CHAPTER 7    GRAMMAR

English Grammar

English has strict rules for combining words into phrases. The article (the) must go before the adjective (lucky), which must go before the noun (boys). article + adjective + noun (and not *noun + article + adjective, for example).

Traditional Grammar

Since there was a well-established grammatical description of Latin, based on earlier analyses of Greek, it seemed appropriate to adopt the existing categories from this description and apply them in the analysis of newer languages such as English.

The Parts of Speech

-Nouns refer to people, objects, creatures, places, qualities, phenomena, abstract ideas

-Articles (a, an, the)

-Adjectives provide more information about the things referred to

-Verbs actions 

-Adverbs provide more information about actions, states and events

-Prepositions (at, in, on, near, with, without)

-Pronouns (she, herself, they, it, you)

-Conjunctions (and, but, because, when)

Agreement

Traditional grammatical analysis has also given  a number of other categories, including “number,” “person,” “tense,” “voice” and “gender.”

Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender is based on the type of noun (masculine and feminine) and is not tied to sex.

Traditional Analysis

In traditional grammar books, tables such as the following were often presented for the analysis of English verbs, constructed by analogy with tables in Latin grammar.

The Prescriptive Approach

An approach taken in eighteenth-century England by grammarians who set out rules for the “proper” use of English. This view of grammar as a set of rules for the proper use of a language is still found today and is best characterized as the prescriptive approach.

The Descriptive Approach

It may be that using a well-established grammatical description of Latin is a useful guide for

European languages (e.g. Spanish), is less useful for others (e.g. English), and may be

absolutely misleading for non-European languages.

Structural Analysis

One type of descriptive approach is called structural analysis and its main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a language.

Constituent Analysis

An approach with the same descriptive aims is called constituent analysis.

Subjects and Objects

- the subject as the first noun phrase before the verb

- the object as the noun phrase after the verb.

-the other phrase at the end of our example sentences is an adjunct.

Word Order

The basic linear order of constituents in English is Noun Phrase–Verb–Noun Phrase (or NP V NP)

Language Typology

The use of word order patterns such as SVO or VOS to talk about different “types” of languages is part of a more general area of study known as language typology.