A General Comparison on Sentences Analysis and Its Teaching Significance Between Traditional and Structural Grammars

Jiaying Yu Department of Foreign Language

Heilongjiang Institute of Technology Harbin, China

jiaying9868@sina.com

Abstract—Grammar is familiar to all of us. We have learned grammar for many years. But now we come to a new field in which grammar is not exactly the same as before. Here we mainly talk about two kinds of them, traditional grammar and structural grammar. Traditional grammar, also called school grammar, is a type of grammar first developed in Europe in the eighteenth century, based on Aristotelian logic and ancient Greek and Latin Grammars, often as an aid to learning these languages and interpreting classical texts. When we talked about structural grammar, we should firstly look at the Structural Linguistics. The structural grammar is based on the theory of Structural Linguistics. Structuralism is a collective term for a number of linguistic approaches in the first half of the twentieth century, all based on the work of F. de Saussure, but strongly divergent from one another. Depending on theoretical preconceptions, the term ‘structuralism’ is used in several ways. In this essay we will make a general comparison between them, which could give us a better understanding about each of them.

Keywords-comparision; grammar; traditional grammar; structural grammar

I. WHAT IS GRAMMAR? Originally, grammar designated the ancient study of

the letters of the alphabet and in the middle ages of the entirety of Latin language, stylistics, and rhetoric. The term 'grammar' is presently used to various areas of study.

a. Grammar as the knowledge and study of the morphological and syntactic regularities of a natural language. In this traditional sense, grammar caters to the formal aspects of language, excluding phonetics, phonology and semantics as specialized areas of linguistics.

b. Grammar as a system of structural rules (in the sense of de Saussure's langue) fundamental to all processes of linguistic production and comprehension.

c. Grammar as language theory, and in transformational grammar as a model representing linguistic competence.

• Systematic description of the formal regularities of a natural language in the form of a reference work or textbook. Due to the numerous interpretations of the term grammar, scientific criteria for its classification overlap.

Grammar are currently evaluated on the basis of applicability, simplicity, completeness, coherence, and lack of contradiction. Here we mainly mentioned Traditional Grammar and Structural Grammar.

II. INTRODUCTION OF TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR Traditional grammar, also called school grammar, is a

type of grammar first developed in Europe in the eighteenth century, based on Aristotelian logic and ancient Greek and Latin Grammars, often as an aid to learning these languages and interpreting classical texts.

One of the most famous monuments of traditional grammar is George O. Curme’s massive, two volume, A Grammar of the English Language, first published in 1931. Like all the traditionalists, Curme begins with an exhaustive, descriptive analysis, in Volume I, of the "Parts of Speech." He devotes Volume II, however, to "Syntax." It is true that his concept of "syntax" differs from that of the structuralists and transformationalists, but that is because it includes almost everything about grammar that could be categorized and described.

III. INTRODUCTION OF STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR When we talk about structural grammar, we should

firstly look at the Structural Linguistics. The structural grammar is based on the theory of Structural Linguistics. Structuralism is a collective term for a number of linguistic approaches in the first half of the twentieth century, all based on the work of F. de Saussure, but strongly divergent from one another. Depending on theoretical preconceptions, the term ‘structuralism’ is used in several ways. In its narrower sense, it refers to the pre-generative phase of linguistics before N. Chomsky’s Syntactic structures; in its broader sense, to all linguistic theories which focus on an isolated investigation of the language system, which would include generative transformational grammar. The most important centers of ‘classical’ structuralism are (a) the Geneva school, concerned primarily with the work de Saussure, (b) American Structuralism following the work of L. Bloomfield, (c) the Copenhagen Linguistic circle with L. Hjelmslev’s glosse matics, (d) contextualism, centered in London, and (e) the Prague School, represented chiefly by N. Trubetzkoy, A. Martinet, and R. Jackobson.

All variations of structuralism have certain theoretical premises in common, which results in part from the influence of empiricism and in part from a common reaction against the nineteenth century positivistic atomism of the Neogrammarians.

Even though de Saussure did not use the term ‘structure’ in his posthumously published Cours de linguistique generale (1916, based on lecture notes from the years 1906-11), but rather the term systeme and mecanisme, he is none the less recognized as the ‘father’

2010 International Conference on Asian Language Processing

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2010 International Conference on Asian Language Processing

978-0-7695-4288-1/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/IALP.2010.44

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and pioneer of structuralism, and his course in seen as a summary of the fundamental principles of structuralist linguistic description.

