STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

                                                                   STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

 BACKGROUND TO STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR 

        The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by a new approach to grammar suggested by linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and American linguists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Leonard. This school of linguistics is called structuralism.

 It is against the approach of the traditional grammarian so the 17th,18th and 19th centuries. Traditional Grammar The traditional grammarians had looked upon Latin as their model. Since English is a member of the Indo -European family of languages, to which Latin and Greek also belong, it did have many grammatical elements in common with them. 

    But many of these had been obscured or wholly lost as a result of extensive changes that had taken place in English. Early grammarians considered these changes as a sort of degeneration in language and felt that they were duty bound to resist these changes. They, therefore, came outwith a group of prescriptive rules for English on the basis of Latin.They ignored the fact that every language is unique in its own way and has to be described as autonomous in itself.     

       They did not realize that the only standard which is to be applied to a language is the language itself,its usage.Also,they attached more importance to the written part of language than to the spoken element. Even the definitions of the parts of speech given by them,as has been discussed earlier,were inadequate and confusing. Instead of describing the actually spoken language, they found faults with it on trivial considerations. The following sentences, though in common use, were condemned by them for reasons shown in brackets 

1. I do not known thing.(double negative) 

2. I will ask you to quickly do it. (use of‗will‘ with I and use of split infinitive)

 3. He is taller than me. (comparison is between he and I and not me) 

         There   authority, in judgement concerning the correctness of sentences in a language,is the native speaker language, not the grammarian. The approach of the traditional grammarians was thus not scientific or logical;it was the ran illogical presumptive approach, prescribing certain rules of do‘s and don‘ts as to how people should speak or write in conformity with the standards. They did not first observe as to how people used the language and then describe it, depending upon the usage. The traditional grammarians gave a classicist‘s model of grammar based on the authority of masters of classical literature and rhetoric,while later on, after this authority was challenged (a process which began from the Renaissance onwards), models of grammar began to be made on the basis of scientific observation and analysis, i.e. the empirical approach or model was adopted.

 Structural Grammar (Major Tenets) The structural linguists began to study language interms of observable and verifiable data and describe it according to the behaviour of the language as it was being used. These descriptive linguists emphasized the following points: 

(i) Spoken language is primary and writing is secondary. Writing is only a means of representing speech in another medium.Speech comes earlier than writing in the life of an individual or in the development of a language. 

(ii) The synchronic study of language should take precedence over its diachronic study. Historical consideration are not relevant to the investigation of a particular temporal state of a language. In the game of chess,for example,the situation on the board is constantly changing. But at any one time, the state of the game can be fully described in terms of the positions occupied by several pieces on the board. It does not matter by what route the players have arrived at the particular state of the game. 

(iii) Language is a system of systems. It has a structure of its own.Each language is regarded by the structuralists as a system of relations .The element so his system(sounds,words,etc.)have no validity independently of the relations of equivalence and contrast which hold between them. Each sound is normally meaningless in isolation. It becomes meaningful only when it combines with other sounds join to form meaningful words which further join to form sentences,i.e. unit so higher level. 

    The structural linguists attempted to describe language in terms of its structure, as it is used, and tried to look for ‗regularities‘ and‗patterns‘ or ‗rules‘ in language structure. Bloomfield envisaged thatlanguagestructurewasassociatedwithphonemeastheunitofphonologyandmorphemeastheunitofgrammar.Phonemes  are the minimal distinctive sound units of language. The word tap, for example, consists of three phonemes: /t/, /æ/, and /p/. Morphemes are larger than phonemes as they consist of one or more phonemes. The word playing consists of two morphemes play and ing, whereas it consists of the phonemes /ρ/, /|/, /eı/, /I/ and /□/. So in order to study the structure of a sentence,a linguist must be aware of the string of phonemes or morphemes that make up the sentence. Here is a sentence: The unlucky player played himself out .