The grammar of a LANGUAGE is the set of rules controlling the permissible sentences of that language. Grammatical sentences are those which speakers of the language accept as well-formed, ungrammatical sentences are those which they cannot accept. In its widest sense, grammar includes a language’s SYNTAX, MORPHOLOGY and PHONOLOGY, and permissible semantic structures. In narrower senses it refers to the permissible sequential structures of words within sentences—that is, syntax plus morphology. Grammars can also be books describing the grammar of particular languages. Generative grammar is the notion, proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky, of grammar as a device for generating all and only the permissible sentences of a language. Transformational grammars—again due to Chomsky—capture the relations between different syntactic forms expressing the same underlying proposition. Thus ‘Jack built the house’, and The house was built by Jack’ may be described as having a common underlying structure, with the addition of a passive transformation in generating the second.
‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ is Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence which is syntactically permissible though meaningless; it illustrates the separability of syntax and SEMANTICS. (In certain contexts this sentence is now however highly likely, and thus also illustrates the separability of semantics and frequency of occurrence.) Just as different syntactic forms can express one underlying proposition, so can the same form express more than one meaning: English grammar generates ‘Charles is the man I want to succeed’ to convey at least five propositions (I want Charles to have success; I want to follow Charles; I need Charles if I am to have success; I want Charles to follow [X]; I need Charles if I am to follow [X]). Grammatical words (or function words) are words which primarily perform a syntactic function—such as articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns. They contrast with lexical, or content words: nouns, verbs, adjectives. Languages differ according to whether they largely use independent words for such syntactic functions (as English does), or whether they prefer some other means such as affixes or word order. The degree to which thematic relations of case (for instance, subject, object, instrument), verb mood (for instance, factual, possible) and aspect (for instance, completed, uncompleted) are explicitly represented by the grammar also differ widely across languages. So, again, does preferred order for the basic propositional relations subject, verb, object; across the world’s languages all possible orderings may be observed.
References
Borsley R.D. (1991) Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach, Arnold: London.
Hurford J.R. (1994) Grammar: A Student’sGuide, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
ANNE CUTLER
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