Шкала оценок по системе зачетных единиц

Кол-во кредитов	Оценка	Неудовлетвор.	Удовлетвор.	Хорошо	Отлично
Оценка ECTS	F(2)	FX(2+)	E(3)	D(3+)	C(4)	B(5)	A(5+)
Макс. сумма баллов
		Менее 25	25-36	37-42	43-48	49-60	61-66	67-72

Пояснение оценок:

AВыдающийся ответ

BОчень хороший ответ

CХороший ответ

DДостаточно удовлетворительный ответ

EОтвечает минимальным требованиям удовлетворительного ответа

FXОценка 2+ (FX) означает, что студент может добрать баллы только до минимального удов-

летворительного ответа

FНеудовлетворительный ответ (либо повтор курса в установленном порядке, либо основание

для отчисления)

 

· Темы лекций

I неделя (1 лекция): История развития английской грамматики. 2 периода развития английской грамматики. 1 период – до 1900г.; 2 период – с 1900г. Типологизация английской грамматики до 1900г.: 1) дескриптивная грамматика; 2) предписательная (прескриптивная) грамматика; 3) классическая научная; 4) структурная грамматика.

II неделя (2 лекция): История развития английской грамматики. Типологизация английской грамматики после 1900г.: 1) до 1940 – прескриптивная грамматика и классическая научная грамматика. 2) после 1940г. – структурная и трансформационная грамматики.

III неделя (3 лекция):Цели, задачи, предмет теоретической грамматики.

IV неделя (4 лекция): Лексическое и грамматическое значения слов. Грамматическое значение, грамматическая форма, грамматическая категория.

V неделя (5 лекция): Черты английского языка как аналитического. Черты английских суффиксов.

VI неделя (6 лекция): Морфология. Имя существительное. Классификация существительных (семантическая, морфологическая и синтаксическая).

VII неделя (7 лекция): Категории существительных (род, число, падеж). Категория числа: образование множественного числа существительных. Pluralia Tantum. Singularia Tantum. Существительные с одинаковой формой в единственном и множественном числе. Существительные множества и собирательные существительные.

VIII неделя (8 лекция): Категория падежа. Общий падеж, функции существительного в общем падеже. Притяжательный падеж: его образование и употребление

IX неделя (9 лекция): Глагол. Лексико-грамматические черты. Классификация глаголов (по значению, форме и функции в предложении). Категории глагола.

X неделя (10лекция): Категория глагола

XI неделя (11 лекция): Глагол. Личные и неличные формы глагола: инфинитив, причастие, герундий. Инфинитив, его формы, функции в предложении; конструкции: сложное подлежащее, сложное дополнение.

XII неделя (12 лекция): Неличные формы глаголов. Причастие и герундий, их свойства и отличия, формы и роль в предложении. Независимый причастный оборот и способы его перевода.

XIII неделя (13 лекция): Согласование подлежащего (выраженного существительным) со сказуемым (выраженным формой глагола).

XIV неделя (14 лекция): Артикль. Грамматическая функция артикля в современном английском языке. Определенный и неопределенный артикли. Место артикля в предложении. Отсутствие артикля в современном английском языке и его функциональная и семантическая значимость. Употребление артикля с различными классами существительных.

XV неделя (15 лекция): Имя прилагательное. Синтаксические функции прилагательного. Морфологическая характеристика прилагательного: отсутствие форм рода, числа и падежа. Суффиксы прилагательного. Виды прилагательного.

XVI неделя (16 лекция): Имя прилагательное. Грамматическая характеристика прилагательных. Степени сравнения прилагательных. Синтаксический и аналитический способы образования степеней сравнения. Супплетивные формы степени сравнения. Субстантивация прилагательных.

XVII неделя (17 лекция): Наречие. Общая характеристика. Синтаксическая характеристика наречий. Семантическая характеристика наречий. Наречия обстоятельственные. Категории наречий.

XVIII неделя (18 лекция): Синтаксис. Предложение. Функция предложения как единицы коммуникации. Грамматическая структура предложения. Главные и второстепенные члены предложения. Синтаксис словосочетания. Синтагматические объединения слов.

XIX неделя (19 лекция): Синтаксис. Предложение. Порядок слов и служебные слова как основные способы выражения синтаксической связи в предложении. Порядок слов в современном английском языке. Прямой и обратный порядок слов. Инверсия.

XX неделя (20 лекция): Синтаксис. Предложение. Предложения простые и сложные. Классификация предложения. Классификация предложений – по цели высказывания: повествовательные, вопросительные и побудительные предложения; по их структуре: двусоставные и односоставные предложения. Понятие эллиптического предложения. Правила пунктуации в английском языке.

XXI неделя (21 лекция): Подведение итогов. Индивидуальные сообщения по пройденным материалам на базе индивидуальных творческих работ.

 

4. Учебно-методические материалы, используемые для реализации курса на обеспечивающей кафедре: учебники, учебные пособия, конспекты лекций, методические указания (в т.ч. в электронном виде: http://web-local.rudn.ru/web-local/prep/prep_2118/ ; http://www.classes.ru/grammar/42.Teoreticheskaya_grammatika_sovremennogo_angliyskogo_yazyka/);

Конспекты лекций:

 

Лекция 1

There does not appear to exist a generally accepted periodization of the history of English grammars, so we shall roughly divide it into two periods of unequal length, according to the general aims or objectives of the grammars appearing within this periods. The first is the age of prescientific grammar beginning with the end of the 16^th century and lasting till about 1900. It includes two types of grammars which succeeded each other.

The first types of grammars in the history of English grammars are the early prenormative grammars of English, beginning with William Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English (1585).

