English grammar
English grammar refers to the systematic study of the rules and structures that govern the English language, encompassing various levels including phonology, morphology, and syntax. Historically, grammar has played a crucial role in education, stemming from its roots in ancient Greek and later evolving alongside Latin influences during the Middle Ages. Early English grammars attempted to adapt Latin rules to English, but by the seventeenth century, scholars began to focus on describing English in its own context.
Today, English grammar is typically approached in a descriptive manner, highlighting common patterns without imposing strict usage rules. Three primary frameworks have emerged in the twentieth century: structuralism, generativism, and functionalism. Structuralism, championed by Ferdinand de Saussure, examines the relationships between linguistic elements, while Noam Chomsky's generativism aims to create a theory that explains sentence formation and structure. In contrast, Michael A. K. Halliday's functionalism emphasizes how language serves social functions, suggesting that grammar and vocabulary evolve to meet communicative needs. Most contemporary grammar education leans towards this functional perspective, balancing descriptive practices with some prescriptive elements. This diverse approach reflects the dynamic and evolving nature of English as a global language, accommodating a wide range of speakers and contexts.
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English grammar
The word grammar comes from the ancient Greek language and means the study of the organization of letters. More recently, however, grammar has come to mean the set of rules that govern the organization of a language at its various levels (i.e., phonology, morphology, and syntax) or a treatise that provides a thorough description of the possible patterns in a language. English, like all other natural languages, has a grammar.
Overview
Grammar has been an important subject of study since ancient times. During the Middle Ages it became one of the three subjects, together with logic and rhetoric, that provided the foundation for a liberal arts education. The early English grammars, dating back to the sixteenth century, were closely modeled on concepts from Latin grammars. By the middle of the seventeenth century, grammar writers were trying to break the ties with Latin grammars, describing English in its own terms and providing the general public with simple and straightforward usage rules. Present-day grammars of English reveal a clear contrast with the early grammars in that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. While the latter were meant to regulate usage and prevent change or the deterioration of English, the former attempt to describe the most frequent patterns of usage and identify them as characteristic of one register, mode, genre, age group, or geographic location, without passing judgment.
Three main approaches to the study of grammar date from the twentieth century and constitute the basis for much of the research pursued by scholars since then: structuralism, generativism, and functionalism. In Europe, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, considered by many the father of modern linguistics and the first structuralist, proposed a number of dichotomies to characterize language. One of those dichotomies—syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations among linguistic elements—is a key notion that sets the basis for the study of the organization of sounds (phonology) and the patterning and combination of words (syntax), which in turn constitute the grammar of a language.
In the United States since the 1950s and 1960s, transformational generativists, led by linguist Noam Chomsky, have emphasized the importance of developing a theory of grammar capable of predicting all possible sentences in a language and have gone beyond the notion of the sequence of words and phrases. Their models provide rules and principles that capture the combinatorial properties of words and hierarchical structure of phrases and sentences in the English language but also seem to work universally, with only minor variations, for all natural languages.
The third approach, proposed by Michael A. K. Halliday in the 1960s and 1970s, can be seen as a reaction to transformational generative grammarians’ excessive concern with form over meaning. His systemic functional approach to the study of grammar is based on the assumption that languages have evolved to fulfill a number of social functions. In this approach, the grammar and vocabulary of a language reflect those functions and offer a number of options that speakers and writers use to achieve their communicative purposes.
Most English grammar books used at schools and universities to teach native English speakers as well as speakers of other languages favor a functional approach over a structuralist or generativist one. Even though some of these grammar books appear to be prescriptive on the surface; that is, they often include some usage rules, they give priority to the description and characterization of language structures in use.
Bibliography
Aarts, Bas. Oxford Modern English Grammar. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Carter, Ronald, Michael McCarthy, Geraldine Mark, and Anne O’Keeffe. English Grammar Today. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Celce-Murcia, Marianne, and Diane Larsen-Freeman. The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle, 1999. Print.
Cornish, Francis. “On the Dual Nature of the Functional Discourse Grammar Model: Context, the Language System/Language Use Distinction, and Indexical Reference in Discourse.” Language Sciences 38 (2013): 83–98. Print.
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Rev. ed. London: Arnold, 2004. Print.
Payne, Thomas E. Understanding English Grammar: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Rohdenburg, Günter, and Julia Schlüter, eds. One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
Teschner, Richard V., and Eston E. Evans. Analyzing the Grammar of English. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2007. Print.
Van Gelderen, Elly. An Introduction to the Grammar of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2010. Print.
Yoo, Isaiah WonHo. “The English Definite Article: What ESL/EFL Grammars Say and What Corpus Findings Show.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8.4 (2009): 267–78. Print.