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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.



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