Grammar

Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. The set of rules governing a particular language is the grammar of that language; thus, each language can be said to have its own distinct grammar. Note that the word grammar has two meanings here: the first is the inner rules themselves and the second is our description and study of those rules. When a grammar is fully explicit about all possible constructions within a specific language, it is called generative grammar. A particular type of generative grammar that has become the leading framework in modern linguistics is transformational grammar which was first proposed by Noam Chomsky.

Grammar is part of the general study of language called linguistics. Grammar is a way of thinking about language.

As the word is understood by most modern linguists, the subfields of grammar are phonetics, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Traditionally, however, grammar included only morphology and syntax.

History

The first systematic grammars originate in Iron Age India, with Panini (5th c. BC) and his commentators Pingala (3rd c. BC), Katyayana and Patanjali (2nd c. BC). In the West, grammar emerges as a discipline in Hellenism from the 3rd c. BC with authors like Rhyanus and Aristarchus of Samothrace, the oldest extant work being the Art of Grammar (Τέχνη Γραμματική) attributed to Dionysius Thrax (ca. 100 BC). Latin grammar develops following Greek models from the 1st century BC with authors such as Orbilius Pupillus, Remmius Palaemon, Marcus Valerius Probus, Verrius Flaccus, Aemilius Asper.

Tamil grammatical tradition also begins in ca. the 1st century BC with the Tolkāppiyam.

Arabic grammar emerges from the 8th century with the work of Ibn Abi Ishaq and his students.

Belonging to the trivium of the seven liberal arts, grammar was taught as a core discipline throughout the Middle Ages, following authors of Late Antiquity like Priscian. Treatment of vernaculars begins gradually from the High Middle Ages, with isolated works such as the First Grammatical Treatise, but becomes influential only from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In 1486, Antonio de Nebrija published Las introduciones latinas contrapuesto el romance al latin, and in 1492 the first Spanish grammar, Gramática de la lengua castellana . In the 16th century Italian Renaissance, the Questione della lingua was the discussion on the status and ideal form of the Italian language, initiated by Dante's de vulgari eloquentia (Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua Venice 1525).

Grammars of non-European languages began to be compiled from the 16th century for the purpose of evangelization and Bible translation from the 16th century, such as the 1560 Gramática o Arte de la Lengua General de los Incas o los Reyes del Perú Quechua grammar by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás. In 1643 appeared Ivan Uzhevych's Grammatica sclavonica, in 1762 the Short Introduction to English Grammar of Robert Lowth. The Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart, a High German grammar in five volumes by Johann Christoph Adelung, appeared from 1774.

From the later 18th century, grammar came to be understood as a subfield of the emerging subject of modern linguistics. The Serbian grammar by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić appeared in 1814. The Deutsche Grammatik of the Brothers Grimm appeared from 1818. The Comparative Grammar of Franz Bopp, starting point of modern comparative linguistics, in 1833.

Development of grammars

Grammars evolve through usage and also of human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammars do not have any justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say "I didn't do nothing", some say "I didn't do anything", and some say one or the other depending on social context.

The formal study of grammar is an important part of education from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not a "grammar" in the sense most linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive.

Constructed languages (also called planned languages or conlangs) are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (for example, naturalistic Interlingua, schematic Esperanto, and the highly logic-compatible artificial language Lojban) or created as part of a work of fiction (for example, the Klingon language and Elvish languages). Each of these languages has its own grammar.

It is erroneously believed that analytic languages have simpler grammar than synthetic languages. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic and meaning is therefore very context dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.) Latin, which is highly synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements placed in largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite.

References

Bede Rundle, Grammar in Philosophy, Oxford 1979.
Chris Foryth, Grammar through time, 1981.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al, The Classics of Style, 2006.

External links

History

Development of grammars

References

See also

External links