Traditional Grammar

A.   HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

1.    Ancient Greek

At least as early as the fourth Century, Greek philosophers were intrigued by the phenomenon of language. They turned to the study of language - that uniquely human ability - in the hope that here they might^. discover the answers to some of life's great misteries. The earliest known motives for language study seem, then, to have been philosophical rather than practical.

A prevailing belief among them was that language (meaning the Greek language) had been given to humans as a divine gift. Language must therefore represent divine perfection

a.         Plato

Plato as the philosopher. His contribution is the analysis of words and their meanings. His system based on meaning had but two word classess: anoma and rhema. These two word classes bear a striking resemblance to the traditional grammar’s noun and verb classes.

b.        Aristotle

Aristotle as the philosopher. His contribution are these:

1.    He added a third word class, syndesmoi (roughly equivalent to traditional grammar’s conjunction class, which included all words that fell into neither of Plato’s two classes;

2.    He made of note of certain structural word features, such as that nouns possess case and that verbs possess tense;

3.    He provided what is probably the earliest definition of the term word. Describing it as the smallest meaningful language unit. This definition is very close to the modern structuralist’s definition of the morpheme.

Aristotle most important contribution, however was his carefully developed system of naturallogic.

c.         The Stoics

The Stoics as the philosopher. His contribution: he expanded Aristotle’s three word classes to four, adding article to noun, verbs, and conjunction. Later Stoics philosopher subdivided words in the noun class into proper and common nouns. They also mae detailed studies of tense and agreement in verbs and of case in nouns, concluding that nouns possess five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative.

d.        Dionysius Thrax

Dionysius Thrax as the philosopher. His contribution: in a small book entitled Techno Gammatike, he expanded the word classes to eight, still basing his classification largely on meaning. His eight classes were equivalent to nouns, pronoun, verbs, participles, articles, adverbs, conjunction, and prepositions.

2.    Ancient Rome

years later, when the center of wetern civilization had shifted from greece to rome, greek learning came to influence nearly avery facet cultured Roman life, including the study of language. When Roman scholars wrote their first Latin grammar, they patterned them after the earlier Greek models. This possible because both Greek and Latin were highly inflected languages with many grammatical similarities.

a.         Varro

Varro as the philosopher. His contribution: he was interested in the old anomalist-analogist controversy, which had concerned language scholars from the time of Plato’s Cratylus. Plato had argued the analogist point of view: that words in particular and language in general are natural and logical. The anomalists, on the other hand, viewed word choices and language practices as arbitrary and accidental. In defence of the anomalist position, Varro pointed to many irregularities of language. If language were completely logical, he contended there would not be such illogical features as the absence of separate wordss for the male and the female of all animal species.

b.        Quintilian

Quintilian as the philosopher. He stressed the importance of including the study of grammar and rhetoric in the education of the cultured Romans. In his discussions of language he held that proper usage must be based on the three criteria: reason, authority, and antiquity.

c.         Donatus (about A.D. 350) and Priscian (+ A.D. 500)

Donatus as the philosopher. His contribution: he wrote one book on parts of parts of speech and another, Ars Minor, in which he summarized the ‘’basics’’ of Latin Grammar.

3.    The Middle Ages

The Medieval period is the longest in Western Europe's history, having lasted for approximately a thousand years. These years have traditionally been characterized by historians as ones in which scholar­ship suffered a severe decline and during which feW new ideas were generated.

a.         St. Anselm

St. Anselm as the philosopher. His contribution: he wrote a treatise entitled DeGrammatico in which hwe expressed considerable interest in grammatical distinctions such as that expressed by the concepts or signifier and the thing signified.

b.        Peter of Spain (Pope John XXI)

Peter of Spain as the philosopher. His contribution: he detected an important difference between what he called the significatio and the suppositio of a word. He recognized that a name like Max means two quite different things in the two sentences: Maxisthedog’sname and Maxisscratchinghisfleas.

c.         Peter Helias

Peter of Helias as the philosopher. His contribution: his analytical considerations of a ‘’nature of things’’, discovers the real significance and importance of grammar study.

4.    The Renaissance (+ 1400 – 17^th century)

The term renainssance means reawakenin. Thus, as personal dangers gradually became less accute, as commerce and trade once again began to compete with agriculture in Europe's economy, and as the feudal lords' hold over the local inhabitants consequently diminished, families began to move from the rural communities to the cities. And as people's fortunes improved, their attention could once,more be turned to other matters. Gradually, interest in scholarship and in things cultural was renewed. It soon became possible for men of leisure to focus their attention once again on the work of earlier Greek and Roman scholarS for enlightenment.

a.         Franscisco Sanctes de las Brozas (Sanctius)

Sanctius was a professor first of Greek and then of Rhetoric at Salamanca. His book, Minerva ( 1587), was for many years considered the standard work on Latin grammar. He believed that all languages, despite their superficial difference, were simply varied developments of a single universal set of underlying principles which were common to all human languages. Sanctius had devised the theory as a method for the interpretation of literary work.

b.        Huarte

Huarte as the philosopher. He argued that human can be distinguished from animals because humans alone possesss two powers.

c.         Peter Ramus

Peter Ramus as the philosopher. He wrote grammars of Greek, Latin, and French and in his work Scholae stressed consulting the current usage of native speakers as the best guide to usage practices.