By the middle of the 18^th century, when many of the grammatical phenomena of English had been described, the early English grammars gave way to a new kind of grammar, a prescriptive (normative) grammar, which stated strict rules of grammatical usage, condemning those constructions and forms which if considered to be wrong or “improper”, and setting up a certain standard of correctness to be implicitly followed by learners of English. The grammars of the second type still constitute the only kind of grammar in use in the practical teaching of English.

By the end of 19^th century, when the prescriptive grammar had reached its highest level of development, when the system of grammar known in modern linguistics as traditional had been established, the appearance of new grammar, the scientific grammar, became possible.

In contrast with prescriptive grammars, classical scientific grammar (the third type of grammar), according to the explicitly stated views of its founders, was both descriptive and explanatory. As Sweet's grammar appeared in the last decade of the 19th century, we may take 1900 as the dividing line between the two periods and the beginning of the second period, the age of the scientific grammars of English (including three new types of grammars). During the first half of the present century an intensive development of this grammar has taken place. Classical scientific grammar has accepted the traditional grammatical system of prescriptive grammar, but, as has been mentioned, now we witness the final stage of its existence, for since the 1950's no new grammars of the scholarly traditional type seem to have appeared. The new types of English grammars, which appeared since the fifties are the fourth type of grammar — structural or descriptive, which, in its turn, is becoming obsolete and is being supplanted by the fifth type of grammar —the transformational gener­ative grammar. The linguistic theory represented by the last mentioned type of grammar is considered by many modern linguists to be the most fruitful approach to the description and explanation of the grammatical system of English, especially in the field of syntax.

Thus we see that during the first period there was only one kind of grammar in use at a time, whereas in the present century there were at first two types of grammars current (the second and the third) and at present there exist at least four types of grammatical^[1] description, which must be taken into consideration by a student of English grammatical theory.

Thus the coexistence and a certain interaction of four types of grammar is a typical feature of the last two decades of the present century.

In the following survey we shall briefly dwell on the process of development and the main results of the efforts of the grammarians of the earlier periods in creating the so-called traditional system of grammar. The theoretical basis of the traditional grammar is well worth considering so that the student may with a certain objectivity evaluate the work of the authors; of classical scientific grammars and compare it with the procedures and results of the investigations of strucI tural and transformational linguistics.

 

I. ENGLISH GRAMMARS BEFORE 1900

(THE FIRST PERIOD)

1. Early (Prenormative) Grammars

Until the 17th century the term "grammar" in Eng­lish was applied only to the study of Latin. This usage was a result of the fact that Latin grammar was the only grammar learned in schools ("grammar" schools) and that until the end of the 16th century there were no grammars of English. One of the earliest and most popular Latin grammars written in English, by Wil­liam Lily, was published in the first half of the 16th century and went through many editions. This work was very important for English grammar as it set a standard for the arrangement of material and thus Latin paradigms with their English equivalents easily suggested the possibility of presenting English forms in a similar way, using the same terminology as in Latin grammar.^[2] Lily's Latin grammar may be consid­ered the precursor of the earliest English grammars; in most grammars the arrangements of the material was similar to that of Lily's Latin grammar, though at no period was there a literal imitation of Latin gram­mar. Thus, in Bullokar's grammar there were 5 cases of nouns (cf. 6 cases in Latin) and 6 genders (this was the number of genders attributed to the Latin language in medieval grammars). But in spite of this adherence to the structure of Latin grammar, even early gramma­rians could not help noticing some typical features which made the structure of English different from that of such a highly inflectional language as Latin. Even Lily, translating the Latin inflectional forms, noticed the fact that some of their English equivalents were analytical forms, which included auxiliary' words, and spoke of them as "signs". W. Bullokar made free use of the theory of "signs", which he had found in Lily's grammar.¹ A striking example of the two approaches to the description of English is the divergence of views on the problem of English case system. Though Bullokar mentioned 5 cases and in a grammar published in 1749 and reprinted as late as 1819 (Th. Dilworth, A New Guide to the English Tongue) the number of cases both of nouns and adjectives is said to be 6 (as it is in Lily's grammar), in two grammars which appeared during the first half of the 17th century, Ben Jonson's and Ch. Butler's English grammars, the num­ber of cases is two, while in J. Wallis's Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653), which was written in Lat­in, in spite of the author's intention to break entirely with Latin tradition, the category of case is said to be non-existent and the s[3] form is defined as a possessive adjective. This view was supported by an early 18th century grammar, attributed to John Brightland. The authors of the second half of the 18th century seemed to prefer the two-case system, which was revived at the end of the 19th century in scientific grammar. In 19th century school grammars a three-case system prevailed (see p. 16).

The treatment of the problem of case shows that even in the early period of the development of English grammars the views of grammarians were widely di­vergent, a fact which may be explained by two differ­ent approaches toward the description of English gram­matical structure. The grammarians who desired to break with Latin grammatical tradition were not al­ways consistent and still followed the Latin pattern in some of the chapters of their grammars.

By the middle of the 18th century the main results of the description of the English grammatical system, as it was presented in the prenormative grammars,^[4] were as follows:

Morphology. The Latin classification of the parts of speech, which included eight word-classes, differed from the system adopted by modern grammars in that the substantives and adjectives were grouped together as two kinds of nouns, while the participle was pre­sented as a separate part of speech. In the earliest Eng­lish grammars, where this system was reproduced, the parts of speech were also divided dichotomically into declinable and indeclinable parts of speech, just as in Lily's grammar (W. Bullokar), or words with number and words without number (Ben Jonson), or words with number and case and words without number and case (Ch. Butler). The first of these groups, declinable words, with number and case, included nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles, the second — indeclinables — adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and in­terjections. Ben Jonson increased the number of parts of speech in his classification, introducing the article as the ninth part of speech.

