Page 344 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes ‘prescriptive’ and having a ‘literary bias’. They are full of inadequacies. There may be about 200
definitions of die sentences, yet they are not able to differentiate between
the dog is barking
the barking dog
Traditional grammar says that a ‘noun’ is “the name of a person, place, or thing,” yet cannot include
blue and red in the list of nouns although they are the names of colours.
Traditional grammar uses meaning as the primary tool of linguistic analysis. Total meaning of a
language utterance cannot be analysed in the present stage of our knowledge. Meaning is a complex
entity for the understanding of which a formal description of language should form the base.
Furthermore, it, fails to indicate clearly which meaning it is going to treat.
TOTAL MEANING

Social Meaning Linguistic Meaning
lexical structural
meaning meaning

notional referential contextual
meaning meaning meaning
Traditional grammar gives priority to the written form of language, and ignores the notion that the
spoken form is prior to the written form. It is not a complete grammar; it does not treat all aspects of
language adequately; it does not cover even the whole range of the written forms of a language, but
is restricted to specific kinds of writing—the more formal styles, in particular. It gives a general
conception of the nature of language in essentially aesthetic terms. A language, structure, word or
sound is said to be more ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘affected’, and so on, than another. It regards grammar as
something God-given, neat, holy, and does not allow the consideration for language-change and
ignores the fact that the grammar of a language should also change as the language changes. It is
inadequate to analyse all the ambiguities. Its methods and notions are unverifiable, inaccurate,
incomplete and inconsistent; its descriptions are inexplicit and intuitive.
“The tradition of universal grammar came to an abrupt end in the nineteenth century, for reasons
that I will discuss directly. Furthermore, its achievements were very rapidly forgotten, and an
interesting mythology developed concerning its limitations and excesses. It has now become something
of a cliche among linguists that universal grammar suffered from the following defects: (a) it was not
concerned with the sounds of speech, but only with writing ; (b) it was based primarly on a Latin
model, and was in some sense ‘prescriptive’; (c) its assumptions about language structure have been
refuted by modern ‘anthropological linguistics’. In addition, many linguists, though not all, would
hold that universal grammar was misguided in principle in its attempt to provide explanations rather
than mere description of usage, the later being all that can be contemplated by the sober scientist”
(Selected Readings,).
The traditional grammar does not have an adequate notion of a linguistic rule. It appeals only to
intuition. The rules are not adequate and wholesome. The learner has to use his own commonsense
or judgment in matters of unstated rules. This grammar concentrates on giving rules and defining
terms, but its rules and definitions are not satisfactory; nor are they scientifically sound. To quote
John Lyons, “The traditional grammarian tended to assume, not only that the written language was
more fundamental than the spoken, but also that a particular form of the written language, namely
the literary language, was inherently ‘purer’ and more ‘correct’ than all other forms of the language,
written and spoken; and that it was his task, as a grammarian, to preserve this form of the language
from ‘corruption’ (An Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics). So traditional grammar is informal,
unscientific, illogical, full of contradictions and inconsistencies, inexplicit, inadequate preseriptive,
uneconomical, unmethodical and unwholesome. It lacks scientific accuracy, objectivity, precision.
It ignores the contemporary usage and all the varieties of language.

338 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY