Structural Grammar 3z5m6g

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Structural Grammar A. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

AMERICAN STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS

1. Sir William Jones 2. Franz Bopp 3. Charles Darwin

1. Historical and Comparative Linguistics a. Sir William Jones In the 1780’s, Sir William Jones contributed invaluable linguistic information. He had come across the work of an ancient Indian scholar, Panini, who had written an extremely detailed grammar of Sankrit during the fifth century B.C. Panini had analyzed and classified words and word parts into roots, prefixes and suffixes. Jones examined Panini’s classifications – the particularly the roots – he draw a number of conclusion. The conclusions are: 1. Jones had convinced that the enormous number of similarities between the roots of Sanskrit and those of Greek and Latin provided strong evidence that all three of these language were in some way related. 2. Jones hypothesized that a great many other European and Asian languages probably had histories which could be traced back to the same original parent language. 3. Jones speculated that whatever that original source language might have been, it had been spoken so far back in history that it no longer existed.

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b. Franz Bopp In 1816, Franz Bopp is often called founder of historical and comparative linguistics, published Uber Das Conjugationssystem, in which he did two things. First, he ed the result of his own comparative studies of verb inflections in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and several of the European Teutonic (Germanic) languages. Second, he contended that his own results, along with those of other comparative inquiries, furnished convincing for the theory that not only had all these languages developed simultaneously, although independently, from a single parent language, but that it also was quite possible to recover enough empirical historical linguistic evidence to be able to reconstruct a fairly close approximation of that ancient Indo-European language which had been the source of them all. c. Charles Darwin In 1859, Darwin published his book The Descent of Man. In these volumes, Darwin argued that humans had evolved, very gradually and over an enormous period of historical time, from more primitive ancestors. In the years between the late 1810’s and the early 1870’s, great numbers of archeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists and philologists spent time in the field unearthing vast bodies of evidence which ultimately convinced most language scholars that many of the previously incomprehensible mysteries of language could be reasonably ed for. Among the conclusions on which comparative language scholars soon reached agreement were the following: 1. It seemed certain beyond reasonable doubt that humans had lived in civilized societies at least as early as six thousand years before the birth of Christ. 2. Enough evidence had been accumulated to convincingly the theory of related languages, or language “families”, English, most of the European language, and a number of Asiatic language were all now thought to have developed from a single parent language which linguistics called Indo-European. 3. The development of the existing “sister” languages had taken place independently but simultaneously. 4. This development had, furthermore, taken place over a very long period of time. 5. The original Indo-European language had finished long ago. 6. All existing vernacular languages where still changing and developing.

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7. Language change is a continuous, open-ended process that never stops so long as a language continuous to be viable spoken tongue. 2. American Structural Linguistics The discoveries of the European historical comparative linguists were influential both in shedding much light on the understanding of language development and in ridding language scholars of some of their earlier ideas about the nature of language. In addition, their newly developed empirical methods paved the way for new approaches to language study. Perhaps the most significant work which made use of these new field-study methods was that begun by a small group of American anthropologists around the turn of the century. For very different reasons, but driven by the same sense of urgency, another group also became involved in the formidable project of decoding Indian languages and inventing written forms for transcribing as many of them as possible. This second group was composed of missionaries who were bent on bringing Christianity to the heathen Indian tribes, and their work with Indian languages was directed toward translating the Bible into as many tribal languages as they could. For both of these groups, the Indian tongues soon proved to be so different from any of the languages to them that field workers found themselves utterly without guidelines. Assumptions about word and phrase structure seemed not to apply. B. Approach of Structural Grammar The structural grammar makes use the descriptive approach. The approach is priority on spoken language. The structuralists were determined to describe English objectively. They hoped to describe English as it is spoken, not as they thought it ought to be.  Franz Boas and Edward Sapir were the first to formally propose that structural analysis should be conducted on three successive levels, beginning with the sound level, proceeding next to word structure analysis, and only then to the analysis of syntax or sentence structure.  Leonard Bloomfield stressed particularly the importance of using empirical data only. Bloomfield’s is most important contribution as probably his method of “immediate constituent” analysis. He pointed out that English sentences are expanded, from simple to very complex word sequences, on a binary principle.

