Descriptive grammar

16.09.08

I. Basic terms:

grammar:

1. study of rules governing the use of language

2. part of more general study: linguistics

linguistics:

1. scientific study of language

2. theoretical

3. applied (puts it in practice)

language:

1. system of communication consisting of sounds, words and grammar

2. system of communication used by the people of a particular country or profession

II. Branches of linguistics:

1. phonetics – production of sounds and the perception of sounds (properties of speech sounds)

2. phonology – organization of speech sounds

3. morphology – internal structure of words

4. syntax – arrangement of words into sentences and phrases

5. semantics – meaning of words

6. *pragmatics – meaning in context

III. Rules of grammar:

1. prescriptive – tells people what they should and what they shouldn’t do

2. descriptive – describes what people say

3. competence – fluent native speaker’s knowledge of the language

4. performance – the actual use of language; what people say on a certain occasion (performance is not always a perfect reflection of competence)

*competence:

1. grammatical (syntax, morphology, phonetics, semantics)

2. pragmatic

IV. the importance of linguistic competence:

creativity – the ability to produce new sentences and understand new utterances.

Language is not learned by imitation, what is learned are rules:

1. syntactic – how sentence is built

2. morphological – how words are built

3. phonological – how words and phrases are pronounced

4. semantic – how words and phrases are interpreted

*generative grammar – gives a set of rules which generate sentences.

*a set of well-formed sentences is infinite

*finite set of rules infinite number of well formed sentences.

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Morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit

Infixes – put into a word

Simplex (monomorphemic) – proste (word that cannot be decomposed into smaller meaningful units, they consist only of one morpheme)

Complex (polymorphemic) – złożone (words that are composed by putting together smaller elements to form longer words with more complex meaning)

*Morphemes:

a) free – can stand alone, occur only when attached to some other morphemes

b) bound – cannot stand alone, occur on their own

*Free morphemes:

a) functional – words that have meaning by themselves

b) lexical – function to specify the relationship between one lexical morpheme and another

*Bound morphemes: affixes (prefixes and suffixes):

a) inflectional affixes – do not change grammatical form

b) derivational affixes – create a new word, change grammatical form

*Inflectional morphemes:

-s (3^rd person)

-ed (past)

-ing (progressive)

-s (plural)

-‘s (saxon genitive) e.g. John’s car

-er/est (comparative sup.) e.g. bigger, biggest

Morphological analysis:

a) base – the part of a word which an affix is attached to

b) root – bases that cannot be analyzed further into morphemes, cannot be divided

c) derivative – derived word