Giordeano De Baby Blue

 

Module One

 

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

Learning Objectives

1. INTRODUCTION

Grammar is a description of the possible arrangement of words in a language, and sometimes also the possible arrangements of sound. Syntax is the arrangements and interrelationships of words, phrases, clause, and sentences. The job of a grammarian is to describe the syntax of language. Since the early modern English, we know that the grammars that have been used to describe the English language are Traditional, Structural, Transformational, and Functional. This module will try to give brief reviews on each grammar in order to provide you with some basic understanding of each approach.

 

2.      TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR

Looking back to the history of the English language, we know that Latin was the primary language of scholarship in England until the sixteenth century. The only grammars studied in English schools, therefore, were Latin grammars, which were designed to give Englishmen the skills needed to read, write, and sometimes converse in this lingua franca of Western Europe.

In line with the raise of the sense of nationality, the development of science, technology, literature, and renaissance during the fifteen, sixteenth and seventeen centuries, grammars of English began to appear. Although the structure of English is quite different from that of Latin, The early grammar rigorously followed Latin models and were studied exclusively as an aid to learning Latin. The purpose of the early grammars of English, however, was not to provide an accurate description of the language, but rather to serve as a basis for the study of Latin grammar.

In the early modern English, Latin was replaced as the language of scholarship by English. Because of this new role for English, some Englishmen by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were greatly concerned with refining their language. They felt that English had somehow become “corrupt” and that in need of purification. Through the use of logic they hoped to return English to an “undefiled” state. With unlimited zeal and imagination but limited knowledge about language change and the history of English, they reasoned out rules. The rules were based entirely on logic. They did not use language data as the basis of the rule formation. For their classification of words and sentences, they followed the patterns set by grammars of the preceding two centuries.

The results from their effort develop the English grammars used in schools during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This grammar is called Traditional Grammar. The model of this grammar is best known to many people from high-school text books and college handbooks. In concentrating on parts of speech that are subcategorized according to case, person, number, gender, mood, tense, etc, It followed Latin Grammar. These concepts are informative in a study of Latin, but many of the categories are hard to justify for English. Word order was usually ignored. Sentences were classified as simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex; clauses were classified as independent, noun, adjective, or adverb; phrases were prepositional, participial, gerund, or infinitive. Many school grammars used the study of English grammar as nothing more than a background for a study of, subject-verb agreement, pronoun case forms, and other matters of usage.

Now, we still often find some grammatical terminology of the traditional grammar. We may, for instance, divide a sentence up in terms of subject and predicate, we may know something about person and tense, and we may be familiar with the following words: adjective, adverb, noun, verb, article, conjunction, preposition, pronoun. In traditional grammar terminology, these are known as part of speech. We are probably able to suggest working conditions for some of them (for example, a noun is naming word, a verb is a doing word, an adverb is adding the meaning of a verb, a conjunction is a joining word, a pronoun stands in for a noun and so on.)

Although traditional grammar has along history stretching back to ancient times, the way of describing language remained little changed until this century. The prestige of the old classical languages ensured the survival of this form of description. It can be argued that the concepts represented by the Traditional Grammar underlie the operation of a language. Thus the knowledge of the traditional description can still deepen our knowledge of how language operates.

 

3.      STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

The phenomena of a wider use of the English language as world lingua franca, during the nineteenth century, the linguists began studying and comparing large numbers of linguistic facts. They saw that traditional grammar was inadequate, because many of the use are radically different in structure from Latin. This caused dissatisfaction with traditional grammar that continued into the twentieth century. Linguists found it necessary to study a new model of describing the language that is different from that of the traditional grammar. Many scholars became disillusioned with the grammar they were learning when they discovered that it would not account for many ordinary sentences that are discovered in modern newspapers and magazines.

