History of english grammars

Grammar deals with what can be brought under general laws, Alongside practical and theoretical grammar there exist a number of types of grammar. There are roughly distinguished two periods:

English grammars before 1900 (the end of 16^th – 19^th):

Pre-normative grammar (William Bullokar’s “Bref grammar of English” 1585) is the age of pre-scientific grammar. Normative grammar (middle of 18^th- 19^th century) stated strict rules of grammatical usage. The most influential grammar of the period was R. Lowth’s “Short Introduction to English grammar” 1762. The best prescriptive grammars of this period, like C.P. Manson’s “English grammar” (1858) and A. Bain’s “Higher English grammar” (1863) paved the way for the first scientific grammar of English. Classical scientific grammar appeared after the description of the grammatical system, especially that of syntax, had been completed (the end of 19^th century). A need was felt for a scientific explanation of the grammatical phenomena. The appearance of H. Sweet’s “New English grammar, Logical and Historical” (1891) met this demand.

English grammars in the 20^th century:

The first is from the beginning of the 20^th century till the 1940’s, when there were only two types of grammars in use – the prescriptive and the classical scientific. a) Prescriptive grammar in the 20^th century changed very little, and some 19^th century grammars continued to be reprinted. Among the 20^th century prescriptive grammars is a work of J.Nesfield, which underwent a number of editions. J. Nesfield developed the system of members of the sentence. b) The founders of classical scientific grammar in the Modem period either specialize in syntax or deal with the problem of both morphology and syntax. Among the authors who specialize in syntax are L.G. Kimball, C.T. Onions and H.R. Stokoe. A greater number of grammarians have more ambitious aim – to describe English grammar scientifically as a whole. The most famous scientists are Poustma H. and Kruisinga A., Curme G.O. and Bryant M., Jesperson O.

The second is from the 1940’s, during which time the first structural grammar appeared, and then of other types have been added.

a. Structural (descriptive) grammarians began treating the problems of the structure of English with the criticism of traditional grammar. A representative of this approach is Ch.Fries. Among American linguistics should be mentioned L. Bloomfield, K.L. Pike, and R. Wells, E. Nida, Z.S. Harris and others. Sentence structure was represented in terms of immediate constituents analysis. The generally favorite method of linguistic description became that of description (distributional analysis and substitution).

The difference between the traditional and structural approaches is that the former did not rely on this method as a part of explicitly formulated theory.

b. Other grammar: a transformational generative grammar, followed structural linguistics. Its main aim was to find out the mechanisms which account for the generation of a variety of sentences of language out of a kernel sentence. The representative of this grammar is E. Bach “an introduction to transformational grammars” (1964). The representatives of Generative semantics vigorously opposed the notion of “deep structure”. They propounded the idea of the semantic level where all the information relevant for the syntactic structure of a sentence is accumulated. The representatives of this grammar are Ch. Fillmore “The case for case” (1968), K. Donnellan “Reference and Definite Descriptions” (1971).

As well as the analysis of the semantic properties of sentences there appeared a new trend-textual linguistics. Its aim is to provide a formal device needed for theoretical description of discourse. M.A.K. Halliday’s work illustrates an attempt at giving a theoretical basis of textual linguistics.