5.    The Seventeenth Century and Beyond

During the 17th century, the old quarrel between the analogists and the anomalists was for a brief time revived and then ultimately supplanted by a much broader or philosophical debate, that between the "ratio­nalists" and the "empiricists".

a.    The Rationalists

1.         Rene Descartes

·      The rationalist position was based on the philosophical writing of Rene Descartes, who held that certain human abilities, capacities, and ideas were innate. He argued that the acquisition of knowledge is determined by certain abstract, ‘’built in principles’’ which are present in every normal person from the moment of birth. Among the most significant of unique human achievements, he felt, is the creative use of language.

·      The empiricists, whose earliest standard bearers were John Locke and David Hume, insisted that everything humans come to know including language is entirely explainable as sense-oriented, ‘’learned’’ behavior. The empiricists were adamant in denying the existence of innate ideas or germs of ideas.

2.         The Port Royalists

The Port Royalists argued that the only proper role of the grammarian is to describe, as accurately and objectively as possible, the actual language practices of a speaking community as they exist, not according to subjective prescriptive notions about what the ‘’rules’’ ought to be, and above all not according to the rules of Latin. Fundamental to all of these contentions, was the Port Royal Grammarians’ basis belied in the Cartesian theory that the function of language is to convey thought.

3.         Cordemoy

Cordemoy as the philosopher. He elaborated on Descartes’ ‘’human versus beast’’ theme. He argued that all forms of communication among the beasts as simply instinctive, automatic responses and thus do not qualify as true speech.

4.         Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt as the philosopher. His contribution: his large work, UberdieVerschiedenheitdesMenschlichenSprachbaues was published in 1836. He speculated that the different surface characteristic of particular languages may very well result in cultural differences in modes of thought.

b.    The Empiricists

1.         Condillac

Condillac as the philosopher. His philosophical treatise, Traitedessensations that language had necessarily evolved before thought. Condillac postulated that instictive sounds became by mutual agreement by the first ‘’word’’. He turned his attention to the etymology of words.

2.         Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau as the philosopher. He was uncomfortable with presumptions of a priory agreement on the desire to communicate, which it seemed to him already represented a kind of social contact.

B.    APPROACH OF TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR

The approach which attempts to lay down rules of correctness as to how language should be used. Using such criteria as purity, logic, history, or literary excellence, prescriptivism aims to preserve imagined standards by insisting on norms of usage and criticising departures from these norms (Crystal 1990: 282). Thus, to be able to use or speak a language correctly, one must strictly comply to the rules that have been layed down by the grammarians. The rules and definitions of the traditional grammar are taken over froma Latin, because Latin grammar was considered to be a universal grammar that can be applied to all other languages. It is the task of schools to root out the mistakes or errors and cultivate the language uses that are correct according to the rules.

C. CHAPACTEFISITCS OF TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR

The discussion of the characterisitcs of tradi­tional grammar will be divided into two main sections: (1) the principles of traditional grammar and (2) the grammatical system.

The principles upon which traditional grammar is based are as follows:

a.    Priority of Written Language

The traditional grammar is based on the assumption that the written language, the literary language, was more fundamental than the spoken language. It’s objective was to analyze the written language found in literary works. All the examples are taken from liter­ary works.

b.    Latinization

Traditional grammarians attempted to impose on English, for example, the structural description the Latin, with its complicated system of cases, tenses, moods, and so on. This description resulted, on the one hand, in the discussion of categories that don't really the exist in English and on the other, in the ignoring of errors                some very central parts of the mechanism. Structurally,Latin and English are very different languages, the one relatively highly inflected the other inflected very little.

c.  Traditional Grammar is Prescriptive or Normative

With this characteristic, traditional grammar attempted to lay down rules of correctness as to how language should be used. To speak English correctly one must stick to the rules

d.  Traditional Grammar is Meaning-Based

The traditional grammar of English makes use of meaning as the main foundation upon which analysis and classification must be based. Some of its key concepts and definitions are based on meaning. Most traditional grammars of English define a sentence, for example, as "group of words which expresses a complete thoughtthrough the use of a verb, called its predicate, and a subject, consisting of a noun or pronoun about which the verb has something to say"; a noun is defined as "the name of a person, place, or thing".

2. The Grammar System

a.   Parts of Speech

Single words - and larger constructions or word groups - can be given part-of-speech labels. Although there was some disagreement, most traditional school grammars listed eight parts of speech. The definitions that follow are typical, noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjuction, and interjection.

b.    Subject and Predicate

The subject of a sentence names theperson, the place, or the thing (condition,^- object, activity, abstraction, situation) which the sentence, as a whole, is talking about. The subject will thus be a noun or pronoun, or a word or ward group that functions as a noun (a nominal).

The predicate of a sentence asserts or tells somrthing about the subject. At the very least, the predicate must contain a complete verb. In addition to the verb, however, a predicate may also contain a word or words that complement and/or modify the verb.

c.       Phrase

A phrase is a group of related words (1) which does not contain a subject-predicate combinatior and (2) which, as an entire unit, serves as part-of speech role in the larger construction of which it is a part. Although form and function characteristics are very much interdependent and overlapping, we can classify phrase types primarily according to certain formal qualities.

d. Clause

A clause is a group of related Words which contain a subject and a predicate. As with phrases, the inter­relationship of the words in this kind of word group are function ones, so we cannot, in the strict sense, distinguish phrases from clauses sOlely on the basis of the form characterisitcs of these word groups. Further­more, it is somewhat doubtful that a person unfamiliar with the  whole grammar of English sentence would be able to tell the difference between the independent and the nonindependent (dependent) clauses, or among the various kinds of dependent clauses. Yet there are unquestionably a number of formal differencies in­volved. The lexical meaning of a clause and its function in a sentence must be the criteria of clause classification.