UNIT 1

Grammatical System of a language;

Grammar is an essential part of language learning. Language is a system of

symbols, such as sounds or character sequences, that can be combined in various
ways following a set of rules, especially to communicate thoughts, feelings or
instructions. Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of
reality and exchanging them in the process of social intercourse. Language is social
by nature. It is connected with people who are its creators and users, it grows and
develops together with the development of society.

Language consists of three parts. These parts are the phonological system, the
lexical system, the grammatical system. Only the unity of these three elements
forms a language.

The phonological system is the sound system of language. The lexical system is
the whole set of naming means, that is, words and stable word-groups.
Grammatical system is the set of regularities determining the combination of
naming means in the formation of utterances. The phonological description of
language is effected by the science of phonology; the lexical description of
language is effected by the science of lexicology; the grammatical description of
language effected by the science of grammar.

What is grammar? The word “grammar” derives from Greek and means “art of
letters” (gramma = letter). The term “grammar” is used in two meanings. On the
one hand, in its wide sense, the term refers to the explicit theory which is
constructed by the linguist to describe the speaker’s linguistic competence. On the
other hand, in its narrow sense, the term “grammar” refers to the study of
morphology (i.e. the rules of word formation, parts of speech and their
grammatical categories) and syntax (i.e. the rules of sentence formation).
Grammars are of different types. There is a descriptive grammar of language that
does not tell you how you should speak or what rules you should know in order to
speak. It only describes the rules that are already known, i.e. a descriptive
grammar describes your unconscious linguistic knowledge. Another type of
grammar is a prescriptive grammar which attempts to legislate what your
grammar should be; in other words, it tells you what rules you should know to
speak the standard language.

There is also a teaching grammar which is used to learn another language or

dialect. Teaching grammars are used in schools – they state explicitly the rules of
the language, list the words and their pronunciations and help learn a new
language and dialect. Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows
one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar
of the native language.

The universal grammar aims to uncover the principles characterizing all human
languages and to reveal the inborn human language faculty that makes language
acquisition possible (წარმოაჩინოს ადამიანის თანდაყოლილი უნარი და ნიჭი
ენისადმი, რაც შესაძლებლობას აძლევს მას აითვისოს ენა).

There are linguistic universals that refer to all languages. They are:

1. Wherever humans exist, language exists.

2. There are no “primitive” languages – all languages are equally complex and
equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe.

3. All languages change through time.

4. The relationship between the pronunciation and the meaning of a word is

mostly arbitrary, i.e. the pronunciation of words have no resemblance to
their meaning and the link between them is a matter of convention.

5. All human languages use a limited set of sounds that are combined to form
meaningful elements or words, which themselves may be combined to form
an infinite set of possible sentences.
 6. All grammars contain similar rules for the formation of words and
sentences.

7. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments that can be defined
by peculiar sound properties or features. For instance, every language has a
class of vowels and a class of consonants.

8. Similar grammatical classes of words, i.e. parts of speech (for example,

nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are found in all languages.

9. There are universal semantic properties like “male”, “female”, “animate” or

“human”, found in every language in the world.

10.Every language has a way of referring to past or future time, a way of

negating, forming questions, issuing commands, and so on. Syntactic
universals reveal that every language has a way of forming different
structural types of sentences.

11.Speakers of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an

infinite set of sentences.

12.And finally, any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial,
geographical, social or economic heritage, is capable of learning any
language to which he or she is exposed. The differences we find among
languages cannot be due to biological reasons.

These principles, that characterize all human languages, have been revealed and
studied by Universal Grammar.

The last type of grammar, we would like to focus on, is a theoretical grammar. The
aim of theoretical grammar is to present a theoretical description of a grammatical
system of a given language, that is, scientifically analyze and define main classes of
words, so called parts of speech, their grammatical categories and study the
mechanisms of sentence formation in the process of speech making.
 The grammatical system of a language is a set of linguistic means and their
application rules, employed to produce a coherent utterance. ( A coherent
utterance is a linguistic structure which is lexically and grammatically marked
and which contains information.)

Grammatically a language may be characterized by how the relationships of

words are marked in a sentence. According to this there are two types of
languages: analytic and synthetic. An analytic language is any language where
syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order rather
than by inflection. The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language
in which ,on the other hand, grammatical distinctions are realized by inflections.
English is considered to be an analytic language because of the scarcity of
grammatical affixes and a relatively large number of analytic grammatical forms.
The predominant means of marking the grammatical relationship of words in an
English sentence are form-word and word order. In Georgian it is affixation as
Georgian is a synthetic language. Thus, as regards the markers of the relationship
of words in a sentence, the main difference between English and Georgian is in
the means themselves and in how the two languages employ them.

Analytical forms are mostly proper verbs. An analytical verb-form consists of

one or more form words , which have no lexical meaning and only express one or
more of the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood,
and, one notional word, generally an infinitive or a participle: e. g. He has gone, I
am reading. She was speaking; It had been finished;

However, the structure of a language is never purely synthetic or purely

analytic. Accordingly in the English language there are:

1. endings:

-s in the third person singular in the present simple: reads;

 -s in the plural of nouns: tables;

-s in the genitive case: my brother's book;

-ed in the past simple of regular verbs: looked.

2. Inner flexions: man-men; drink-drank.

3. The synthetic forms of the Subjunctive Mood: were, be, have, etc.

Due to the scarcity of grammatical affixes the grammatical character of a word

or a group of words in English can often be identified only in the context, i. e.
through the distribution.( the distribution of a word is its immediate surroundings
in a sentence.)

Hundreds of pieces of silver and gold for use and display grace collections all over
the world.

Comprehension Exercises:

a. Answer the questions according to the unit material:

1. How can you define grammar?

2. What is language?

3. What are three parts of the language?

4. What is the aim of theoretical grammar of a language?

5. Which two types of languages are there?

6. Speak about the differences between synthetic and analytic languages.

b. Look at the statements below and decide whether they are true or false
1.The changes in the society cannot be reflected in its language. T/F

2. Grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases and
words in any given natural language. T/F
3.Phonological system is the system of phones used in particular languages. T/F

4. Coherent utterance is producing separate units of speech. T/F

5. Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context for the interpretation of sentences.
T/F

6.Word-order does not carry a lot of importance for analytic languages. T/ F

7.There are no fixed patterns in synthetic languages T/ F

c. Read and translate the examples of synthetic forms from Georgian language
and find their analytic equivalents in English to compare them:

1. წიგნის ყდა

2. მანქანის საბურავები

3. ის მოვიდა.

4. მე ვკითხულობ.

5. უკვე ორი საათია, რაც ისინი ცეკვავენ.

6. ხვალ ამ სტატიას გადავთარგმნი.

7. ის მღერის?

8. ის არ ატარებს მანქანას.

9. მე თეატრში დამპატიჟეს.

10. მე იქ წავიდოდი, დრო რომ მქონდეს.