Syntax
Every language has a system of
principles and rules which govern the structure of the elements of that
language. These principles and rules underlying a language constitute its grammatical
system which is automatically internalized during the process of language
acquisition.
Words are organized in principle of
ways into higher units like phrases and sentences. The rules and principles
governing the arrangements of words into such higher units is technically
called syntax. I.e. , the structure of phrases and sentences in terms of words.
The syntactic analysis of a language is a description of the structure of its
sequence of the principles of sentence construction in that language. Syntactic
analysis can be done in different ways and each method is called a syntactic
model. A syntactic model or theory is the stamen of a method of description of
the syntactic structure of a language.
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR
The term traditional grammar is
rather vague and it is difficult to pin points its definite features. As David
Crystal has pointed out, there are no such things as a single homogeneous traditional approach to grammar. A
spectrum of methods and principles appear in various combination and emphasis
associated with many schools of thoughts. There never was anyone traditional
grammar which enshrined all the fallacies which structuralists condemn. The history of traditional grammar will
explain its inadequacy to an extent. They conceived of the classical language
as superior to the vernaculars. Consequently they took Latin grammar as the
norm and analyzed English in terms of Latin. They forgot Latin is Latin and
English is English. And tried to fit
English grammar in the frame work of Latin grammar.
The traditional approaches to the
study of grammar underwent a radical change as a result of the rapid advances
in the scientific discipline of linguistics in early 20th century.
The new scientific approaches especially the emergence of structural or
descriptive grammar raised objections against the old concepts of traditional
grammar and exposed its inadequacies and fallacies. And its associated chiefly
with the name of the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield and his followers.
The Immediate Constituent analysis was the method employed by the structuralist
for synthetic analysis.
IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENT ANALYSIS
Immediate Constituent(I C) Analysis
essentially a structuralist tool for syntactic analysis was first introduced by
Bloomfield and systematized with theoretical formulation by Roulon Wells and
Zelling Harris. This kind of analysis aims at analyzing each utterance into the
smallest meaningful units possible. The process of binary segmentation is continued;
until we reach the smallest meaningful units. This unit at the last level is
called the ultimate constituents. I C analysis helps us to discover how units
are hierarchically layered into sentences, each lower-level units or
constituent being part of a higher level construction
PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
I C analysis analyses each utterance into
its basic linguistic units. In order to discover its constituents and how they
are organized, a more sophisticated model of grammar called phrase structure
Grammar has been evolved out of this. This method is introduced by Noam Chomsky
in his book Syntactic Structure. P.S Grammar contains a set of rules called
Phrase Structure Rules or Re-write Rules. P.S Rules are capable not only of
generating strings of linguistic elements, but also of providing a constituent
analysis of the string. They provide a set of directions, which is followed
mechanically, will generate the abstract framework of Basic English sentences. It
also represent how morphemes are organized into words, words into phrases and
phrases into sentences in a way slightly different from the of I C analysis.
PS
Grammars have an advantage over the I C model in that the labels are in
built in the re-write rules, and the rules themselves can be arranged in a
sequence so that each rule can be used to rewrite the output of the previous
one.
Thus there are certain facts about
language which cannot be described adequately by a P.S Grammar. A really
radically departure came with the model called T.G Grammar which made use of
transformational rules to explain facts of language inadequately so far.
TRANSFORMATIONAL GERNERATIVE GRAMMAR
T G Grammar is one of the most
influential of modern linguistics theories introduced by Noam Chomsky. The term
Transformational Generative obviously suggests that there are two aspects of
this theory viz, transformational and generative. It shows how different types
of sentences are derived from basic types of simple sentences through the
application of certain rules called Transformational Rules (T-Rules). In the
1957 model, T G Grammar is organized in three components: the base component,
the transformational component and the morpho phonemic component.
T G Grammar is generative since it
must be able to generate all the grammatical sentences of a language. By
following its rules and conventions we could produce all or any of the possible
sentences of that language. It attempts to describe a speaker’s competence and
the competence of a native speaker.
Thus, there are many theories and
theories myriads of them, analyzing and describing language in different ways
and many more to come. Still the mystery of language may never be fully
unraveled. Hence its charm perhaps, this is because it is essentially a human
phenomenon and shares the complex and mysterious nature of everything human..
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