Later, at the beginning of the 18th century, another scheme of classification appeared in J. Brightland's grammar. This author reduced the number of parts of speech to four, rejecting the traditional terminology as well. The four parts of speech were: names (i. e. nouns), qualities (i. e. adjectives), affirmations (i. e. verbs) and particles, which included the four so-called indeclinable parts of speech. In this scheme the adjective was classed as a separate part of speech, owing to the influence of the philosophical or universal (logical) grammars of the age, which in their attempts to discover the universal jaws of the structure of languages pointed out the differ­ence between the syntactic functions of the two varie­ties of "nouns".

Brightland's system does not appear to have been very extensively adopted, though it was accepted by a few grammarians of the period, e. g. by Farro in his grammar. But since that time the adjective came to be viewed as a distinct part of speech in English.

Syntax. In Brightland's grammar we likewise find an important innovation in the study of English syntax — the introduction of the notion "sentence" into syntax. Latin grammar was not concerned with the structure of the sentence, the principal object of the syntax of modern grammar. Though definitions of the sentence, mostly logical (pointing to its function as an expression of a complete thought, a judgment or proposition), already existed in the ancient period, grammarians understood syntax etymologically as a study of the arrangement, i. e. the connection of words. Thus, Lily briefly stated the three concords of Latin: of the nominative and the verb, of the substantive and the adjective and of the relative pronoun and its an­tecedent.

Ben Jonson applied this analysis to English syntax and devoted a large part of his grammar to the de­scription of the "syntax" of a noun with a noun, of a noun with an adjective, with an article, with a verb, etc. As the rules of concord and government were few in English, the author paid much attention to a specif­ically English means of connection of words — word-order. The sentence was mentioned only in the chapter on punctuation, which was based on the theory of rhet­oric (i. e. stylistics) created by ancient authors. The principal unit of rhetoric was the period, which, like the sentence, was defined as an expression of a com­plete thought. The expression of a complete thought in rhetoric was not confined to the bounds of a single sen­tence. It could be expressed by a group of closely con­nected sentences, but early English grammarians iden­tified the period with the sentence, so that the marks of punctuation (named after the parts of the period, which they divided, such as the comma, the least part of the period, the colon, a member of the period, and the period itself, which denoted the mark of punctuation pointing to its completion) were at the same time in­tended to divide sentences and their parts, which as yet had no special names. As some colons were rather long, another mark of punctuation was added, the semi­colon (a half-member), which was so named by analogy with the already existing terms.

It was only in Brightland's grammar that the con­cept of the sentence was included in syntax proper. In Brightland's grammar sentences are divided dichotom­ically into simple and compound. The simple sentence is defined as containing one affirmation (verb) and one name, signifying the subject of the affirmation expressed or understood. The compound sentence consists of two or more simple sentences.

Brightland's precursors were two grammarians, whose works appeared during the second half of the 17th century: J. Wilkins and Ch. Cooper. J. Wilkins was the author of one of the earliest philosophical grammars in England. ^[5]

Wilkins identified the grammatical notions of the "nominative case" and the verb with the logical subject and predicate. Thus the theory of the parts of the sen­tence began to develop under the influence of logic in the second half of the 17th century. Ch. Cooper in his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685) reproduced the ideas of Wilkins, though in his syntax he still followed the old pattern, describing the rules underlying the combinations of words. Cooper mentions three princi­pal parts of the sentence: the nominative case of the grammarians, as identical with the subject of the logi­cians; the predicate which affirms or denies something concerning the subject is the same as a verb (or a copula with an adjective or a nominative case) in grammar. The third principal part of the sentence is the "accu­sative", i. e. the noun affected by the action of the transitive verb. To these three parts of the sentence are added various dependent parts (which were not further differentiated syntactically).

Brightland's very short chapter on the sentence is based upon Cooper's rules (though the opposition of principal and dependent parts is not mentioned). In addition Brightland defines the sentence as an expres­sion of a sentiment or a thought.

Alongside the logical terms introduced into syntax, the term "object" (deriving from medieval scholastic phi­losophy) was added to denote the third "principal" part of the sentence. But morphological terms (such as the nominative case or word, the noun, etc.) continued to be used in the description of the parts of the sentence.

The concept of the compound sentence, which, judg­ing by Brightland's examples, denoted both complex and compound sentences, according to a classification introduced much later, was also due to logic, where propositions or judgments were divided into simple and compound. The second part of his syntax deals with the "construction of words" (as it does in older gram­mars). ^[6]

 

Prescriptive Grammars

The age of prescriptive grammar begins in the sec­ond half of the 18th century. The most influential grammar of the period was R. Lowth's Short Intro­duction to English Grammar, first published in 1762. The aim of prescriptive grammars was to reduce the English language to rules and to set up a standard of correct usage. As Lowth put it, "The Principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety... and to enable us to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not. The plain way of doing this is, to lay down rules and to illustrate them by examples. But beside shewing what is right, the matter may be further explained by pointing out what is wrong."^[7] This state­ment is characteristic of the new methods of approach. The authors of prescriptive grammars believed, that their task, was not only to prescribe, to provide' rules for distinguishing what is right from what is wrong, but also to prescribe expressions which they considered to be wrong. The rise of prescriptive grammar met the demand for settling usage and for codifying and -systematizing grammar,^[8] a demand which earlier, at the beginning of the 18th century, had found expres­sion in the movement for establishing an English Acad­emy, similar to the French Academy, which would decide what words and constructions should be regarded as correct. It was discovered that English grammar was largely uncodified and unsystematized. The ancient languages had been reduced to rule; one knew what was right and what was wrong. But in English everything was uncertain. Although the numerous proposals for the establishment of an Academy were never acted on, in the second half of the 18th century it was the grammarians who took upon themselves the respon­sibility of dictating the laws of grammar and usage. These grammarians settled most disputed points of usage by appealing to reason, to the laws of thought or logic, which were considered to be universal and to be reflected in the Universal, that is, Logical or Philo­sophical Grammar. Thus Lowth wrote in the Preface quoted above: "Grammar in general, or Universal Grammar explains the principles which are common to all languages. The Grammar of any particular lan­guage, as the English Grammar, applies those common principles to that particular language...."^[9] But as O. Jespersen correctly observes, "In many cases what gives itself out as logic, is not logic at all, but Latin grammar disguised."[10] There is then nothing whatever in logic which obliges the predicative to stand in the same case as the subject, that is, in the nominative. But the construction is me was one of those which were condemned by the authors of prescriptive gram­mars. No 19th century or early 20th century writer would venture to let his characters use the objective case of a pronoun as a predicative without mentioning that it was ungrammatical or that his characters spoke without regard to grammar. _: „

