What is GRAMMAR (not)?

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 What is GRAMMAR?
Is grammar the sort of the thing we
learn in English classes?

What is grammar for a linguist?

For linguists, grammar is simply the collection of

principles defining how to put together a sentence.

It is the set of elements and rules that make up

a language.
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 GRAMMAR can be studied under
four distinct headings

• Mental grammar
• Prescriptive grammar
• Descriptive grammar
• Pedogogical (teaching grammars)

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1. Mental Grammar (Competence)
The generative grammar stored in the brain that allows a
speaker to produce language that other speakers can
understand.
Everyone who speaks a language has mental grammar
that is made up of knowledge of phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics in
his/her mind.

However, details of this grammar varies

among different dialect groups and even
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among speakers of the same dialect.
 We all have knowledge of Turkish,
BUT in actual usage it is used differently:

In how many other ways have you heard the word

“geliyorum” produced?

“gelirem”
“geliim”
“geliom”
“celiyrum”
“geliym”

Needless to say, grammar determines the structural well-

formedness of utterances but not their appropriateness.
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 2. Descriptive grammar
• Major aim of linguists: to discover what speakers know
about a language and describe that knowledge
objectively.

• What people know about their language may differ in

quality and quantity but there must be a shared
knowledge that makes it possible to communicate.
• It is the linguists job to describe this shared linguistic
knowledge.
A B

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Linguists devise rules to describe languages
such as:

• Adjectives precede the nouns they modify.

• To form the plural of a noun, add –s.
• The vowel sound in the word suit is produced with
rounded lips.

Descriptive grammar is then created by

linguists as a model of speakers’ linguistic
competence.
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 3. Prescriptive grammar.
• Prescriptive rules tell you
how to speak and write,
according to someone’s
idea of what is “good” or
“bad”.

• The aim: not to describe

your language usage
but to mold your language
to some NORM.

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 Can you think of any examples of
prescriptive rules of English?
• Never end a sentence with a preposition.
No: Where do you come from?
Yes: From where do you come?

• Never split an infinitive.

No: ...to boldly go where no one has gone before
Yes: ... to go boldly where no one has gone before

• Never use double negatives.

No: I don’t have nothing
Yes: I don’t have anything. I have nothing.
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 So what is the difference?
Prescriptive rules Descriptive rules

-Make value judgement about -Accept the patterns a speaker

the correctness of an utterance actually uses and try to account
and for them.
-Try to enforce a usage that -Allow for different varieties of
conforms with one formal norm. language.

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 Is this grammatical?
• Him lucky we never
nyam him too, for we
did done cook already.
Linguists would attempt to
analyze this and formulate
rules based on use
• ‘It’s lucky we didn’t eat
it too, for we had
already cooked.’ [of a
chicken]
• (Sistren 1987: 30)

Jamaican Creole Grammar!

For more on the descriptive grammar of JC:
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/papers/JamCreoleGrammar.pdf
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 So what is the difference?
...the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different
meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.

The rules people learn (or more likely, fail to learn) in

school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how
one ought to talk. Scientists studying language propose
[descriptive] rules, describing how people [do] talk -- the
way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical"
is to find people who speak the language and ask them.

Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely

different things, and there is a good reason that
scientists focus on the descriptive rules.

Pinker, The Language Instinct

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If presciptive rules are not based on actual use, how
did they arise?
• The classical period considered LATIN to be the
perfect language being better or purer than
contemporary languages because it was by then a
stricty written language.

• Thus, for many writers of the 17th and 18th

centuries the rules of Latin became the rules of
English. The rules in the previous slides are all results
of this phenomenon.

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• Purists claim was that language change is

a sign of corruption and

all educated people should

know the correct forms of the language.

Such opinions gave rise to a new class (upper class) who

want to speak properly and who use a prestigious

dialect.
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 Objections to prescriptivists!!!

• Language cannot be for a group of elitists!!!

• It is againts the nature of language (language
change)!!!

• All languages and dialects are rule-governed

(what is grammatical in one language may be
ungrammatical in another).!!!
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 Justification for the existence of
prescriptive rules:
• They provide a standard form of a language
that is accepted by most speakers of that
language. Thus, they allow a speaker to be
understood by the greatest possible number
of individuals.

• Standard rules of a language is vital for second

language learners.
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 4. Pedagogical Grammar
(Teaching Grammar)
Teaching grammar is used in schools to
fulfill language requirements.

It explicitly states the rules of language,

lin•guis•tics
list the words and their pronunciation, (liŋ gwis tiks)

and aid in learning a new language or dialect

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 Creativity in Language
How many sentences can you make with
the words you know in Turkish or
English?

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• Language use demonstrates the creative
capacity of the human mind. Language
provides infinite variety through a finite set
of elements and rules.

How can we do that?

• Through COMBINATIONS of elements by rule.

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What's the longest sentence of English?

There is no longest sentence!

Recursion (embedding) allows for an infinite number of sentences

by allowing sentences inside other sentences.

Mary hit John.

Sally said that Mary hit John.
Kelly believed that Sally said that Mary hit John.
Kim thought Kelly believed that Sally said that Mary hit
John.
............

Language is infinite: not just memorization

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