Structural grammar is mainly based on the theory of American structuralism which is a general term for variously developed branches of structuralism pioneered above all by E. Sapir (1884-1939) and L. Bloomfield (1887-1949). Although the various schools cannot be clearly distinguished from one another, a distinction is made between two general phases: the so-called ‘ Bloomfield Era,’ and distributionalism, with Z. Harris as chief representative. Common to all branches are certain scientific prerequisites which decisively influenced the specific methodological orientation of American structuralism. At first, an interest in dying Native American languages brought about interdisciplinary research in linguistics and anthropology. The occupation with culturally distant and as yet completely unresearched languages, which existed only orally, was a significant catalyst for the parole-oriented, purely descriptive methods of American Structuralism. The works of E. Sapir and F. Boas are significant. The theoretical and methodological format came to the determined in large part by the principles of behaviorist psychology. Following the natural sciences, this direction of research reduces the object of its investigation to perceptible data and draws on observations made in animal experiments to explain human behavior.

IV. COMPARISON BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

We could say structural grammar developed after the highly development of traditional grammar. In many aspects, it surpassed the traditional grammar, but in certain aspect it also has serious shortcomings. Now let's make a general comparison of the advantages and disadvantages between these two grammars.

A. The classification standard of parts of speech Many of the traditional terms for parts of speech date

back to classical antiquity to the Greek and Roman grammarians. Our current classification is based primarily on the teachings of the grammarian Dionsyios Thrax, who proposed eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction, which are classified mainly according to the implicated meaning of each part.

a. Noun: the name of a person, place, or thing: Clarissa, Middlemarch, book.

b. Verb: a word expressing a state or action: be, have, do, run, write, love, give, can, must.

c. Adjective: a word describing (or 'qualifying') a noun: purple patches, a handsome husband, my country, that woman.

d. Article: This minute category contains only the definite article (the) and the indefinite article (a, an).

e. Pronoun: A word used as a substitute for a noun: he, himself, that, what, who, each, either, some, one.

f. Preposition: is used to relate nouns or pronouns grammatically to the rest of the sentence.

g. Adverb: a word qualifying an adjective; e.g.: very fat, so sweet, seriously displeased.

h. Conjunction: is used to link words or groups of words.

While the analysis of structural grammar usually concerns with the three levels: phonology, morphonology and syntax. Facing a word, the structural grammar will first consider the function that this word performed in a certain sentence or content. Its main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a language. The method employed involves the use of ‘test-frames’ which can be sentences with empty slots in them. For example:

The _____ makes a lot of noise. There are a lot of forms which can fit into these slots to

produce good grammatical sentences of English (e.g. donkey, car, dog, radio, child. etc.). Consequently, we can suggest that because all of forms fit in the same test-frame, they are likely to be examples of the same grammatical category. The label we give to this grammatical category is, of course, ‘noun’. However, there are many forms which do not fit the test-frames above. Examples would be Cathy, it, the dog, a car, and so on. For these forms, we require different test-frames, which could be like this:

_____ makes a lot of noise. Among the forms which fit these test-frames are Cathy,

Anna Banana, it, the dog, an old car, the professor with the Scottish accent, and many more. Once again, we can suggest that these forms are likely to be examples of the same grammatical category. The common label for this category is ‘noun phrase’. By developing a set of test-frames of this type and discovering what forms fit the slots in the test-frames, you can produce a description of aspects of the sentence structures of a language.

Traditional grammars were primarily formal and focused. Thus nouns were arranged in declensions; verbs, in conjugations, primarily based on the forms of the words. Although some attention was paid to the function of individual words (adjectives modify nouns or pronouns), little, if any attention was devoted to the functions and interrelationships of larger constructions such as clauses or verbals. As a result, traditional grammar has numerous names for pronouns (personal, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, etc.), but relatively few for clauses. So traditional grammar mainly focused on categorization of individual words and rarely looked at the functions of groups of words. The greatest achievement of the Structuralist movement in linguistics was, indeed, to shift attention away from individual words to the structure of the sentence as a whole. Whereas traditional grammars had started from the individual word and worked toward the sentence, structural grammars started from the sentence and worked toward the word.

