Lecture 1

Grammar in the systematic conception of language.

The development of grammar and its types.

Language is an essential feature that distinguishes us from other living

beings. It is a central part of our lives. We discover our identity as individuals and
social beings when we acquire language in childhood. Language is a means of
cognition and communication. It enables us to express our ideas and
emotions, to think for ourselves or to set control over others. But
language is first and foremost a means of transmitting information
which helps us cooperate with other people in our community
(Widdowson, 1997, p. 4).
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others
who know the same language. Knowledge of a language enables you to combine
words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. In addition to knowing the
words of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for their combination
to form sentences and make your own judgments. These rules must be limited
(finite) in length and number so that they can be stored in our brains. Knowing a
language means being able to produce new sentences never spoken before and
to understand sentences never heard before. The famous linguist Noam Chomsky
refers to this ability as a creative aspect of language use: creativity is a universal
property of human language. Speakers of a language can create great literature
and all persons who know a language, can and do create or understand an
infinite set of new sentences in the process of human discourse. Thus, creativity
or the creative aspect of language implies a human ability to create and
understand an infinite set of new sentences in the process of human
discourse.

There is a difference between a person’s linguistic competence and his/her

linguistic performance. A person’s linguistic competence implies the
knowledge which is necessary to produce sentences of a particular language,
while the application of such knowledge in the process of speech-making
determines his/her linguistic performance.
 Speakers with linguistic knowledge can form sentences of any length by
joining phrases and words together or adding modifiers to a noun or a verb. For
the most part, linguistic knowledge is not a conscious knowledge. The linguistic
system with its sounds, structures, meanings, words and rules for
putting them all together – is learned subconsciously when language is
acquired in childhood, while in adulthood it is learned with awareness,
i.e. with great effort.

Language is a system of signs. It can function as a means of cognition

and communication due to the unity and interaction of its three
constituent parts or subsystems. These parts are the phonological system,
the lexical system and the grammatical system.
1. The phonological system determines the material (phonetical)
appearance of its meaningful units;
2. The lexical system represents the vocabulary and word groups;
3. The grammatical system represents the set of regularities (rules)
that determine the formation of utterances (i.e. actualized in speech
sentences) in the process of discourse.
Each of these three constituent parts of language is studied by a particular
linguistic discipline. The sound system is studied by phonology, the vocabulary of
words is studied by lexicology and the regulating rules of word and sentence
formations are studied by 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 theory
that 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.
Another type of grammar is prescriptive grammar which attempts to legislate

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what your grammar should be. From ancient times until the present, “purists”
have believed that language change is corruption and that there are certain
“correct” forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing. So,
prescriptive grammar tells 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 grammar is used in schools to fulfill
language requirements. Teaching grammar state explicitly the rules of the
language, list the words and their pronunciations and help learn a new language
and dialect.

In 1957 Noam Chomsky developed a theory of Transformational

Grammar, sometimes called Transformational-Generative Grammar
(ტრანსფორმაციული წარმომშობი გრამატიკა). This theory made a revolution in
the study of language. According to this theory, instead of starting with minimal
sounds, people should begin with the kernel (ბირთვული), i.e. elementary
sentences, the number of which is limited in any language. Chomsky believed,
that by a limited number of kernel sentences and a set of transformational rules,
one can generate (create) innumerable syntactic combinations. Each sentence in
a language has two levels of representation: a deep structure and a surface
structure (თითოეული წინადადება წარმოდგენილია ორ დონეზე: მას აქვს
სიღრმისეული სტრუქტურა და ზედაპირული სტრუქტურა). The deep structure
represents the core semantic relations of a sentence which are explicated in the
surface structure via transformations. Chomsky and his followers formulated
transformational rules with the help of which a sentence with a given
grammatical structure can be transformed into a sentence with a different
grammatical structure but the same essential meaning. For instance, the
sentence “John saw Mary”, which is in the active voice, can be transformed into
the passive construction “Mary was seen by John.”

Transformational grammar laid the foundation for universal grammar.

Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between the
deep structures of different languages, which are common to all languages. The
more languages of the world linguists investigate, the more they discover that
these differences are limited. Universal Grammar aims to uncover the

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principles that characterize all human languages and to reveal the
inborn component of the 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 are connected with all languages.
These universal facts 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.
The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new
words for new concepts.
3. All languages change through time.
4. The relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken
languages are for the most part arbitrary, i.e. the material forms or
sounds of linguistic signs bear no natural resemblance to their
meaning and the link between them is a matter of convention, and
conventions differ radically across languages.
5. All human languages use a finite set of discrete 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 rules of a similar kind for the formation of
words and sentences.
7. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments, that can
all be defined by a finite set of sound properties or features. For
instance, every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of
consonants.
8. Similar grammatical categories, 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.

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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.
Strong evidence for Universal Grammar has been found by Chomsky in the
way children acquire language. Children need not be deliberately taught as they
are able to learn effortlessly any human language to which they are exposed. By
four or five years of age, children have acquired nearly the entire adult grammar.
This suggests that children are born with the genetics to learn and use human
language, which is part of the Universal Grammar.

The last type of grammar, we would like to focus on, is theoretical grammar.
The aim of the theoretical grammar of a language is to present a
theoretical description of its grammatical system, i.e. scientifically
analyze so-called parts of speech, and their grammatical categories and
study the mechanisms of sentence formation in the process of speech
making.

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