Weaknesses of the Traditional Grammar:
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(a) The Parts of Speech:
It is easy to get the impression from traditional grammar that parts of speech are almost god-given – neat pigeon-holes into which the words of a language can be sorted. There is plenty of historical excuse for this feeling, of course, as people have adopted this attitude, with few exceptions, since the time of the Stoics. But it is a misleading attitude, and in a linguistic approach we should try to avoid the distortions that an inflexible grid of this kind can provide.
Traditional grammar classified words into parts of speech. Nouns and verbs were defined notionally, i.e. according to meaning (e.g., a noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing; a verb is a word that makes an assertion, or indicates an action or being), and all the other parts of speech are defined syntactically, on the basis of the definition of noun and verb (e.g., an adjective is a word that modifies a noun; an adverb is a word that modifies a verb; a pronoun is a word that replaces a noun, etc.). The double basis of definition – notional and syntactic – is apparently a logical weakness; for in order to make these definitions valid, we should have to define their terms (name, thing, action, etc.), which is not an easy task.
A noun, we are told, is the name of a person, place, or thing. In the sentence: The car is red, car is a noun because it names a thing. But red must also be a noun, for it names a color. If a color isn’t a thing, what is it?; a verb, we learn, is a word that expresses action, being, or state of being. Then departure must be a verb because it expresses the action of departing. Indignation must be a verb, for it expresses the state of being indignant. But of course these are not verbs in English, and grammarians would wish to call them so. As with the noun, identifying the word class on the basis of features not stated in the definition.
And even if we grant that the notional definitions are sound, it is doubtful that they serve their intended purpose in the teaching of grammar. Young learners do not master the definition of noun and proceed from that to an identification of nouns. They learn what nouns are by having a great many nouns pointed out to them, and they learn verbs in the same way. Their recognition is based on formal positional characteristics of nouns and verbs, though they may pay lip service to the notional definition. Perhaps the notional definition is best characterized as a useful fiction.
The whole description of the English ‘parts of speech’ rests on little more than guess, intuition, and accident. There is no particular reason why we should say that English has eight parts of speech. It just happened that early grammarians sorted out English words in fashion and later grammarians imitated them.
(b) Syntactic Analysis:
Some of the shortcomings of traditional grammar have to do with the analysis of complex sentences. Traditional grammar has no problems with sentences like (1) below:
1. A child won the prize.
Sentences like (2)-(4), however, are less simply analyzed:
2. It was a child who won the prize.
3. What the child won was a prize.
4. There was a child who won a prize.
Traditional grammar introduced special terms for words like it, what, there, as used in these sentences. Yet, these seem ad hoc, designed rather to solve embarrassment encountered in treating the variants of simple sentences like (1) than to get at the heart of the language.
Subordinate clauses in traditional grammar are equated to parts of speech. The subordinate clause of sentence 5(b) below is comparable to a simple object, and accordingly, it is called an ‘object clause’:
(5) a. We expect their arrival at noon b. We expect that they will arrive at noon
Because of this treatment of syntax, parallel constructions are treated at different points in the grammar rather than under one heading. For example, consider the following:
(6) a. We expect them to arrive at noon b. We expect their arriving at noon
Since the verbal element in 6(a) is an infinitive, traditional grammar treats such patterns with other infinitive constructions. The verbal element in 6(b) is a gerund and this variant is treated under gerunds. Users of such grammars must track down the parallel constructions in several places instead of regarding sentences 5(b), 6(a), and 6(b) as embedded variants of the simple sentence 5(a).
A different kind of problem led to a departure from traditional grammar, especially among American linguists in the first half of the twentieth century. Traditional grammar did not lend itself well to the treatment of many non-European languages. Some languages like Japanese do not have a separate part of speech corresponding to pronouns. Moreover, verbs and adjectives may fall into one class, as in Japanese. Other languages such as Chinese and Vietnamese have no inflections, making it difficult to determine the parts of speech in a traditional manner. Still, others like Eskimo combine constituents so that a sentence is equivalent to a word. To treat these languages suitably, linguists set out to develop a grammatical approach that would analyze any language in terms of its own structure.
Finally, traditional grammar devoted much of the syntactic discussion to uses of forms. For example, if nouns are inflected for case, uses of each case are described. It appears to assign the reason why certain grammatical features of a language occur, and how they must behave. The same procedure applies to verb forms and to other parts of speech. Syntax in this way is an extension of morphology.
