INTRODUCTION
The study of language dates back to ancient times, though it had a rather checkered history. Although the earlier traditions of its study cannot, for the most part, provide us the kind of information we now need to fully appreciate the nature and workings of language, nevertheless, they provide us insights into the achievements of the present. In ancient times, the study of language was not as systematically organized as it is now because it was primarily speculative and attitudinal. In this unit, we shall try to explain what Traditional Grammar means, how it originated, and how it developed.
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2.0 OBJECTIVESl
At the end of this unit, you should be able to:
- Explain what the ancients regarded as grammar.
- Explain what Traditional Grammar is.
- Discuss how it originated.
- Trace its development over time.
3.1 An Overview of What Grammar is
The meaning of grammar covers a wide range of phenomena, and it assumed different meanings from generation to generation. As we know it now, grammar refers to generalized statements we make about the regularities and irregularities that are found in a language. At present, the way we study language is to observe how native speakers use the language, and from our observations, we make general statements concerning the regularities and irregularities found therein. These observations are stated in the form of sets of rules guiding usage of the language, thus becoming the principles on which the study of the grammar of the language is based. Theories of language are formulated based on such rules that are universal across languages, and many theories have been propounded by many scholars for the study of language.
In ancient times, grammar meant something different from what it means now. In coming to their decisions about grammar, those early writers were guided by two influences: logic and Latin grammar. The Greeks considered grammar as a branch of philosophy that was concerned with the 'art of writing'. The study of grammar was based on the way the language is written and used by the best authors. Thus, by the Middle Ages, grammar had come to be regarded as a textbook containing rules of correct usage of a language. In other words, a grammar book provided universal rules that teach how a language ought to be written or spoken. These prescriptions often led to inconsistencies and discrepancies.
Today, grammarians generally agree that any grammar of a language should describe and record actual usage from which rules that generate acceptable sentences in the language are formulated. In this, grammar thus becomes a valuable instrument in improving a learner's performance in the language rather than a textbook of do's and don'ts.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
1. What did the ancients consider to be grammar?
2. How will modern scholars define grammar?
3.2 What is Traditional Grammar?
The phrase 'Traditional Grammar' represents an attempt to summarize the range of attitudes and methods that characterized the study of grammar in the ancient and medieval periods, especially of the European school grammars of the 18th and 19th centuries. It can mean several things: the way grammar was studied in the pre-linguistic era; the grammatical descriptions as contained in the school grammars written by renowned grammarians of the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. Otto Jespersen's Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, 1909-40); and a level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics and generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology. In this unit, we shall take 'Traditional Grammar' to mean the set of attitudes, procedures, and prescriptions found in the pre-linguistic era of grammatical study.
The distinctive features of traditional grammar were insistence on correctness, linguistic purism, literary excellence, the use of Latin models, and the priority of the written language over the spoken language. As we shall see in later modules, these features contrast with what obtains in modern grammatical studies that emphasize descriptive accuracy, appropriateness, comprehensiveness, explicitness, and the priority of the spoken language over the written form.
It is pertinent to note that there is no such thing as a single, homogenous, traditional approach either to grammar or to anything else in language study in the ancient and medieval periods. Therefore, the phrase 'traditional grammar' is an attempt to summarize a state of mind, a spectrum of methods and principles over the 18th and 19th centuries that are associated with many schools of thought. For example, in traditional grammar, there are ideas about sentence structure deriving from Aristotle and Plato; there are ideas about parts of speech deriving from the Stoic grammarians; there are ideas about the nature of meaning from the scholastic debates of the Middle Ages, and so on. Therefore, there is no one homogenous approach called 'traditional' as we have of 'Transformational-Generative Grammar' (Noam Chomsky), or of 'Systemic Grammar' (M.A.K. Halliday).
When linguistics began to develop in the early decades of the last century, there was a natural and reasonable reaction against much of traditional study. This reaction, however, led to many of the valuable insights of traditional grammar being ignored or their importance being minimized. However, many of the valuable insights of traditional grammar are now being recognized and appreciated.
SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
1. What things can the phrase 'traditional grammar' mean?
2. Define 'traditional grammar'.
3.3 Origin and Development of Traditional Grammar
As we noted in the previous section, the development of traditional grammar cannot be traced to one source. The fundamental attitudes and methods of traditional grammar came from different backgrounds. For example, the basic terminology for discussing language was first developed by the Greeks, adopted by the Romans, and passed on to us through translation in various languages. We find also that traditional grammar drew on the semantic theories of the ancients and the medieval. It should however be noted that there is no single semantic theory that has been agreed upon in ancient, medieval, or modern times, but implicit in the method of distinguishing among the parts of language is Aristotelian idea.
Traditional grammar has its origins in the 5th century B.C. with Plato and Aristotle in Greece and a Sanskrit scholar named Panini (who knew nothing of the Greeks' work, nor they of his) in India. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics devoted a great deal of time to the development of specific ideas about language. Plato was regarded by later Greek writers as the first to discover the potentialities of grammar, and his conception of speech (logos) as being basically composed of the logically determined categories of noun and verb (the thing predicated and its predicator) produced a dichotomous sentence analysis which has fathered most grammatical analyses ever since. The classification into the traditional 'parts of speech' was first articulated by the grammarians of Classical Antiquity – most authoritatively by Dionysius Thrax in the third century A.D.
Aristotle, and later the Stoics, examined the structure of Greek very carefully and produced definitions of what people felt grammatical analysis should be concerned with – definitions of parts of speech in particular, but also of many of the so-called categories of grammar such as case, number, gender, and tense. This fairly detailed study of the language was the major influence on subsequent grammatical thinking. It was taken over by the Romans with very little change in general principle, and through the influence of Latin on Europe, was introduced in various degrees into every grammatical handbook written before the 20th century. Many of the features of modern linguistic theory too (for example, the idea of levels of grammatical structure) can be traced back to this early period.
Panini constructed a grammar of Sanskrit a half millennium before our era, concentrating especially on its forms. His grammar analyses simple words, determining roots and inflectional elements. It also analyzes compound words, distinguishing formations such as those of bluebird 'a blue bird', bluebeard 'a man having a blue beard', fourteen 'four plus ten', etc. With Panini grammar, we can determine precisely the forms of Sanskrit. It greatly influenced western grammatical theory when it came to be known in the 19th century.
Latin, largely under the aegis of the church, became the medium of educated discourse and communication throughout Europe by the end of the first millennium. Largely as a result of this, the emphasis in language study was for a while exclusively concerned with the description of the Latin language in the context of language teaching. The massive codification of Latin grammar by Varro, and the subsequent grammars of Aelius Donatus (fourth century) and Priscian (sixth century) are the outstanding examples of this approach. Donatus' grammar was used right into the Middle Ages – and a popular grammar it was too, being the first to be printed using wooden type, and providing shorter editions for children. Throughout this period, a high standard of correctness in learning was maintained, especially in pronunciation.
By the Middle Ages, when it had come to be recognized that Latin was no longer a native language for the majority of the prospective users, the grammar books became less sets of facts and more sets of rules, and the concept of correctness became even more dominant. One popular definition of grammar was "the art of speaking and writing well'. Later, it was common to hear people identify the aim of learning grammar with the ideal of being able to write Latin like Cicero. A similar attitude had characterized much Greek language teaching also: especially after the Alexandrian school (third century B.C.), the language of the best literature was held up as a guide to the desired standard of speech and writing for all. The Greek language had to be preserved as far as possible from decadence.
