Grammar and Usage

In earlier periods of the development of linguistic knowledge, grammatical scholars believed that the only purpose of grammar was to give strict rules of writing and speaking correctly. The rigid regulations for the correct ways of expression ignoring the social nature of language were often based on purely subjective and arbitrary judgements of individual grammar compilers. The result of this ‘prescriptive’ approach was, that alongside quite essential and useful information, non-existent ‘rules’ were formulated that stood in sheer contradiction with the existing language usage (узус), i.e. lingual reality (the way in which words or phrases are actually used, spoken, or written in a speech community).

To refer to some of the numerous examples of this kind, let us consider the well-known rule of the English article stating that the noun which denotes an object ‘already known’ by the listener should be used with the definite article:

1) I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my own. You see it is not a story like other stories I have been telling you: it is a true story (J. K. Jerome).

Or let us take the rule forbidding the use of the continuous tense-forms with the verb ‘be’ as a link, as well as with verbs of perception:

1) My holiday at Crome isn't being a disappointment (A. Huxley).

2) For the first time, Bobby felt, he was really seeing the man (A. Christie).

Or let’s observe the use of case forms of personal pronouns in the predicative function. There is no logical explanation of using the objective case of personal pronouns in the constructions of the type It is I/me. However nowadays such forms are considered to be grammatically correct.

The given examples, though not agreeing with the above ‘prescriptions’, contain no grammar mistakes in them.

The said traditional view of the purpose of grammar has lately been re-stated by some modern trends in linguistics. In particular, scholars belonging to these trends pay much attention to artificially constructing and analysing incorrect utterances with the aim of a better formulation of the rules for the construction of correct ones. But their examples and deductions, too, are often at variance with real facts of lingual usage.

Worthy of note are the following two artificial utterances suggested as far back as 1956:

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.

According to the idea of their creator, the American scholar N. Chomsky, the first of the utterances, although nonsensical logically, was to be classed as grammatically correct, while the second one, consisting of the same words placed in the reverse order, had to be analysed as a disconnected, ‘ungrammatical’ (аграмматичные формы) enumeration, a ‘non-sentence’. Thus, the examples, by way of contrast, were intensely demonstrative (so believed the scholar) of the fact that grammar as a whole amounted to a set of non-semantic rules of sentence formation.

However, a couple of years later this assessment of the lingual value of the given utterances was disputed in an experimental investigation with informants — natural speakers of English, who could not come to a unanimous conclusion about the correctness or incorrectness of both of them. In particular, some of the informants classed the second utterance as ‘sounding like poetry’.

To understand the contradictions between the bluntly formulated ‘rules’ and reality we must bear in mind that the true grammatical rules or regularities cannot be separated from the expression of meanings; they are themselves meaningful. Namely, they are connected with the most general and abstract parts of content inherent in the elements of language. These parts of content, together with the formal means through which they are expressed, are treated by grammarians in terms of ‘grammatical categories’. Such are, for instance, the categories of number or mood in morphology, the categories of communicative purpose or emphasis in syntax, etc. Since the grammatical forms and regularities are meaningful, it becomes clear that the rules of grammar must be stated semantically, or, more specifically, they must be worded functionally.

Recently there appeared grammatical descriptions of a new type: the so-called corpus-based (корпусные) and communicative (коммуникативные). In communicative grammar descriptions increased emphasis is given to grammar in spoken language, presenting grammar through the eyes of the communicator and focusing on the uses of grammar rather than on grammatical structure. At the same time the notions of ‘grammar rules’ and ‘grammatical’ (грамматическая правильность) are becoming much wider and much more flexible in meaning. The first English communicative grammar descriptions appeared in the 70s of the 20^th century (such authors as D. Leach, S. Greenbaum should be named). Corpus-based grammar descriptions appeared a few years later and in fact are the result of processing huge amounts of linguistic information (the so called extensive corpus of examples of spoken and written language based on real everyday usage taken from various language sources). The most famous examples are COBUILD Grammar (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) and Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LSWE Corpus), which embraces more than 40 million examples of word usage. Such grammar descriptions are synchronic and in some cases explanatory.