Page 349 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 27: Grammar: Traditional to Transformational

with varying success, to extend the same kind of analysis of ‘higher levels of linguistic’ structure. Its Notes
fundamental assumption is that procedures of segmentation and classification, applied to data in a
systematic way, can isolate and identify all types of elements that function in a particular language
along with the constraints that they obey. A catalogue of these elements, their relations, and their
restrictions of ‘distribution’, would, in most structuralist views, constitute a full grammar of the
language’ (Chomsky, Selected Readings).
Structural linguistics provided a remarkable and scientific methodological basis of language study. It
also provided new standards of clarity and objectivity. ‘These methodological contributions are not
limited to a raising of the standards of precision. In a more subtle’ way, the idea that language can be
studied as a formal system, a notion which is developed with force and effectiveness in the work of
Harris and Hockett, is of particular significance. It is, in fact, this general insight and the techniques
that emerged as it developed that have made it possible, in the last few years, to approach the traditional
problems once again. Specifically, it is now possible to study the problems or rule-governed creativity
in natural language, the problem of constructing grammars that explicitly generate deep and surface
structures and express the relations between them, and the deeper problem of determining the
universal conditions that limit the form and organization of rules in the grammar of human language’
(Chomsky, Selected Readings).
Nevertheless, structural linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is inductive, objective, tentative,
and systematic; it is concerned with reportable facts, methods, and principles; it works by means of
observations, hypotheses, experiments, postulates, and inferences; its products are descriptive verbal
or algebraic statements about language.
So the main difference between formal and notional grammar can be stated as follows:

Notional (traditional or Formal or Structural Grammar
Universal) Grammar

1. Old; declined after the 18th century New; developed mainly in the twentieth
century
2. Pre-scientific (or unscientific) Scientific
3. Illogical, inconsistent and Consistent, logical and mehtodological
unmethodological
4. Subjective and intuitive Objective and verifiable
5. Informal Formal
6. Studies languages as if they were all alike Studies a language as a mirror of culture; since
no two cultures are alike; no two languages
are alike either.
7. Gives priority to written form, especially Gives priority to the spoken form or the
literary form of language contemporary, actual usage.
8. Lacks precision and economy Has precision and economy
9. Is a set of prescriptive or normative rules Is an inventory of all the linguistic units:
phonemes, morphemes, phrases, clauses,
sentences.
10. Lays due emphasis on meaning Since meaning is a very complex phenomenon,
ignores meaning
11. Based on Greek and Latin models Based on factual study of language.
12. Fusion of all linguistic levels Separation of all linguistic levels
13. Explanatory (how and why) Observational and descriptive
14. Humanistic and philosophical study Empirical science
15. Has a long history A short history

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