During the second quarter of the twentieth century a new approach to the study of language evolved which is called Structural Linguistics. Followers of this approach felt that it was necessary to study the structure of a language as objectively as possible without reference to any other language. It is descriptive not prescriptive. The structuralists based their conclusion upon analysis of sentences that they had collected from native speakers of English. One of the most remarkable of the structuralists was Charles C. Fries, who obtained access to letters written to government agency as a corpus for his analysis presented in American English Grammar (New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1940). Later he obtained permission to record telephone conversations, unknown to the people talking. The results of this study were published in The Structure of English (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952). Professor Fries’ work was widely read and emulated by later structuralists such as Francis, Hill, and Stageberg. ( Archibald A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structure , New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. ; W. Nelson Francis, The Structure of American English, New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1954.; Norman C. Stageberg, An Introductory English Grammar, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965.

 

4.      TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

The structural view of language as a collection of syntactic patterns held away until the publication of Syntactic Structure by Noam Chomsky in 1957. He argued that the structural description was too superficial, because it only described the surface structure of the language, and thus could not explain the relationship of meanings which were quite clearly there, but which were not realized in the structure. Thus these two sentences:

Johan is easy to please

Johan is eager to please.

Would, according to structural description, indicate the same relationship between the words in the sentences. But obviously the relationship is not the same: in the first sentence Johan is the receiver of pleasing, while in the second he is doing the pleasing. Similarly the identity of meaning between an active and passive sentence would not be shown, e.g.

The employees have taken over that cement company.

That cement company has been taken over by the employees.

Here the relationships of the meaning within the two sentences are identical, but in a structural description this cannot be shown. Structurally they are different and there is no way of indicating the identity of meaning.

Chomsky concluded that these problems arose because language was being analyzed and described in isolation from the human mind which produces it. He maintained that, if we want to understand how language works, it cannot be viewed as phenomenon in itself. It must be viewed as reflection of human thought patterns. He posed that there must be two levels of meaning: A deep level, which is concerned with the organization of thoughts and surface level, where these thoughts are expressed through the syntax of language. The grammar of language is therefore, not the surface structure themselves, but the rule that enable the language user to generate the surface structures from the deep level of meaning.

The transformational grammarian is not content with describing what he finds in a corpus of sentences collected from native speakers. He feels that his grammar should enable one to produce all sentences of language, and he is interested in possible sentences in English or any other language is finite, no one could have heard all of them. Yet native speakers of English understand new sentences. Every day the natives speakers hears, reads, and creates new sentences, sentences which seems so ordinary that he is not aware that they have never been before. An adequate grammar of English should enable a person to produce not just those sentences that have been said in the past, but all the sentences that a native speaker is capable of creating or understanding. In addition, the grammar should not generate sentences that a native speaker would rejects.

The transformationalist is more concerned with the system that underlies the language than he is with the actual speech of an individual at any given time. In addition, speech may be affected by physical surroundings, emotions, memory limitations distractions, or other features such as chewing gum in the mouth of the speaker. It is language, not actual speech output, that is primary interest to the transformationalist.

 

The aims of transformational grammar are quite different from those of structural linguists. Instead of attending to corpus and methods of analysis. TGG focuses attention on the fact that all speakers of a natural language are able to form new sentences and understand utterances they have never heard before. In other words, knowing  a language is not merely a matter of storing in one’s head a long list of words or sentences, but being able to produce sentences not heard before. TGG assumes that the basis of this ability is the knowledge of what may be called a grammar. It is this grammar that every speaker has somehow stored in his brain, and it is the business of linguist to describe this grammar, which enables a speaker to understand and produce new sentences on a given occasion.

 

5.      FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR

Transformational grammarians concern with the nature of native speakers’ (tacit) knowledge, not with the way they use it. It is probably to respond to these shortcomings of the Chomsky and Chomskians’ work, Halliday, on the other hand, is very concerned with the uses to which linguistic description can be put. Halliday writes that his grammar ‘is functional in the sense that it is designed to account for how the language is used’. He immediately goes on to talk about text: ‘ Every text – that is, everything that is said or written – unfolds in some context of use’.Halliday, like the Prag School linguists, sees that function, not biologically endowed mental faculties, as explanatory principle. By calling his grammar functional, Halliday refers to the fact that:

‘The fundamental components of meaning in language are functional components’

These are the ‘meta-functions’:

            Ideational (‘to understand the environment’)

            Interpersonal (to act on other peoples in the environment)

            Textual (‘which breathes relevance into the other two’)

In other words, From the work of Halliday, in the book “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” This is the book to which we should have regular access, we can generalize that, the primary concern of Functional Grammar is how the meanings of the text are realized. And the unit of analysis is the whole text. The language level of concern is semantics. And the language should be understood as a resource for meaning making and something we do.