Another example of the confusion of logic and Latin grammar mentioned by Jespersen is the condemnation passed by grammarians on passive constructions of the type He was allowed a sum of money, in which what is in the active an indirect object is turned into a sub­ject in the passive. Here again what is forbidden in Latin grammar, is considered as absolutely at variance with the laws of reason.

Applying the principles of Universal Grammar, es­pecially those formulated in Harris's Hermes, ¹ to which he often appealed, Lowth subjected to criticism many expressions long current in English use, such as had rather, had better. He condemned double negatives, double comparatives (such as lesser and worser), be­gun for began, the possessive case of a noun or pos­sessive pronoun before the gerund, the confusion of who and whom, whose as a possessive of which, the use of the so-called "flat" adverbs without the suffix -ly, the expressions it is me, these kind of and many others. The expressions had rather, had better were condemned on the ground that had, being a past tense form, could not in this case be "properly expressive of the time present".

In their appeal to authority Lowth and others com­pletely disregarded English usage including that of the best authors. They condemned as wrong or barbarous many constructions and forms which occurred in the works of those authors. They used passages from the works of classical writers as exercises for pupils to correct bad English or "false" syntax. ,,

19th-century grammarians pursuing the same course in teaching the doctrine of correctness asked their pupils to point out errors and nonsense in the King's speeches (Cobbet's grammar), or used the works of other, grammarians, their predecessors or contempora­ries for the same purpose (Goold Brown's grammar).

Lowth's method of approach and the rules which he had formulated, were perpetuated in the 19th-century prescriptive grammar through such channels as the works of his imitators; one of them, Lindley Murray, an American, wrote a most popular and successful work, English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, which was first published in 1795.

This grammar introduced some changes, which in a few cases, as we shall see later, were rather unfor­tunate (when compared with the grammatical system in Lowth's grammar). As a result of his compilation, Murray arrived at a system which provided the pattern for practically all grammars of the first half of the 19th century. For many years his was the most widely used grammar text-book. In its original form it under­went 50 editions, and in an abridged version more than 120. It was probably due to the influence of this book that English grammars changed very little between 1795 and the middle of the 19th century. One of the grammarians of this period wrote in the preface to his book that Murray's grammar was so superior to any then in use, that immediately on its appearance it be­came the text-book in almost every school, and the continuance of his popularity has led, many to believe that no farther improvement could be made.

Lindley Murray's prescriptions were memorized by thousands of persons. The following passage from Dickens testifies to Murray's popularity: "Mrs Tibbs inquired after Mrs Bloss' health in a low tone. Mrs. Bloss, with a supreme contempt for the memory of Lindley Murray, answered various questions in a most satisfactory manner."^[11] This means that Mrs. Bloss used in her answers forms and constructions con­demned as ungrammatically Lindley Murray.

In order to evaluate more properly the achieve­ments of the prescriptive grammarians towards the end of the 19th century, let us first turn to the analysis of the grammatical system as it was presented in the grammars published before the middle of the 19th cen­tury and then compare this system with that established by the grammarians of the latter part of the century.

From the point of view of modern grammatical theory some changes which had taken place in the de­scription of the morphological system did not contrib­ute to its improvement. In spite of the authority of Lowth and Murray, who had retained the scheme of nine parts of speech, the succeeding grammarians reverted to the system of eight parts of speech. They chose" to class the article with the adjective, as it had been done in earlier grammars (e. g. in Wallis's grammar), rather than increase the number of the parts of speech beyond eight. In this case it was the older tradition which prevailed. This classification remains the most popular one in prescriptive and classical scientific grammars of the modern period. Another morphologic­al problem which in the earliest grammars had caused considerable disagreement among grammarians and admitted of various solutions came to be settled to the satisfaction of the authors of prescriptive grammars. This was a problem which continues to be subject of dispute to this day — the number of cases in English. Lowth adopted a two-case system for nouns and a two-case system for nouns, and the term "pos­sessive case", which is, extremely popular now. The paradigm of the declension of personal pronouns in­cluded the nominative case, the possessive pronoun as a form of the possessive case and the objective case, the latter term also having been most likely introduced by Lowth.^[12] After a great deal of vacillation, Murray, in the later editions of his grammar, decided to adopt the, three-case system for nouns. As he wrote in the preface to one of the later editions, "... the nouns of our language are entitled to this comprehensive objective case."[13] This quotation shows the arbitrariness in settl­ing vexed questions of grammar. The three-case system was adopted almost unanimously by all prescriptive grammars of the 19th century and later, until in the 1920's Nesfield substituted for it a five-case system (seep. 28).

The syntactic study of the simple sentence did not advance greatly till the middle of the century. By the time Lowth's grammar appeared the concept of the principal parts of the sentence had been already elabo­rated to the number of three. The terminology was rath­er unsettled. Lowth distinguished an agent, an attri­bute (i. e. the predicate) and an object. The definitions of the first and second parts of the sentence corre­sponded to the definitions of the logical subject and predicate. The object was defined as the thing affected by the action of the verb. There was no advance in the conception of the secondary parts of the sentence. Be­sides the principal parts, Lowth mentioned adjuncts ^[14] without further differentiation on the syntactic level.