(c) Reliance on Latin Grammatical Model:
English grammar books that were produced by the traditional grammarians were not English grammars at all; they were Latin grammars disguised. This was not particularly surprising, in view of the millennium of concentration on Latin studies to the exclusion of almost everything else. The grammar that the early grammarians knew was Latin grammar, and when they decided to ‘grammarize’ English, they simply transposed the Latin structure and the Latin terminology and called it English grammar, forgetting that English and Latin are strikingly different languages. They not only express their meanings in totally different ways with totally different structural features, but they don’t always express the same meanings. Languages are not convertible into one another the way dollars are convertible into Naira and pounds, and the first mistake of the 18th-century grammarians was that they didn’t understand this.
This is why, for example, such English grammars describe six tenses. English doesn’t have six tenses. It has two tenses if looked at in one way or several dozens if looked at in another way. But it happens that Latin does have six tenses, differentiated by inflectional endings, and grammarians simply took the English translations of the six Latin tenses and called them the English tense system. In the same way, features such as voice, mood, case, which are important in Latin as in other highly inflected languages, were sought out and emphasized in English. Some grammarians were so ingenious as to discern five or six cases in the English noun. Meanwhile, the essential features of English grammar – the basic signals by which the language transmits its meanings – were largely ignored.
Let us illustrate this reliance on the Latin framework with the case system. By case, grammarians normally refer to a kind of variation in the actual form or shape of the noun, which shows the noun’s relationship to other parts of speech or its function in a sentence. This variation in the form of a noun is called inflection, and a language which displays it is called an inflected language. English has hardly any inflectional endings for its nouns; it has the genitive case (as in cat’s) and a general case which is used everywhere else (cat, cats). To call cat in "The cat came" and "I kicked the cat" different cases is simply to misuse the word case, for there are clearly no differences between the endings of the two nouns. In examples like these, we know the difference between the doer and the receiver of the action by the position of the noun in relation to the verb.
The general point to be made here is that the description of a language must not be carried out using the descriptive framework originally devised for the specific study of some other language – even if there are strong cultural affiliations with this other language. When inflections are found in a language, parts of speech, for example, are most securely identified by them. Since Latin had characteristic inflections, it could be treated in accordance with the procedures of traditional grammar.
From the above discussion, we thus see that in traditional grammar, there is a tendency to treat Latin as a kind of authority to turn to when doubts arise about grammar.
(d) Reliance on the Written Form of Language
In traditional grammar, there was very little recognition of the extent of the difference between spoken and written forms of language. Many grammarians and lexicographers, particularly in the 17th century, were aware of the existence of such a difference but did little to analyse it. And most authors paid only lip service to the existence of the spoken language. In a way, this is not surprising; it is partly due to the way in which Latin was taught, almost solely as a written language. But more importantly than this, the neglect is due to the fact that it is extremely difficult to study speech without some mechanical aids to make the speech permanent and therefore more precisely analyzable.
The rules of written language must not be forced onto speech, as they so often were. Writing is a later and more sophisticated process than speech. Speech is the primary medium of linguistic expression: we begin to speak before we write; most of us speak far more than we write in everyday life; all natural languages were spoken before they were written, and there are many languages in the world today which have never been written down. All these go to show the superiority of the spoken form over the written form. To base our statements about language on writing rather than on speech is therefore a reversal of linguistic priorities, and leads to all kinds of confused thinking. The two media should be considered separate systems of communication.
A distinct but related aspect of the partial account of language given in traditional studies is that the material presented does not even cover the whole range of a language’s written forms, but is restricted to specific kinds of writing – the formal styles, in particular. Anything which smacks of informality tends to be carefully avoided, or if mentioned, castigated as ‘slang’ and labelled bad grammar – even though informality may be in regular and widespread use among people. We do not, after all, use the same kind of formal language when at home or when writing letters to friends as we do when we are giving a speech or applying in writing for a job. A language can be used at many levels of formality, and it should be one of the tasks of a linguistic description to take account of these differences, and not to select some levels as ‘right’ and others as ‘wrong’. For example, we are all familiar with the ‘rule’ in English which tells us that we should use whom and not who as the relative pronoun in a sentence like: The man – you were talking to is a foreigner. But such rules simply distort the reality of English. It is not a question of whom being correct usage, and who being incorrect: each is appropriate in certain circumstances and inappropriate in others.