Functional Grammar does not separate the context and the text, because it is based on the proposition that all meaning is situated in contexts of situation and culture. Basically  in Functional Grammar, the focuses is more on the study of context of situation which is specified through the use of register variables: field, tenor and mode.

Fields refers to what is going on, including

-          activity focus (nature of social activity)

-          object focus (subject matter)

Tenor refers to the social relationships between those taking part. These are specifiable in terms of

-          status or power (agent roles, peer or hierarchic  relations)

-          affect (degree of like, dislike or neutrality)

-          contact (frequency, duration and intimacy of social contact).

Mode refers to how language is being used, whether

-          the channel of communication is spoken or written

-          language is being used as a mode of action or reflection.

 

 

6.      CONCLUSION

In the literature of linguistics, we learn that there are four outstanding fundamental grammars used to describe the structure of English language as briefly surveyed in this module. Others might fall in to one of these Grammars. The development of the science of language, however, has made a change from time to time. What we did in this module is only to present some information about the notions and the way each grammar describes the language.

Knowing the basic notions of the way to describe language offered by the grammarians will give us insights into the way how English works. We have no intention here of attacking or ridiculing the older ways of describing the English. We do not want to mean that some descriptions of English are more valuable than others, because it is open to discussion.  This module only tries to give a brief review on each grammar in order to open the gate of our perception for the shake of further comprehensive study.

 

REFERENCES

Baugh, A C. 19??. A History of the English Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Chomsky, N, 1957. Syntactic Structure. The Hague: Mouton

Chomsky, N, 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press

David Butt, et all, 2000. Using Functional Grammar, an Explorer’s Guide. 2nd edition. Sydney: Macquary University

Gerot,L and Wignell, P, 1994. Making Sense of Functional Grammar, Australia: Gerd Stabler

Halliday, M A K, 1994. An introduction to functional Grammar: 2nd edition. London: Edward Arnold

Huddleston, R. 1976. An Introduction to English Transformational Syntax. London: Longman

 

E X E R C I S E: Answer the following questions

1.      Compare the grammar and the syntax. What do we mean by prescriptive and descriptive approach? Why did early English grammar follow Latin model? What was the basis for the formation of early English grammar? What is traditional grammar? Mention several terminologies used in traditional grammar. What caused dissatisfaction with traditional grammar before the twentieth century? How did the structuralist get the rules of the English grammar? Mention several names of the structural linguists.  Why was the structural view held away after the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure? What makes the structural view different from Chomsky’s? What is the basis of Transformational Grammar? What facts that base the Functional Grammar? What is the meta-functions of language? What do we mean by Field, Tenor, and Mode in Functional Grammar?

 

Module Two

 

STRUCTURAL (DESCRIPTIVE) LINGUISTICS

Learning Objectives

 

1. INTRODUCTION

In this module, we will set out the main ideas of structural linguistics. The structuralism’s view of language structure is associated with the ’phoneme’ as the unit of phonology (the sound system) and the ‘morpheme’ as the unit of grammar. Morphemes are made up of combinations of phonemes, and sentences of combinations of morphemes (syntax). In other words, phonemes and morphemes are regarded as the building blocks of the sentences of a language.

 

Before going further to study the syntax (the arrangements and interrelationships of words, phrases, clause, and sentences), we had better review the elements that will be the basis of the syntactical constructions. First, we will discuss the phonemes and the morphemes of the language then we move on to look at the syntactic analysis.