The effect of these attitudes to language on later thought was considerable. The teaching of Latin grammar and the study of Latin literature were perhaps the two most important aspects in the history of language study for promoting the development of misleading principles of analysis in traditional grammars. The pride of place given to Latin was clear in the classical orientation given to grammar and rhetorical studies. Grammar to many was the basis of all arts and all education (as the phrase 'grammar school' reflects). The sixteenth century provided the peak period of prestige for Latin, and other languages suffered accordingly. Languages, it was felt, were corrupted by commoners and preserved by the educated. Dictionaries, moreover, were only to define the words used by the best authors. It is not difficult to see the long-term effects of attitudes such as these. Grammars came to be considered as preserving a language's purity. Their role was to tell people authoritatively how to speak and write. The Latin grammars were to be used as models for the descriptions of all new languages. Only the best authors, the literary giants, were to be studied as examples of what a language was like. And when English grammars came to be written, especially in the 18th century, the authors, steeped in these Latinate and literary traditions, regularly produced rules of 'correct' usage ('normative' rules, as they are sometimes called) which bore little relation to the facts of everyday speech, and rules derived from Latin into which the features of English structure were forced (such as the use of case system for nouns). Dryden, for example, seems to have introduced into English the 'rule' about not putting prepositions at the end of a sentence, taking his idea from the grammatical situation that existed in Latin; and his influence was so great that it has appeared in most grammar books since – though it is doubtful whether there has ever been a time in English when prepositions were so restricted in their placement in a sentence. Writers like Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and John Wallis argued vehemently that English needed to be 'regularized' and 'improved', its principles spelled out, its discrepancies smoothed out, and its distortions ruled out. Naturally enough (because there was no grammar of English before this time, but centuries' worth of clear analysis did exist for Latin), the first grammarians modeled their analysis of English on Latin. Also naturally, they found that English did not match the rules of Latin. So, they aped English to fit. That is why we are sometimes warned, for example, never to split an infinitive in English: Latin infinitives, being part of the verb's base, cannot be split apart as the two-word infinitive of English can. Many such prescriptive rules linger in English traditional grammar today, as carryovers from Latin grammar.
Similar standards of correctness were imposed upon other languages too, sometimes being formalized in a more extreme way, as in the establishment by Cardinal Richelieu of an Academy in 1635 to preserve the purity of French. The attempt failed, as it was bound to do: the language continued to change with the years; and in France, as in England, the prescriptions of the grammarians simply became more and more removed from the majority usage (i.e., the reality) of the time.
Even in the earliest days, there were writers who protested that grammarian’s job was to record how the language was used, not to manipulate it and hand down prescriptions, but voices of men like George Campbell and Joseph Priestley were not loud enough. As a result, nearly every English-speaking person today is self-conscious about ‘grammar’, uncertain about what is ‘good grammar’ and what is not, and anxious about his or her ability to analyze the workings of the native language. As a sadder result, few adults are even interested in their own language, once they learn the basic skills of using it. Perhaps these unhappy consequences can be laid as much to bad teaching as to the inadequacies of the traditional system, but there is still no denying how awkwardly traditional grammar has served us as an analytical tool and how much it has confused most of us.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
1. Is Traditional Grammar traceable to one origin?
2. What contributions did Plato and Aristotle make in the development of Traditional Grammar?
3. What influence did Latin have on Traditional Grammar?
In subsequent units, you will learn how this grammatical model handled specific aspects of language.
SUMMARY
You have learned in this unit that:
- Grammar refers to generalized statements we make about the regularities and irregularities that are found in a language.
- These statements are stated in the form of sets of rules guiding usage of the language.
- What grammar meant in ancient times differs from its meanings now.
- Traditional Grammar is simply a summary of the range of attitudes and methods that the ancients and the medieval employed in studying language.
- Traditional Grammar differs from modern grammars basically on its insistence on correctness, linguistic purism, literary excellence, the use of Latin models, and its reliance on written language.
- Traditional Grammar is not traceable to a single origin – many philosophers contributed to its development.
- The teaching of Latin grammar and the study of Latin literature tended to promote misleading principles of analysis associated with Traditional Grammar.
TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. Define Traditional Grammar.
2. "Traditional Grammar has little or no influence on the development of modern grammars". Discuss.
REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Cattell, N. R. (1966). The Design of English. Melbourne: Heinemann.
Clark, V. P, Paul A. Eschholz, and Alfred F. Rosa (Eds) (1981). Language: Introductory Readings. 3rd Edition. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Crystal, D. (1971). Linguistics. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
Crystal, D. (Ed.) (1980). A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Friend, Jewell A. (1976). Traditional Grammar. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
Lamidi, M. T. (2000). Aspects of Chomskyan Grammar Ibadan: Emman Publications.
Robins, R. H. (1967). A Short History of Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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