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 Charles Carpenter Fries important contributions were these: first, he divided a wordclassification system based solely on the forms or structure of isolated words. Second, he listed five grammatical devices which serve, in English, to signal grammatical clues. Third, he invented a system of grammatical analysis by means of “test frames”. The three levels of structural analysis had become the basic structural linguistic technique. C. Characteristic of Structural Grammar CHARACTERISTIC OF STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR

GRAMMAR SYSTEM

PHONOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY

SYNTAX

1. Principles of Structural Grammar Lyon (1968:38-52) says that structural grammar or modern linguistics is based upon the following principles: a. Priority of the spoken language The contemporary linguist maintains that the spoken language is primary and that writing is essentially a means of representing speech in another medium. The principle of the priority of the spoken language over the written implies, first of all, that speech is older and more widespread than writing. b. Linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive science The linguist’s first task is to describe the way people actually speak (and write) their language, not to prescribe how they ought to speak and write. In other words, linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive (or normative). c. The linguist is interested in all languages The linguist’s concern (in principle) with all languages derives from the proclaimed aims of his subject: the construction of a scientific theory of the structure of human language. All recorded and observable instances of language serve as data to be systematized and ‘explained’ by the general theory.

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d. Priority of synchronic description By the synchronic study of a language is meant the description of a particular ‘state’ of that language (at some ‘point’ in time). e. The structural approach This means that each language is regarded as a system of relations (more precisely, a set of interrelated system), the element of which sounds, words, etc. – have not validity independently of equivalence and contrast which hold between them. f.

‘langue’ and ‘parole’ The relationship between langue and parole is very complex and controversial. The utterances are instances of parole, which the linguist takes as evidence for the construction of the underlying common structure: the langue. It is therefore the langue, the language system, which the linguist describes.

2. The Grammar System a. Grammatically The structural description of English begins with an analysis of the sounds of the language in general, and then goes on to isolate mutually exclusive groups of sounds which have semantic significance, the phonemes. From there the grammar description proceeds to the next highest level, the word structure (morphology) of English, which involves the isolation of the smallest meaningbearing units, the morphemes, which make up the words of the language. Finally, structural grammar analyzes the phrase structure or syntax, of English. At this level, the grammarian looks for the various ways in which words can be combined to produce grammatical English sentences. b. The System of Language First of all, a language must be a system which is agreed upon by all of a particular speech community, since everyone has to use the same set of signals. Second, a language must contain grammar rules – devices for signaling meaning and meaningful relationships. 3. Phonology a. English Phonemes and Phonemic Analysis Structural linguistics is a language description method concerned with both expression and content. It attempts to explain content by discovering how a language’s expression system (it’s grammar rules) conveys meaning. The goal of a structural analysis is to isolated all of the structures which a language uses, from the smallest (sounds) to the largest (sentences), and to discover how

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these structures are organized into the various sentences or patterns which enable the language to convey information and ideas. Among linguists, there is general agreement that the English language contains about 45 phonemes, each consisting of one or more allophones. Generally speaking, English phonemes are of two kinds:  Segmental phonemes, which comprise the twenty-four consonants and nine vowels of the language;  The suprasegmental phonemes, which include twelve significant intonation sounds; four for pitch, four for stress and four for juncture. 4. Morphology a. English Morphemes and Morphemic Analysis Investigation at the morphological level is confined to word-structure, and while investigators may make use of the methodology and conclusions of the lower phonological level, they may not justify any of the morphological analysis by reference to the higher, syntactical level. A morpheme is such a unit and can be very generally defined as a minimally significant grammatical unit which contributes to the grammatical and semantic meaning of a word. Just as morphemes will be shown to be composed of a combination of phonemes, words will be shown to consist of combination of morphemes. The meaning of a word is dependent on the morphemes which make it up and the order in which they occur. 5. Syntax a. English Syntax and Syntactical Analysis One of the most basic methodological tools developed by the structuralists for analyzing the syntactic structural distribution of constructions is the test frame. Test frames are simply phrases or sentences with a blank space for the structure which is to be tested. They permit linguists to discover syntactic class hip. Another important methodological tool for syntactic analysis is a method called immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis), first developed by Leonard Bloomfield. According to the IC analysis, a sentence must be cut into its two and only two immediate constituents. If one or both of the immediate constituents are constructions, then they must be further analyzed into their immediate constituents, and so forth, until we arrive at the smallest units, namely, words.

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As IC analysis shows, English sentences are constructed in an organized, patterned way. The smallest unit is the word, and the largest unit is the sentence. Within these lower and upper limits, the sentence is the only unit that is not a constituent and the word is the only unit that is not a construction. All units in between are both constructions and constituents.