Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка : учебное пособие
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Theoretical Grammar
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TheoreTical english grammar as a Branch of linguisTics 1. on the history of english grammars Until the 17 th century the term “grammar” in English was applied only to the study of Latin. Latin grammar was the only grammar learned in schools (grammar schools). Until the end of the 16 th century there were no grammars of English. One of the most popular Latin grammars was written in English by William Lily. It was published in the first half of the 16 th century and went through many editions. This book was very important for English grammar as it set a standard for the arrangement of material. Latin grammatical paradigms with their English equivalents made possible the presentation of English forms in a similar way, using the same terminology as in Latin grammar. Lily’s “Latin Grammar” may be considered as the precursor of the earliest English grammars. The first English grammar was written by William Bullokar (“Bref Grammar for English”, 1585). There were 5 cases of nouns in Bullokar’s grammar (cf. 6 cases in Latin). However, even early grammarians noticed some typical features which made the structure of English different from that of Latin. Generally speaking, the history of English grammars may be divided into two periods. The first is the age of prescientific grammar beginning with the end of the 16 th century and lasting till about 1900. It includes two types of grammars which succeeded each other. The first type of grammars in the history of English grammar is represented by early prenormative grammars of English (the first among them is W. Bullokar’s “Bref Grammar for English”). 8 By the middle of the 18 th century, when many of the grammatical phenomena of English had been described and the English language norms established, the prenormative grammars gave way to a new kind of grammar, a prescriptive (normative) grammar. It stated strict rules of grammatical usage and set up a certain standard of correctness to be followed by learners. One of the most influential grammars of that period was R. Lowth’s “Short Introduction to English Grammar”, first published in 1762 in London. On the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, Lindley Murray wrote a very successful work, “English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners”. It was first published in 1795 and later underwent 50 editions in its original form and more than 120 – in an abridged version. Some of the 19 th -century normative grammars were reprinted in the 20 th century. For example, W. Lennie’s “Principles of English Grammar” underwent numerous editions, the 99 th edition being published in 1905; or, else, J. C. Nesfield’s grammar (“English Grammar Past and Present”, 1898) underwent twenty five editions in different variants and was still on sale in the 1960s. Grammars of the second type (prescriptive, or normative grammars) written by modern authors are usually referred to as practical grammars of English. By the end of the 19 th century, when the system of grammar known in modern linguistics as traditional had been established, there appeared a new type of grammar (the third on the list), the scientific grammar. In contrast with prescriptive grammars, the classical scientific grammar was both descriptive and explanatory. H. Sweet’s grammar book appeared in the last decade of the 19 th century (H. Sweet, “A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical”. Part I. Oxford, 1892; Part II. Oxford, 1898). The title of the book speaks for itself, so it is common practice nowadays to take the date of 1900 as the dividing line between the two periods in the history of English grammars and the beginning of the age of the scientific grammar. Classical scientific grammar accepted the traditional grammatical system of prescriptive grammars. During the first half of the 20 th century, an intensive development of scientific English grammar took place, with great contributions to it being made by O. Jespersen (“The Philosophy of Grammar”, 1924; “Essentials of English Grammar”, 1933; “A Modern English Grammar on Historical
9 Principles”, 7 vols, 1914–1949), E. Kruisinga (“A Handbook of Present- Day English”, 1909), H. Poutsma (“A Grammar of Late Modern English”, 5 vols, 1904–1929), C. T. Onions (“An Advanced English Syntax”, 1904), G. O. Curme (“A Grammar of the English Language”, 1931) and some other scholars. In the 1950s a new trend in linguistic studies came to the fore, the structural grammar (the forth on the list). It was very popular with grammarians for about 40 years and took different directions in its development which are known as Descriptive Linguistics, Transformational Grammar, Generative Grammar, Generative Semantics. The main ideas of structural approach to language were advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure (“Cours de linguistique generale”, 1922) and Leonard Bloomfield (“Language”, 1933). Those ideas were accepted and further developed by H. Whitehall (“Structural Essentials of English”, 1956), Z. S. Harris (“Methods in Structural Linguistics”, 1961), Ch. C. Fries (“The Structure of English”, 1963), H. A. Gleason (“Linguistics and English Grammar”, 1965), E. Bach (“An Introduction to Transformation Grammars”, 1964), N. Chomsky (“Syntactic Structures”, 1957; “Language and Mind”, 1968), and a great number of other linguists. When comparing the two periods in the history of English grammars, one can see that during the first period (the 17 th — 19 th centuries) there was only one kind of grammar in use at a time, whereas in the 20 th century there were several types of grammatical descriptions used and developed in parallel. The coexistence and a certain interaction of different types of grammars is a typical feature of the second period (the scientific one). Among modern trends we cannot but mention the communicative grammar (the fifth on the list), which has been gaining popularity since the 1980s. In grammar books of this type the grammatical structures are systematically related to meanings, uses, and situations of communication. жүктеу/скачать 0,64 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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