Page 347 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 27: Grammar: Traditional to Transformational

Notes

The word “grammatical” tends to be used in a very loose sense in this context. It is
usual to illustrate the grammatical function by inventing sentences which when
written are ambiguous, and whose ambiguity can only be removed by using
differences of intonation. A typical example is the sentence “Those who sold quickly
made a profit”. This can be said in at least two different ways:
(i) 'Those who 'sold vquickly | ,made a \profit
(ii) 'Those who vsold | ,quickly 'made a \profit

Weaknesses of Structural Linguistics
Chomsky criticised this school of linguistics for its being corpus-bound, and neglect of meaning.
Structuralism ignores explanatory adequacy, meaning, linguistic universals, native speaker’s intuition
and his competence of generating infinite number of sentences from a finite set of items. Structuralism
analyses the data of a given corpus by means of inductive methods, and formulates a grammar based
on discovery procedures of the data. To the structuralists grammar is a catalogue of elements classified
with restrictions enumerated, and relations made physically manifest. But the total corpus cannot be
captured or verified. Language is not merely an inventory, or catalogue of items as the structuralists
imagined.
Structuralisms fails to capture all ambiguities and relations. It does not include the idea of creativity. It
does not account for the degree of grammatically and acceptability; nor does it stop the generation of
ungrammatical sentences. The Grammar produced by it is not predictive and explicit; it does not offer
explanations for the inter-relatedness of sentences. Grammar should not merely be a record of data; it
should establish the general and innate properties of the language based on the intrinsic properties of
human mind. Linguistics is a subclass of congnitive psychology. Language is both nature and nurture.
Grammar should also specify what to say, and when and why to say. But the structural grammar does
not fulfil all these goals. The structuralist grammar is not a whole but a part of a whole—an inventory
of units such as phonemes, morphemes, words, lexical categories, phrases. Descriptive grammar is
simply one aspect of generative grammar, hence apiphenomenal. Structuralism speaks nothing about
the nature of language; it fails to establish a relationship between sound and meaning. A grammar
should also account for deep structures, and should be concerned with the task of giving a factually
accurate formulation of the rules that generate deep and surface structures, the rules that discover the
inter-relatedness of sentences and the rules that give a phonetic transcription of surface structures and
semantic interpretation of deep structures. ‘The units are logically prior to the grammar: the grammar
is logically prior to the units’, it concentrates on structuralism and ignores the native speaker’s
competence. It also ignores the psychological and sociological side of language. It is interested in data
more for the sake of data than in capturing the creative power that generates an infinite set of sentences;
it does not speak of the internalization. Hence the emergence of Transformational-Generative Grammar.
27.4 Formal vs. Notional Grammar

‘Formal grammar is grammar that both in theory and in method is concerned solely with the observable
forms, structural functions, and interrelations of the components of sentences or stretches of utterance’.
Modern grammatical theory is frequently said to be ‘formal’, in contrast with traditional grammar,
which was ‘notional’. According to Jesperson, ‘notional’ grammar starts from the assumption that
there exist ‘extralingual categories which are independent of the more or less accidental facts of
existing languages’ and are ‘universal in so far as they are applicable to all languages, though rarely
expressed in them in a clear and unmistakable way’. ‘Formal’ grammar puts forward no such
assumptions about the universality of such categories as the ‘parts of speech’, ‘tense’, ‘mode’, etc. (as
they were traditionally defined) and claims to describe the structure of every language on its own
terms.

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