The theory of the compound sentence, dating from the beginning of the 18th century (see above, p.10—12), was during this period at an absolute standstill. The definitions in the grammars of the first half of the cen­tury were practically the same as in J. Brightland's grammar, where they first occurred.

The principal feature of a compound sentence, as it was understood at that time, is that it comprises more than one subject or nominative word and verb, expressed or understood. Sentences were therefore classed as compound, when a punctuation unit contained two or more subject-predicate groups, connected by subordinat­ing or coordinating conjunctions, or when there was a single subject-predicate group with coordinate members.

The classification of conjunctions corresponded to the classification of compound propositions or judg­ments in logic. All conjunctions were divided according to their meaning, but without regard to their syntactic nature, into copulatives and disjunctives. The notions of subordination and coordination were still unknown.

The second part of syntax, which treated the "con­struction of words", was more developed. In Lowth's grammar the word "phrase" came to be used as a grammatical term, defined as follows: "A Phrase is two or more words rightly put together to make, a part of a Sentence and sometimes making a whole Sen­tence." The concept of the phrase occupies an impor­tant place in Murray's grammar and the grammars of his successors, who described the kinds of phrases and the relations between the words making up a phrase.

Though the grammatical system created by the grammarians by the middle of the 19th century (es­pecially in syntax) still differed from that known in traditional grammar of the present period, a great number of prescriptions and rules formulated and fixed by the authority of the grammarians remain in gram­mars of the modern period. One important series of prescriptions that now forms part of all grammars had its origin in this period, namely the rules for the for­mation of the Future Tense. The rule was first stated by J. Wallis, and since that time it has been repeated by all grammarians, at first in its archaic form, as for­mulated by Wallis. Brightland, who wrote most of his rules in verse, translated, it as follows: "In the first person simply shall foretells; '/In will a Threat or else a Promise dwells. /Shall in the second and the third does threat; /Will simply then foretells the future Feat." This means that in declarative sentences simple futurity should be expressed by shall in the first person, by will in the second and third. In the second half of the 18th century these rules were supplemented by the rules for questions and subordinate clauses. The full set of prescriptions drawn up by Lowth and his contempora­ries at that time underlies the rules found in modern books. However, as Ch. C. Fries has shown in his in­vestigation, at no time do they seem to have represent­ed actual usage.^[15]

Though the rule that two negatives destroy one an­other or are equivalent to an affirmative, was first stated in J. Greenwood's Royal English Grammar in the first half of the 18th century, the influence of Lowth's gram­mar helped to fix it.

The early prescriptive grammars were destined, as P. Roberts puts it, to have an enormous influence and to mould the attitudes of many generations to English grammar: "Generations of boys and girls were informed, as part of their preparation for life, that there were eight ... parts of speech, that a noun was the name of a person, place or thing: ,.. that the subject of an in­finitive is in the accusative case, that the subject of imperative sentences is you understood." ^[16]

It was in the second half of the 19th century that the development of the grammatical scheme of the pre­scriptive grammar was completed. The grammarians arrived 'at a system now familiar, because it has since been adopted by a long succession of grammarians of the 19th and 20th centuries. The best prescriptive grammars of the period, like C. P. Mason's English Grammar {London, 1858) and A. Bain's Higher Eng­lish Grammar (London, 1863), paved the way for the first scientific grammar of English.

The description of the morphological system in grammars of the second half of the 19th century changed very little as compared with that of grammars of the first half of the century, but the explanation of grammatical forms became more detailed, expressive of a deeper understanding of the nature of the phenom­ena discussed. Some important changes, however, took place in the description of the syntactic system, though the definition of the sentence remained logical, as a combination of words expressing a complete thought. But the concept of the parts of the sentence differs greatly from that of the grammars of the first half of the 19th century. The changes and innovations concerned both the principal and the secondary parts of the sentence. The number of the principal parts of the sentence was reduced to two — the subject and the predicate, which retained their logical definitions. In this period the grammarians make an attempts to differentiate logical and grammatical subjects and predicates. The former are represented by single words, the latter include word groups with subjects and predicates as head words. A little later subjects and predicates expressed by one word came to be distinguished as simple or essential subjects and predicates, and those expressed by a word group as complete subjects and predicates.

The objects came to be viewed as a secondary or dependent (subordinate) part of the sentence in the light of the newly developed theory of subordination and coordination of sentence elements and the intro­duction info grammar of the content aspect of syntactic relations, such as predicative, attributive, objective and or adverbial relations.

Thus the notion of the attribute came to be applied instead of the predicate to a relation expressed by a secondary part of the sentence and adjuncts were sub­divided into attributive (also attributive or adnominal), and adverbial adjuncts, which was the first differentiation of the secondary parts of the sentence on a syn­tactic level.

The objects were classified according to their mean­ing and form as direct, indirect and prepositional. This classification, though inconsistent logically, is accepted by many grammarians of the modern period. Objects and subjects as well were further classified as com­pound (i. e. coordinate), complex (expressed by infini­tive groups or subordinate clauses), etc.

Besides the object and two kinds of adjuncts, some new notions and terms developed, either as synonyms for the already defined syntactic units or used in a "slightly different meaning to describe some new syn­tactic units, which contributed to a more detailed sen­tence analysis.