Suppose someone is sitting in a classroom, and we ask her to describe the "form" of the room. She may note that it is square, made of cinder-block, and has a door in one of the side walls, windows in the other. Steel beams line the ceiling; a black-board covers the front wall. Now suppose that we ask her to describe the "structure" of the same room. She will, of course, describe exactly the same things. But, if she thinks about it for a minute, she will begin to note a shift in her concept of their relative importance. She’ll probably note, for example, that the steel beams in the ceiling run from the front to the back of the room, and not from side to side. They cannot go from side to side because one of the side walls has windows along its entire

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length and the glass could not support the weight of the beams. Structurally, in other words, the front and back walls are more important than those on the side, since they support the ceiling. A structural perspective, in other words, may include the "formal," but it goes beyond the formal to explore how the individual parts interact to create a larger whole.

Grammatically, a structural perspective helps us not simply to categorize meaningless words, but rather to understand how the structural relationships of words support the meanings which we attempt to convey through language.

B. Prescriptive Grammar and Descriptive Grammar Traditional grammar is rather normative or prescriptive,

laying down rules for the use of language. This grammatical description with the goal of instruction in the proper use of language and which is influenced by historical, logical and aesthetic considerations. Based on the example of other languages (for Indo-European languages, usually Latin), on the language of poets, writers, and scholars, certain researchers and institutions attempt to codify a language in a binding fashion, which is considered ‘good style,’ and is regarded as ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ In this way, traditional grammar has many shortcomings. It is based mainly in European languages; its categories are inadequate for the description of non-European languages. And its rules are not all well-founded. So a reaction against such grammars can be seen in the grammars based on descriptive linguistics, which does not attempt to be regulative, but which represents various linguistic variants without evaluating them as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. As a rule, prescriptive grammars lag behind the development of theoretical or descriptive grammars. This was apparent, for example, on the gradual replacement of traditional language-teaching methods with language-teaching methods influenced by structuralism. The structural perspective also has pedagogical advantages. Using traditional grammar, students have to start with the eight parts of speech and build upward from there. Usually, they don’t get very far. But the structural perspective gives students a dual attack on grammar: not only can they work from, so to speak, the bottom up, but they can also work from the top (the sentence) down.

C. Synchrony and Diachrony After the distinction langue vs parole, the most

important methodological distinction established by F. de Saussure for the interpretation and investigation of language as a closed system. It is only on the axis of simultaneity that language can be analyzed as a system of values in which the value of an individual element results from the relational context of all values in the system. Synchrony refers to changing states of a language between different time periods. While descriptive synchronic research investigates the relationship of individual elements to a balanced linguistic system that can be described structurally, historically oriented diachronic investigations can, according to de Saussure, only address the replacement of single elements by other elements, or the change of individual elements. This devaluation of historical investigation, which was a reaction against the historical linguistics advocated by the Neogrammatians,

was in turn subject to criticism. Owing to this, diachronic linguistics of structuralist variety is still lively today.

The narrower sense of descriptive linguistics is a term for the approaches in American structuralism represented by L. Bloomfield, Z. S. Harris, H.A. Gleason, and others. In this aspect synchronic linguistic is one of the features, which means make no reference to historical contexts.

D. Analysis of sentence Traditional grammar analyses sentences in terms of

how the words are related to one another, using categories such as subject, object, … The following table shows the main grammatical relations, some of which are used in contemporary linguistics. Subject: noun phrase preceding a verb birds fly; all the students are here clause (embedded sentence) as subject that he succeeded is amazing Predicate (the entire verb phrase) the students are playing soccer in the gym Object (noun phrase after verb or preposition) object of preposition: in the house object of verb: Mary wrote a letter indirect object: John gave Mary a letter Complement (something other than NP following a verb) adjective he looked silly clause we thought he looked silly Modifier adjective modifying noun big dogs adverb modifying verb barks loudly clause modifying sentence when they sang, we laughed

Grammatical relations can be defined in terms of phrase structure. For example: an object is an NP immediately dominated by VP or PP; a subject is an NP immediately dominated by S. Some very traditional basic sentence patterns in English include: noun+verb; noun+verb+direct object, noun+verb+indirect object+direct object. The basic sentence type of traditional grammar is: declarative, imperative, interrogative and exclamatory.