In addition, areas of language structure other than grammar are regarded in most traditional accounts: the pronunciation system of languages is treated scrappily, usually only in connection with the formulation of spelling rules or rules for elocution.
(e) Prescriptivism
We have noted earlier that the teaching of Latin grammar and the study of Latin literature contributed immensely to promoting misleading principles of analysis associated with traditional grammar. One of such principles was that the preservation of the classical tongues, which were perfect examples of eloquence, was the main task of literature. Thus, vernaculars were clearly inferior. Spanish and French, for example, were seen simply as “examples of much-decayed languages” (Crystal, 1971:53). Languages, it was felt, were corrupted by commoners and preserved by the educated. Dictionaries, moreover, were only to define words used by the best authors. Grammars came to be considered as preserving a language’s purity. Their role was to tell people authoritatively how to speak and write. Only the best authors, literary giants, were to be studied as examples of what a language was like. It assumed that language was a system embodied in the writings of the best authors, something to be sheltered from change. Where usage differed from books, usage was corrupt. So, traditional grammars drew farther and farther away from language as it was, and more and more it became a policeman of correctness. This blinded its advocates to the potential of language to renew itself from generation to generation.
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 were sometimes called) which bore little relation to the facts of everyday speech.
We have mentioned earlier Dryden’s rule about not putting prepositions at the end of a sentence, though it is doubtful whether there has ever been a time in English when prepositions were so restricted in their placement in a sentence.
Here is what a noted traditional grammarian wrote against a construction that was being taken up by everyone: The bridge was being built, replacing it with The bridge was building:
As to the notion of introducing a new and more complex passive form of conjugation, as, The bridge is being built, … it is one of the most absurd monstrous innovations ever thought of… . This is certainly no better English than The work was being published, has been being published, had been being published, shall or will be being published, … and so on… what a language shall we have when our verbs are thus conjugated? (Goold Brown. 1884. The Grammar of English Grammars. New York: William Wood and Co. p.379).
Cardinal Richelieu of France had established an Academy to standardize and purify the French language. In 1698, Daniel Defoe proposed a society similar to the French Academy, to encourage polite learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and to advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language, to establish the purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced, and all those innovations in speech, if I may call them such, which some dogmatic writers have the confidence to foster upon their native language, as if their authority were sufficient to make their own fancy legitimate … (H. Morley. 1889 (Ed) The Earlier Life and the Chief Earlier Works of Daniel Defoe. London pp.125-126)
It is easy for us to laugh at these, and of course, normative grammarians have given a bad name to traditional grammar, which did not deserve it. To anyone who has gone through a language course since the early 1950s, ‘traditional grammar’ doubtless has a bad sound. Textbooks and teachers using supposedly up-to-date methods in teaching foreign languages or English mention traditional grammar either unfavourably or not at all; it embodies, for them, all the outmoded practices of reciting grammatical paradigms, translating to English instead of learning to speak, and worrying about what language ought to do rather than what it does. Ferdinand de Saussure summarises the weaknesses thus:
Traditional grammar neglects whole parts of language, such as word formation; it is normative and assumes the role of prescribing rules, not of recording facts; it lacks overall perspective; often it is unable to separate the written form from the spoken word (Ferdinand de Saussure. 1959. A Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc. p. 82).
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Discuss any two weaknesses of the Traditional Grammar.
3.2 Strengths of Traditional Grammar
It is easy to paint a picture in black and white in discussing traditional approaches to language study. And at the moment, the black strain has certainly been stressed for the purposes of the argument. But we must not forget that linguistics has a great deal to be grateful for in the work of many early scholars. Any emphasis on weaknesses is, however, a useful one, as it has a chastening effect. It is easy to be smug about language, to rely on traditional grammar for all occasions, and when it does not work, to think that the problem lies with your understanding of the principles. The purpose of the last section has been to show how inadequate traditional grammar and lay beliefs can be as a source of information to account for all we should know about the proper working of language. It has helped to emphasize how complex the reality of language is. In this section, we shall outline the main legacies of traditional grammar.