As the grammars discussed, were practical gram­mars without an explicit' theoretical analysis, we pay special attention to terminology (and also to defini­tions), because it is the only way to assess the results of the creative work of prescriptive grammarians in constructing a workable syntactic system. Such new concepts as completion, expansion, enlargement, exten­sion and modification reflect a perhaps intuitive per­ception on the part of the grammarians of the syntac­tic processes underlying the introduction of various dependent elements into the subject-predicate skeleton of sentence. ¹

Syntactic processes operate to derive a more com­plicated structure from a simpler one. An anticipation of modern theory may be found in A. Bain's grammar: "From a naked or skeleton sentence we may consider all other sentences to be derived ... or expanded by additions..." and: "The most elementary form is seen in such examples as "the sun warms", "water drowns". The more extended forms may be considered as grow­ing out of this ... Both the primary and the secondary elements may undergo transformations and expan­sions." ¹

The notion of completion of the meaning of a transitive or copulative verbs, defined as verbs of incomplete predication, may be understood as a designation of a syntactic process. The unit which completes the mean­ing of, such verbs was called completion, completer or complement and "was used as a synonym for object and for predicate nouns or adjectives (also new syntactic notions in this period), subdivided into subjective and objective complements (as in "he is a pupil", "he is clever" — "consider him clever", "called him a liar"). A certain differentiation took place between the notions, of .enlargement and extension, based on the combinability of the units denoted by these terms. The first came to be used as a synonym for the attribute of the subject or object, the second as a synonym for adverbi­al modifier. "Expansion" was retained as a more gen­eral term to denote the amplification of sentence ele­ments. Great importance in the description of syntactic relations was attached to the notions of "modification" and "modifiers" as well as to the verb "to modify". Previously these terms were used occasionally in the definitions of the functions of adjectives and adverbs. But now they came to express the general process of defining, qualifying or limiting the meaning of the basic parts of the sentence. On the analogy with the corresponding adjuncts, grammarians distinguished attributive and adverbial modifiers.

In this way, with the appearance of the notions of syntactic processes and syntactic units, which were often denoted by the same terms, the secondary (or subordinate) parts of the sentence became differentiated on the syntactic level, though the multiplicity approaches resulted in a variety and synonymity of terms. The new syntactic system of sentence analysis[17] replaced an older method of "parsing", i. e. of describ­ing or Labelling the sentence elements morphologically.

Considering that this syntactic system, though not without its drawbacks, furnished a workable scheme of sentence analysis, non-existent before the mid-nine­teenth century, that it was evolved through the efforts of the prescriptive, grammarfans of that period and that it greatly influenced the development of modern syn­tactic theory,^[18] we cannot agree with those linguists, who maintain that these grammars, as well as 20th-cen­tury prescriptive and even scholarly grammars, carried on the Greco-Roman and eighteenth century tradition.^[19] Such analysis was unknown either in ancient and me­dieval or in 18th-century prescriptive grammars.

A very important innovation in the concept of the compound sentence was its subdivision into the com­pound sentence proper, with coordinated component parts, and the complex sentence, characterized by sub­ordination of clauses. In this way the dichotomy clas­sification of sentences into simple and compound was changed into a tracheotomy division, according to which sentences are divided into simple, compound and complex. This theory has since been accepted with very few exceptions by prescriptive, classical scientific and some structural as well as transformational grammars (see p. 192 on the composite sentence). The recognition and differentiation of the two principal syntactic modes of joining subject-predicate units, subordination and coor­dination (the former expressing syntactic dependence and the latter — equality of syntactic rank), was a great advance in the development of grammatical theory. Of great interest also is the elaboration of the concept of a clause as a syntactic unit containing a noun and a finite verb and forming part of a complex or compound sentence. Clauses are classified as inde­pendent and dependent or coordinate and subordinate. The latter were also classified morphologically as noun, adjective and adverb clauses, because grammarians considered clauses to be of the nature of a word, and not of a part of the sentence. These three kinds of clauses were further subdivided according to their syntactic functions in the sentence.

The concept of the compound sentence in the new sense, as containing independent clauses or sentences, did not, it seems, satisfy those grammarians who had gained a deeper insight into the nature of the grammat­ical phenomena described in their grammars. They give examples illustrating the possibility of isolating the parts of the compound sentences, of pronouncing each part of such a sentence by itself, without any change of meaning or intonation and they stress the com­plete independence of each part (see Bain and Mason).

The concept of the phrase has been retained in the grammars of the second half of the 19th century, though not all grammarians use this term, describing the syn­tax of the parts of speech instead. The phrase is differ­entiated from the clause, as containing no finite verb.

 

3. The Rise of Classical Scientific Grammar

By the end of the 19th century, after tire description of the grammatical system, especially that of syntax had been completed, prescriptive grammar had reached the peak of its development. A need was felt, therefore, for a grammar of a higher type, which could give a scientific explanation of the grammatical phenomena. The appearance of H. Sweet's New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (1891) met this demand. As Sweet wrote in his Preface: "This work is intended to supply the want of a scientific English grammar." ^[20] The difference in purpose between scientific and prescriptive grammar is stated in the following terms: "As my ex­position claims to be scientific, I confine myself to the statement and explanation of facts, without attempting to settle the relative correctness of divergent usages. If an 'ungrammatical' expression such as it is me is in general use among educated people, I accept it as such, simply adding that it is avoided in the literary language." ¹ This was a new approach, in keeping with the Doctrine of General Usage which had been first formulated by an 18th-century grammarian, a contem­porary of Lowth's, J. Priestley, in his Rudiments of English Grammar. But Priestley's views had been re­jected, as we have seen, in favour of the Doctrine of Rules or Correctness. Sweet clearly states the new viewpoint: "...whatever is in general use in language is for that reason grammatically correct."^[21] Scientific grammar was understood by its authors to be a com­bination of both descriptive and explanatory grammar.^[22] The same views on the purpose and methods of scien­tific grammar were held by 20th-century linguists.^[23]

English scientific grammar inherited the grammati­cal system evolved by the prescriptive grammarians. Sweet acknowledged his obligations to a number of prescriptive grammarians, among whom Bain and Ma­son are mentioned. Sweet states that his grammar confines itself as much as possible to the main grammat­ical phenomena., In addition, the author has taken the trouble to define .some general grammatical concepts, the grammatical categories, inflections, form words, logical and grammatical relations between words, all of which have been, as Sweet puts it, neglected or ig­nored by other grammarians.

