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Nov 14, 2019 · Word class analysis has long been familiar in Europe under the title parts of speech, and since medieval times grammarians have operated with nine word classes or parts of speech: noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article, and interjection.
- References
ReferencesAarts, Bas (1998). ‘English binominal noun...
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Jill Bowie. is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Survey of...
- References
May 3, 2013 · The Idler magazine's Bad Grammar Awards recently named and shamed a letter by academics for saying that the national curriculum demanded "too much, too young" - thus confusing an adjective and an...
- Overview
- Conceptions of grammar
- Ancient and medieval grammars
- Modern and contemporary grammars
grammar, rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences, and other elements, as well as their combination and interpretation. The word grammar also denotes the study of these abstract features or a book presenting these rules. In a restricted sense, the term refers only to the study of sentence and word structure (syntax and morphology), excluding vocabulary and pronunciation.
A brief treatment of grammar follows. For full treatment, see linguistics.
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A common contemporary definition of grammar is the underlying structure of a language that any native speaker of that language knows intuitively. The systematic description of the features of a language is also a grammar. These features are the phonology (sound), morphology (system of word formation), syntax (patterns of word arrangement), and sema...
In Europe the Greeks were the first to write grammars. To them, grammar was a tool that could be used in the study of Greek literature; hence their focus on the literary language. The Alexandrians of the 1st century bc further developed Greek grammar in order to preserve the purity of the language. Dionysus Thrax of Alexandria later wrote an influential treatise called The Art of Grammar, in which he analyzed literary texts in terms of letters, syllables, and eight parts of speech.
The Romans adopted the grammatical system of the Greeks and applied it to Latin. Except for Varro, of the 1st century bc, who believed that grammarians should discover structures, not dictate them, most Latin grammarians did not attempt to alter the Greek system and also sought to protect their language from decay. Whereas the model for the Greeks and Alexandrians was the language of Homer, the works of Cicero and Virgil set the Latin standard. The works of Donatus (4th century ad) and Priscian (6th century ad), the most important Latin grammarians, were widely used to teach Latin grammar during the European Middle Ages. In medieval Europe, education was conducted in Latin, and Latin grammar became the foundation of the liberal arts curriculum. Many grammars were composed for students during this time. Aelfric, the abbot of Eynsham (11th century), who wrote the first Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon, proposed that this work serve as an introduction to English grammar as well. Thus began the tradition of analyzing English grammar according to a Latin model.
The modistae, grammarians of the mid-13th to mid-14th century who viewed language as a reflection of reality, looked to philosophy for explanations of grammatical rules. The modistae sought one “universal” grammar that would serve as a means of understanding the nature of being. In 17th-century France a group of grammarians from Port-Royal were also interested in the idea of universal grammar. They claimed that common elements of thought could be discerned in grammatical categories of all languages. Unlike their Greek and Latin counterparts, the Port-Royal grammarians did not study literary language but claimed instead that usage should be dictated by the actual speech of living languages. Noting their emphasis on linguistic universals, the contemporary linguist Noam Chomsky called the Port-Royal group the first transformational grammarians.
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By 1700 grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed. These were written primarily for purposes of reforming, purifying, or standardizing language and were put to pedagogical use. Rules of grammar usually accounted for formal, written, literary language only and did not apply to all the varieties of actual, spoken language. This prescriptive approach long dominated the schools, where the study of grammar came to be associated with “parsing” and sentence diagramming. Opposition to teaching solely in terms of prescriptive and proscriptive (i.e., what must not be done) rules grew during the middle decades of the 20th century.
The simplification of grammar for classroom use contrasted sharply with the complex studies that scholars of linguistics were conducting about languages. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the historical point of view flourished. Scholars who realized that every living language was in a constant state of flux studied all types of written records of modern European languages to determine the courses of their evolution. They did not limit their inquiry to literary languages but included dialects and contemporary spoken languages as well. Historical grammarians did not follow earlier prescriptive approaches but were interested, instead, in discovering where the language under study came from.
As a result of the work of historical grammarians, scholars came to see that the study of language can be either diachronic (its development through time) or synchronic (its state at a particular time). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and other descriptive linguists began studying the spoken language. They collected a large sample of sentences produced by native speakers of a language and classified their material starting with phonology and working their way to syntax.
Generative, or transformational, grammarians of the second half of the 20th century, such as Noam Chomsky, studied the knowledge that native speakers possess which enables them to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences. Whereas descriptivists like Saussure examined samples of individual speech to arrive at a description of a language, transformationalists first studied the underlying structure of a language. They attempted to describe the “rules” that define a native speaker’s “competence” (unconscious knowledge of the language) and account for all instances of the speaker’s “performance” (strategies the individual uses in actual sentence production). See generative grammar; transformational grammar.
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Jul 26, 2015 · People misspell for a variety of reasons. They may not understand the parts of speech or word classes. For example, they might mistake the verb advise for the noun advice.
- Baden Eunson
Sep 5, 2018 · Here are nine examples of English words and phrases that sound wrong, but simply aren't.
- Henry Blodget
There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as "and", "but", or "so". In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions.
The past participle usually ends in -ed (yodeled, remembered), but there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, such as forgotten and gone. (The past participle is usually the same as the plain old past tense (yodeled, remembered), but not always: forgot, went.)