We are indebted to traditional grammar for the modern notion of sentence, the parts of speech and for numerous technical concepts, such as subject and predicate. For the most part, the traditional grammarians talked of categories which actually do exist in English. They got balled up not so much on the categories themselves as on the definition and description of them. The terminology of traditional grammar provides a useful framework for describing the outward structure of sentences and continues to serve as the point of departure for all schools of grammatical analysis. It is important to emphasize that the terminology is directed to outward structure rather than semantic content.
Moreover, we are indebted to traditional grammar for certain basic procedures that are an inescapable part of any approach to language analysis. One of the procedures involves diagramming. In this, they sought to develop a framework that would make possible the exhaustive description of every possible sentence by representing the structural relationship of sentence components graphically. Modern linguists still find this very useful, though they differ with traditionalists primarily in the kind of diagrams they use and the claims they make about what the diagrams represent. A basic technique associated with traditional grammar and which continues to be used in all modern approaches to language is paradigm analysis, which involves the examination of related forms and the analysis of these forms into elements that are ‘same’ and ‘different’. Thus, the paradigm walk, walked, and walking can be analyzed as consisting of a constant walk, to which may be added variables, the suffixes –ed, and ing. Traditional grammar was at its best in describing the inflections, idioms, and sentence forms of particular languages, especially the differences from language to language. This had a practical purpose too, for it put the emphasis on what had to be learned if one already knew a language and wanted to study another. The same principles are expounded in ‘contrast’ grammars today.
In principle, traditional grammar is an analytical and descriptive science, but in practice, it has often been associated with pedagogical approaches that stress the supposed correctness of certain constructions and incorrectness of others, often on the basis of Latin models. Many modern linguists have therefore criticized traditional grammarians for adopting a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach to language study. It would be a mistake, however, to downplay the importance of traditional grammar simply because it has sometimes been put to use in ways that are open to question. It is important to distinguish between the methodology and a resulting body of knowledge on the one hand and a totally extraneous attitude about ‘correctness’ on the other. The fact is that traditional grammar had much the same goals that are now proclaimed by modern linguists. Prescribing rules in language analysis enjoys renewed popularity in current theories of language as ‘rule-governed behavior’.
It would be wrong to censure authority in language simply because it is authoritarian. Every culture recognizes some styles of speech or writing as better than others, at least, under certain circumstances. In our culture, there is a standard, or prestige dialect that more or less coincides with the formal modes of expression used among persons who are not acquaintances and who do not belong to the same social class; in short, who are not relaxed with one another when they speak. In writing, it more or less coincides with the style that must be used in a letter to a stranger. As this is not a dialect that is ordinarily learned in the home, it has to be learned later, and its rules of usage are what we generally think of when someone mentions correct speech. Normative grammar is unassailable when it identifies itself with a prestige dialect and honestly recognizes its practical and aesthetic aims. It goes wrong when it polishes correctness as a badge of superiority.
To put it simply, traditional grammar is the grammar that many of us learned in elementary school. Such notions and techniques as parts of speech, parsing, and the Read-Kellogg sentence diagrams provide a simple and accurate analysis for a sentence like we do not have any money. The prescriptive tendencies of many traditional grammarians, however, would hinder the analysis of the semantically equivalent sentence we ain’t got no money, a variant that occurs with some frequency in certain dialects. They would simply treat this sentence as ungrammatical. Thus, the traditional approach is viewed today as useful but often incomplete. Thus, slang might be appropriate under some conditions, and a form of literary expression under others, but the appropriateness of slang is never viewed as a sign of quality, while that of literary expression frequently is. This, of course, is the linguistic side of social stratification: the speech of superior people is regarded as superior speech.
But at the moment, there is a renewed interest in traditional grammar, largely inspired by contemporary groups of linguists who find in the traditional grammarians their spiritual predecessors. They hold that particular languages are individual forms taken by an underlying oneness common to the race. This notion of universality can be traced to the ancients, but it was encouraged by the linguistic situation prevailing in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages: Latin was the vehicle of learning, the vernacular was the vehicle of commerce and everyday communication. Even after full dignity was accorded to each of the languages and Latin was no longer regarded as superior, the sense of community among European scholars persisted.
4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have discussed the weaknesses and strengths of traditional grammar. It must be stated that the weaknesses and strengths mentioned above do not necessarily apply to the work of all individuals since they are stated in an extreme fashion. The strengths are those claimed by one group for itself, and the weaknesses are those pointed out by representatives of the opposing view.
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