 

2. STRUCTURAL VIEW

		LANGUAGE

 

 

 

 

 

	SOUND		MEANING

 

COMMUNICATION

	SYSTEM OF SOUND   PHONOLOGY				SYSTEM OF MENINGFUL UNIT   MORPHOLOGY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In combination SENTENCES make up TEXT   (DISOURSE)

In combination MORPHEMES make up SENTENCES   (SYNTAX)

MORPHEME   The smallest meaningful unit

In combination Phonemes make up MORPHEME

PHONEMES   The smallest sound to distinguish Meaning

         PHONETICS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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3. PHONETICS, PHONLOGY AND PHONEMICS

Before going into a description of what linguist does in phonemic analysis, let us have a look at the difference between phonetics, phonology and phonemics. In phonetics we study speech sound as sounds in any human language but in phonology we study the speech sounds as they occur in particular language. This is, we study the sound as a system: how they contrast with one another in the language. To put it in another way, in phonetics we analyze the sound stream into segments in various ways. In phonology our task is to understand how these segments function to make the sound stream meaningful communication. In practice, however the boundary between the two is often blurred. Phonemics is one way of looking at the phonology of a language.

What does the linguist do in phonemic analysis then? Since each language makes use of a limited number of sounds, he must find out what these sounds are. The first step is to transcribe as accurately as possible the native speaker’s utterances in phonetic symbols. He may do this directly or use a tape recorder. Next, he examines what has been transcribed in order to find a set of utterances that are different in meaning and differ from each other in only one respect phonetically (they differ minimally, as it is usually expressed). Short utterances will be best for this purpose, because he wants as little difference as possible.

Then, we can do a phonemic analysis of a language to find its phonemes (the smallest significant unit of language). We can do the analysis of a set of minimal pairs of the contrastive units. For example we have contrastive set as below:                                                                 

 

From the above contrastive set we can get the initial phonemes /b/, /s/, and /c/.

This contrastive analysis (phonemic analysis) can be applied to find out all consonant phonemes and vowel phonemes, and supra segmental phonemes of a language with all their characteristics.  However, we will not go further to discuss this point, since this is the concern of the Phonology Class.

 

4. MORPHEMICS, MORPHOLOGY, MORPHEMES

We know that language is a system made up of two subsystem – one of sounds and the other of meanings. The system of sounds is studied in phonemics, and the system of meaningful unit is studied in morphology. Morphology is the study of morphemes and their combination in words.

 

5. MORPHEMES

 

The procedure used to discover the sound units may also be applied in the search for the smallest units of meaning. In this case, the method involves picking our pairs of utterances which are minimally different in meaning in the same way as we pick out pairs that are minimally different in sound in phonemic analysis.

Let us look at the following utterances:

1. Look at the cat
2. Look at the dog
3. Look at the horse

 

They differ in meaning but the difference is minimal only in the last part of each utterance. {cat}, {dog}, {horse}. These parts are called morphemes. They are also different in sound in that cat, dog and horse. They have different combination of phonemes each. The different in meaning lies not in any part of the combination but in the total combination of phonemes. That is, /d/ is meaningless and /og/ is meaningless but /dog/ is meaningful. The plural form of cat, dog and horse within the same utterances is as follows:

4. Look at the cats
5. Look at the dogs
6. Look at the horses

We realize that /cat/, /dog/, /horse/ carry the meaning of the word and /s/ at the end of each word carries the meaning of plural. Each word, cats, dogs and horses, therefore, contains two meaningful units. Such unit called morphemes. We can define that morpheme is the smallest meaningful units of a language. A morpheme can be made up of one phoneme as the plural form /s/, and of more than one phoneme as /d/ +/og/ in /dog/. We cannot equate morphemes with what we call “words” since cats is one word but two morphemes. Nor can we equate morphemes with syllable, since elephant has three syllables but is one morpheme.