Sweet describes the three main features characteriz­ing the parts of speech, namely meaning, form and function, which have also been considered important in Soviet linguistics. The results of his classification, however (see p. 47), reveal a considerable divergence between theory and practice.

But in the light of the modern development of struc­tural theory some of the ideas of Sweet, especially those expounded in his article Words, Logic and Mean­ing seem to indicate an anticipation of views character­istic of modern linguistics. Thus the purely synchronic approach towards the description of the phenomena of modern languages, initiated by F. de Saussure is ex­pressed by Sweet as follows: "...before history must come a knowledge of what now exists. We must learn to observe things as they are without regard to ­ their origin, just as a zoologist must learn to describe accu­rately a horse...." ¹

The priority of oral speech over written proclaimed by the structuralists has also been stated by Sweet, who was, as is well known, an eminent phonetician: "The first requisite is a knowledge of phonetics or the form of language. We must learn to regard language solely as consisting of groups of sounds, independently of the written symbols..." ^[24]

Лекция 2

ENGLISH GRAMMARS IN THE 20th CENTURY (THE SECOND PERIOD)

The modern period may be divided into two chronol­ogically unequal parts, the first from the beginning of the 20th century till the 1940's, when there were only two types of grammars in use — the prescriptive and the classical scientific, the second from the 1940's_; dur­ing which time structural grammar, and then transfor­mational have been added. As has been pointed out, Structural grammar tended to supplant the older scien­tific grammar, which we call classical in order to dis­tinguish it from the new theoretical grammars of Eng­lish. Coexistence of several types of grammars can naturally lead to influence of one type of grammar by another. Curiously enough, prescriptive grammar was not greatly influenced by the rapidly developing clas­sical scientific grammar; on the contrary, it was pre­scriptive grammar which influenced scientific grammar, not only in the beginning, when it furnished the gram­matical basis of classical scientific grammar, but even later (see for instance the problem of double and mul­tiple sentences, p. 28, 199). Moreover, there is an extremely complicated interaction between prescriptive and structural grammars. The authors of prescriptive grammars published since the 1950's tended to assimi­late structural terminology or some specific notions of structural grammar, though on the whole their grammat­ical system remained unchanged. New influences may be traced, for example, in the definitions of the sentence, but for practical purposes the authors think the traditional definitions more to the point. ¹

On the other hand, some authors of structural grammars, as has been mentioned, have tried to blend the principles of structural analysis with some notions and concepts of traditional grammar, in order to intro­duce new ideas into the practical teaching of English grammar. Such are, for example, H. M. Whitehall's Essentials of English Grammar (New York, 1951), P. Roberts' Understanding English (New York, 1958), J. Sledd's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1959).

Besides this kind of interaction there is a borrowing of some of the concepts of prescriptive and classical scientific grammars by the authors of both structural and transformational grammars, especially in the field of syntax, which proves that structural grammar has not quite succeeded in breaking with traditional grammar to the degree that is proclaimed by the authors of these grammars (see below, p. 34), while transformational grammar, as professed by its ex­ponents, is closer to traditional grammar, than descriptivism.

We shall now briefly dwell on some specific features of each of the types of grammars current in the modern period.

 

1. Prescriptive Grammars in the Modern Period

In spite of great advances in linguistic theory (espe­cially in the field of general linguistics) the force of tradition has been strong, causing rule after rule to be copied from book to book. Some 19th-century grammars continued to be reprinted, with hardly any changes, e. g. Lennie's Principles of English Grammar, ¹ which reflected the spirit of the first half of the 19th century, Mason's grammars were reprinted by A. J. Ashton in 1907—1909 and later as Junior, Intermediate, and Se­nior English Grammars.

Not only did the text of the grammars remain prac­tically unchanged, but the attitude of the grammarians of the prescriptive school towards the English language and their duties as guardians of correct usage changed very little. This attitude has been summarized by R. C. Pooley as follows: "English, as it is currently used, is full of errors. The grammarians know these errors and are determined to correct them. The purpose of the teaching of grammar is to eliminate error." ^[25]

Among the 20th-century prescriptive grammars which are of some interest, J. C. Nesfield's grammar should be mentioned. Although published at the end of the 19th century (1898), it exerted a certain influence on prescriptive and even scientific grammars of the 20th century, comparable to the influence of Murray's grammar upon 19th-century grammars.^[26] It underwent a number of editions in different variants (English Grammar Past and Present, Aids to the Study and Composition of English, etc.) and was published even as late as 1964. Nesfield's grammar was revised in 1924 in accordance with the requirements of the Joint Com­mittee on Grammatical Terminology. The editions which preceded the revision continued the tradition of 19th-century grammar: morphology was treated as it had been in the first half of the 19th century, syntax, as in the second half of that century. Of the various classi­fications of the parts of the sentence current in the grammars of the second half of the 19th century the author chose a system, according to which the sentence has four distinct parts: (1) the Subject; (2) Adjuncts to the Subject (Attributive Adjuncts, sometimes called the Enlargement of the Subject); (3) the Predicate; and (4) Adjuncts of the Predicate (Adverbial Adjuncts); the object and the complement (i. e. the predicative) with their qualifying words, however, are not treated as distinct parts of the sentence. They are classed together with the finite verb as part of the predicate. Although grammars as a rule do not consider the ob­ject to be the third principal part of the sentence, indi­rectly this point of view persists since the middle of the 19th century and underlies many methods of anal­ysis. In Nesfield's scheme, though the object is not given the status of a part of the sentence, it is considered to be of equal importance with the finite verb. In diagramming sentences, grammarians place the sub­ject, predicate, objects and complements on the same syntactic level, on a horizontal line in the diagram, while modifiers of all sorts are placed below the line. ^[27] Revision brought about certain changes in Nes­field's grammatical system. The number of cases of the noun was increased to five (through the addition of the vocative and the dative), while classical scientific grammars, for instance, those of Sweet and Jespersen, favoured the two-case system. Another change occurred in the structural classification of sentences. Two new terms, "double" and "multiple" sentences, were substi­tuted for the term "compound" sentence, the term "double" denoting the coordination of two and "multi­ple" of more than two sentences (see p. 199). This inno­vation — a quantitative classification of independent sentences contained within a punctuation unit, is signif­icant as symptomatic of the weakness of the concept of the "compound" sentence, intuitively felt by the members of the Joint Committee and those who fol­lowed their recommendation. According to the concept of the "compound" sentence, the combination of two or more syntactically independent, though semantically connected sentences, was analysed as a single sentence. The -new terms, which were probably intended to im­prove the theory, became very popular in prescriptive grammar ^[28] and, as we shall see, influenced some scien­tific grammars.