While according to formal aspects, American structuralism provides a strict definition of ‘sentence’ as the largest independent syntactic form which cannot be embedded in any other syntactic form by any grammatical rule. Described syntactically, the sentence is the result of an analysis that proceeds from the smallest units through morphemes, words, and phrases to the synthesis ‘sentence.’ And the structure grammar adopted the descriptive way of analysis called immediate constituent analysis. The technique employed in this approach is designed to show how small constituents in sentences go together to form larger constituents. In the following

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sentence, we can identify eight constituents (at the word level): Her father brought a shotgun to the wedding.

This analysis of the constituent structure of the sentence can be represented in different types of diagrams. One type of diagram simply shows the distribution of the constituents at different levels.

This type of diagram can be used to show the types of forms which can substitute for each other at different levels of constituent structure.

Labeled and bracketed sentences An alternative type of diagram is designed to show

how the constituents in sentences structure can be marked off via labeled brackets. The first step is to put brackets (one on each side) around each constituent, and then more brackets around each combination of constituents. For example:

[[[The] [dog]] [[followed] [[the] [boy]]]] With this procedure, the different constituents of the

sentences are shown at the word level [the], at the phrase level [the boy], and at the sentence level [The dog followed the boy]. We can, of course, label each constituent with grammatical terms such as ‘Art’ (=article), ‘N’ (=noun), ‘NP’ (=noun phrase), ‘V’ (=verb), ‘VP’ (=verb phrase ) and ‘S’ (=sentence). In performing this type of analysis, we have not only labeled all the constituents, we have exposed the hierarchical organization of those constituents. In this hierarchy, the sentence is higher than, and contains, the noun phrase. The noun phrase is higher than, and contains, the noun.

E. In the role of teaching process When we say that the legacy of traditional grammar is

pedagogical, we obviously do not mean that traditional grammar, in the way it has been taught, is a good pedagogical grammar. It definitely needs improvement. But we need to remember that structural grammars were first developed in the 30's, transformational in the 50’s, and neither was intended to be pedagogical. Structural grammar has developed the immediate constituent analysis, which gives the learners a better understanding of the structure of a sentence. Traditional grammar, on the other hand, has been used as a pedagogical tool for hundreds of years, and its terms, with a little modification, are perfectly adequate for pedagogical (as opposed to linguistic) purposes. Structuralism and transformationalism, moreover, were not spontaneous generations, created out of nothing. The history of the study of language is evolutionary, with new ideas developing out of the old. Thus, for example, the systematic and sub-systematic nature of language predates structuralism. Traditional grammarians had already realized that language was basically a complex of sub-systems, and the distinctions

among phonology, morphology and syntax are a "traditional" accomplishment.

V. CONCLUSION Traditional grammar, as we have talked about, has its

origins in the description of languages like Classical Latin and Greek. Since there were well-established grammatical descriptions of these older languages, it seemed appropriate to adopt the existing categories from these descriptions and apply them in the analysis of languages like English. After all, Latin and Greek were the languages of scholarship, religion, philosophy and ‘knowledge’, so the grammar of these languages was taken to be the best grammar, and kept on going for hundreds of years.

While structural grammars were first developed in the 30’s, they had surpassed tradition grammar in many fields, such as the descriptive method, the immediate constituent analysis, and so on.

And the purpose for this essay is to help the English learner to make a better understanding of these two grammars. So that the English majors can use the traditional grammar as a basic tool to analyze the structure and function of each element in a sentence, and to master the function and the meaning of the sentence as a whole with the help of ideas of structural grammar. So we say that although structural grammar is different from traditional grammar in certain aspects of its basic theory, it does play an important part in the complement of the perfection of traditional grammar both in the understanding of sentences and teaching functions. Not only does the appearance of structural grammar give us a new horizon of the current grammatical schools, but also it enriches the theories of language learning. So through the comparison between these two kinds of grammar, we get a general idea of the advantages and disadvantages of each part. We know that everything has two aspects. No matter how well it performs, it has several shortcomings, and the same to its opposition. So we should evaluate them objectively.

Her father brought a shotgun to the wedding

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