 

There are two types of morphemes. A free morpheme (also called “stem” or ”base”) is one which can meaningfully occur alone, e.g. book, pencil, elephant, love, give, happy, very. There are also morpheme that must always occur with a base. Such morphemes are called bound morphemes. Examples of bound morphemes are the plural morpheme in dog(s), present tense morpheme in walk(s), run(s), the negative morpheme in (un)happy, (in)attentive, and the quality morpheme in happi(ness), sinceri(ty). However, we will not go further to discuss this point,  since this is the concern of the Morphology Class.

 

6. SYNTAX

Knowledge of Sentences and Nonsentence

When you learn a language you must learn something finite-your, vocabulary is finite (however large it may be) –and that can be stored. If sentences in a language were formed by putting one word after another in any order, the language could simply be a set of words. You can see that words are not enough by examining the following strings of words:

(1)

a. John kissed the little old lady who owned the shaggy dog

b. Who owned the shaggy dog John kissed the little old lady.

c. John is difficult to love.

d. It is difficult to love John.

e. John is anxious to go.

f. It is anxious to go John.

g. John, who was a student, flunked his exam.

h. Exam his flunked student a was who John.

If you are asked to put a star or asterisk before the examples that seemed “funny” or “no good” to you, which one would you star?. Our “intuitive” knowledge about what is or is not an allowable sentence in English convinces us to star b, f, and h. Which one did you star?

Would you agree with the following judgment?

(2)

a. What he did was climb a tree.

b. *What he thought was want a sport car.

c. Drink your beer and go home!

d. *What are drinking and go home?

e. I expect them to arrive a week from next Thursday.

f. *I expect a week from next Thursday to arrive them.

g. Linus lost his security blanket.

h. *Lost Linus security blanket his.

If you starred the same ones we did, hen you agree that not all strings f words constitute sentences in a language, and knowledge of language determines which are and which are not. Therefore, in addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge must include “rules” for forming sentences and making judgments like those you made about the examples in (1) and (2). These rules must be finite in length and finite in number so that they can be stored in our finite brains; yet they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences. These Rules will be learnt in Syntax: The sentence patterns of language.

A language consists of all the sounds, words, and possible sentences. When you know a language, you know the sound, the words, and the rules for their combination

 

7. CONCLUSION

Syntax is the arrangement and interrelationships of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. In syntax, we study the various principles and process by which sentences are constructed in particular language. The central notion in linguistic theory is that of “linguistic level.” A linguistic level, such as phonemics, morphology, phrase structure, is essentially a set of descriptive devices that are made available for the construction of grammars. Therefore, the materials in the next modules will deal with the central notion learnt in syntax, such as Word Classes, Sentence Pattern, Constituent Analysis, and The Types of Construction.

 

REFERENCES

Francis, W Nelson, 1958, The Structure of American English, New York, The           Ronald Press Company, Chapter 2,3,4.

Fromkin V and Rodman R, 1993, An Introduction to Language, Harcourt Brace, New York, Jovanovich College Publisher. Chapter 1.

Robin, R H, 1980. General Linguistics An Introductory Survey. London:           Longman, Chapter 3,4,5

Wardhaugh, R, 1977. Introduction to Linguistics, New York: McGraw-Hill Book           Company. Chapter 3,4,5.

 

E X E R C I S E: Answer the following questions

1.      Please differentiate, phonemes, phonology. 2.      What do we mean by contrastive analysis? 3.      Please differentiate morpheme, morphology. 4.      Please mention the types of morpheme and explain. 5.      Write an essay about the structural view of language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Module Three

 

THE SYNTAX OF STUCTURAL GRAMMAR

 

Learning Objectives

 

1. INTRODUCTION

Grammatical structure is meant the organizing of morphemes and words into larger meaningful utterances. Grammar, then, can be defined as the branch of linguistics which deals with the organization of morphemic units into meaningful combinations larger than words. Syntax is the study of the various ways the words are combined into larger structures.

 

2. LEXICAL AND STRUCTURAL MEANING

Lexical Meaning is the meaning of a separate individual word. Structural Meaning is the meaning when several words are combined.

busy               go       people          watch

come             idly      stand             window

curious           man   street

·        The above words are not in combination, they are only in a list.