 

2. Classical Scientific English Grammar in the Modern Period

The founders of this type of grammar in the period of its intensive development either specialize in syntax or deal with the problem of both morphology and syntax.

Among the authors who specialize in syntax are L. G. Kimball, С. T. Onions and H. R. Stokoe. Both .Kimball's Structure of the English Sentence (New York, 1900) and Onions' Advanced English Syntax (London, 1904), which appeared at the beginning of the period, discuss the problems of the structure of English on the traditional plane, though in Onion's book there is a striking anticipation of the sentence patterns of descriptive linguistics (see p. 141). Kimball's grammar shows the influence of logical grammars of the type current in 19th-century "German linguistics," K. F Becker's grammar for example. The third book, H. R. Stokoe's Understanding of Syntax, which appeared in 1937, was also largely influenced by the views of prescriptive grammarians authors are not satisfied with the traditional concept of the compound sentence. Stokoe adopted the new nomenclature, describing double and multiple sentences in his book. All these authors differ from prescriptive grammarians in their non-legislative approach to the description of English structure and deeper insights into the nature of the grammatical phenomena. A greater number of grammarians have a more ambitious aim — to describe English grammar scientifically as a whole. Their description is inductive and is based on a wealth of material. The authors with one exception, retain the traditional system of the eight parts of speech, grouping the article and the numerals with the adjective. In syntax the more international scheme of five parts of the sentence and the correspond­ing nomenclature (well known in Russian grammar) is in some cases combined with the specifically English features of syntactic analysis described above, with the addition of the concepts of the complement and the modifiers (or adjuncts). Some authors show a marked preference for one of the several contending notions in the description of the secondary parts of the sentence. Thus Poutsma, Kruisinga and Zandvoort seem to pre­fer the term "adjunct", describing adverbial and predicative adjuncts (the latter in the sense of the more commonly used "objective complement"), Curme's choice is the "modifier", Bryant enumerates seven kinds of complements (see p. 152).

The peculiar views of some of the authors on acci­dence, e. g. the four-case system in Curme's grammar, are reflected in syntax. Thus Curme discusses accusative objects, dative objects, etc. Most authors retain the threefold classification of sentences into simple, compound and complex, established in the prescriptive grammars of the mid-19^th century. H. Poutsma introduces the term “composite sentence" as a common term for compound and complex sentences. Some changes have taken place in the concept of the clause (as part of a larger sentence). Most likely under the influence of Nesfield's grammar, where this amendment first appeared, the authors do not insist any more, as Onions did, that in a complex sentence each clause has a subject and a predicate of its own. Instead they take into consideration the peculiar clause structure of com­plex sentences with subject and predicate clauses, where the "main'' clause lacks one or both of its principal parts, e. g. Jespersen in his Philosophy of Grammar and Curme (see. p. 198).

But scientific grammar was the first to undermine the strictly structural concept of a clause as of a syn­tactic unit containing a subject and a predicate, created by prescriptive grammar. Beginning with Sweet's grammar, the authors of scientific grammars have been developing the concepts of half-clauses, abridged clauses, verbid clauses, etc., which practically destroy the original concept of clause and lead to a tendency to analyse simple sentences as complex or, to put it an­other way, demolish the structural distinction between pimple and complex sentences. Thus Poutsma treats substantive, clauses, adverbial clauses, infinitive clauses, gerund clauses and participle clauses as units of the" same kind, though the last three types of "clauses" are not clauses, according to the original and, in our opinion, more correct concept of clause as a syntactic unit.

From a theoretical point of view, Kruisinga's grammar is one of the most interesting of those scientific"grammars" which have retained the traditional grammatical system. Kruisinga approaches the problem of the the problem of the definition of the sentence critically, refraining, however, from giving a definition of his own, whereas most grammarians were content to repeat traditional logical definitions. The concept of the phrase was not popular among the authors of scientific grammars, though no new theory of word-groups was presented to the reader. Kruisinga originated the theory of close and loose syn­tactic groups (see p. 122), the difference between them "being based on the distinction between subordination and coordination. Closely connected with this theory is the author's concept of the complex sentence. His classification is dichotomic: only two sentence types are recognized — simple and compound sentences (i. e. complex, according to the author's terminology). The traditional compound sentence is not considered to be a syntactic unit at all; the material in question is treated in connection with double and multiple loose syn­tactic groups (see p. 124, 197).

Of all the authors of scientific grammars of the classical type O. Jespersen is the most original. His morphological system differs from the traditional in that he lists only five parts o