2. Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar

1. Descriptive Grammar

Every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar.

The shared knowledge - the com­mon parts of the grammar - makes it possible to communicate through language. To the extent that the linguist's description is a true model of the speakers' linguistic capacity, it is a successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. Such a model is called a descriptive grammar. We have used the word grammar in two ways; the first in reference to the mental grammar speakers have in their brains; the second as the model or description of this internalized grammar.

2. Prescriptive Grammar

From ancient times until the present, "purists" have believed that language change is corruption, and that there are certain "correct" forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing.

They wished to prescribe rather than describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars.

In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children to speak the dialect of the "upper" classes. This desire led to the publication of many prescrip­tive grammars. In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. Lowth prescribed a number of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste.

Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar, which had already given way to different rules in the languages that developed from Latin. Be­cause Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak "prop­erly," many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect. Grammars such as Lowth's are different from the descriptive grammars mentioned above. Their goal is not to describe the rules people know, but to tell them what rules they should know.

3. Morphology and Syntax

Grammar is traditionally divided into two parts – morphology and syntax.

In traditional grammars morphology is defined as that part of grammar which treats of the parts of speech and their inflexion (or accidence), i.e. the forms of number and case of nouns and pronouns, the forms of tense, mood, etc. of verbs, the forms of degrees of comparison of adjectives, etc. By inflexion we mean an addition to a whole class of words expressing some grammatical function, or a meaning so general as not to constitute a new word.

To sum up, morphology is the science of the forms of words.

Syntax is usually defined as that part of grammar which treats of the rules according to which words are connected in the sentence, and also of various types of sentences, their structure and meaning.

According to O. Jespersen, both morphology and syntax treat of the whole complex of grammatical phenomena of a language, however syntax looks at grammatical facts from within, i.e. from the side of their meaning and signification, while morphology looks at the same phenomena from without, from the side of their form. Therefore, the difference is due to a different attitude of a linguist.

Some grammatical relations can be expressed either inflectionally (morphologically) or syntactically (as part of the sentence structure). We can see this in the following sentences:

England's queen is Elizabeth II. He loves books.

The planes which fly are red. He is hungrier than she.

What one language signals with inflectional affixes, another does with word order, and another with function words. For example, in English, the sentence Maxim defends Victor means something different from Victor defends Maxim. The word order is criti­cal. In Russian, all the following sentences mean "Maxim defends Victor":

In English, to convey the future meaning of a verb we must use a function word will, as in "John will come Monday." In French, the verb is inflected with a future tense mor­pheme. Notice the difference between "John is coming Monday," Jean vient lundi, and "John will come Monday," Jean viendra lundi. Similarly, where English uses the gram­matical markers have to form a perfect sentence and be to form a passive sentence, other languages use affixing to achieve the same meanings.