·        Each word is just a loose part of the list.

·        We can only get each individual meaning (lexical meaning).

·        We cannot get their meaning in combination (structural meaning) from that list.

Now we try to combine the above words randomly:

busy idly                                stand window people man

curious window busy man people go stand idly

·        The first group of the combination does not make sense, because they do not have “linguistic structure”, they fail to create the structural meaning.

·        The second group of the combination makes sense, because they have “linguistic structure”, they succeed to create the structural meaning.

 

3. FIVE SIGNALS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES

The words are bound into a structure when they apply the syntactic structure, which is signaled by:

1. Word order                       = proximity in fixed order

Examples :

Busy man

Curious window

Cold shoulder

2. Prosodic pattern = pitch, stress, and juncture.

Examples :

People go

Stand idly    

3. Function Words

When we see a longer and more complicated combination as follows:

1. the curious man stood by the window idly watching the busy people coming and going in the street.
2. come stand by the window busy man and watch the curious people who are going idly up the street.
3. why are the curious people standing in the street idly watching that busy man come and go through a window.
4. this curious street goes by some windows where people can stand and idly watch busy men coming.

·        Each of the above sentences contains two such minimum structures, which themselves forms units in larger patterns. (You can see the word order and read aloud to perceive the part played by prosody.

·        We can also observe some other devices at work in those sentences, helping to build the eleven words into well-knit organizations with overall meanings, they are:

1)     the, by, the, the, and, in, the

2)     by, the, and, the, who, are, up, the

3)     why, are, the, in, the, a, and, through, a

4)     this, by, some, where, a, can, and

·        The above words are called function words.

·        They have little or no lexical meaning.

·        They help greatly to build the eleven basic words into complex structures.

·        It is possible to build short structure without them, but longer and complicated ones are impossible.

 

4. Inflection

When we look at our organized utterances above, another thing should strike us. That is, that we have made morphemic changes in the words:

            stand             -           stood             -           standing

            go                   -           going             -           goes

            man               -           men

The changes that we make are called inflection. Inflection is important to keep the utterances natural.

Notice the utterances without inflection that are not natural to the native speakers:

busy man come to the window to stand and watch.

the curious people go idly along the streets.

 

5. Derivational Contrast

Notice the following utterance

            The idly man stood by the window curious watching the people

            coming and going busy in the street.

To speak more accurately we must recognize the derivational change:

 

            The idle man stood by the window curiously watching the people

            coming and going busily in the street.

·        This change is called derivational contrast.

·        It plays part in structural and lexical meaning.

 

6. Conclusion

The combination of two or more words following grammatical rules will create the structural meaning. There are five signals of the grammatical rules, they are, word order, prosodic pattern, function words, inflectional, and derivational contrast.

 

REFERENCES

Francis, W Nelson, 1958, The Structure of American English, New York, The           Ronald Press Company, Chapter 2.

Wardhaugh, R, 1977. Introduction to Linguistics, New York: McGraw-Hill Book           Company. Chapter 3,4,5.

 

E X E R C I S E:

A.  Answer the following questions What do we mean by lexical and structural meaning? Explain : word order, prosodic pattern, function words, inflectional, and derivational contrast.   B.  Analyze the sentences in the following texts to identify and find out the            five signals of linguistic structures as many as possible: Text 1: “Twenty years ago, the photocopy machine was a convenience. Today, it’s necessity for the efficient office. Photocopies of documents are exact reproductions of the original documents. They can be made quickly and cheaply.   Text 2: Many gardeners today do not like to use insecticides or pesticides. They do not like chemicals in their gardens. They use natural insect controls instead. Certain flowers can keep bugs away. Some gardeners plant these flowers next to the vegetables. The flowers are a natural way to keep the vegetables healthy. The also add the beauty to the garden.   Text 3: Today many married people share housework equally. A wife may cook, and a husband may clean the house. A wife may wash windows while a husband may scrub the floors. When a husband and wife each have jobs, housework is the responsibility of both.