II.

Kinds of Grammar

Most people first encounter grammar in connection with the study of their own or of a second language in school. This kind of grammar is called normative, or prescriptive, because it defines the role of the various parts of speech (see Parts of Speech) and purports to tell what is the norm, or rule, of “correct” usage. Prescriptive grammars state how words and sentences are to be put together in a language so that the speaker will be perceived as having good grammar. When people are said to have good or bad grammar, the inference is that they obey or ignore the rules of accepted usage associated with the language they speak.

Language-specific prescriptive grammar is only one way to look at word and sentence formation in language. Other grammarians are primarily interested in the changes in word and sentence construction in a language over the years—for example, how Old English, Middle English, and Modern English (see English Language) differ from one another; this approach is known as historical grammar. Some grammarians seek to establish the differences or similarities in words and word order in various languages. Thus, specialists in comparative grammar study sound and meaning correspondences among languages to determine their relationship to one another (see Language). By looking at similar forms in related languages, grammarians can discover how different languages may have influenced one another. Still other grammarians investigate how words and word order are used in social contexts to get messages across; this is called functional grammar (see Linguistics).

Some grammarians are more concerned, however, with determining how the meaningful arrangement of the basic word-building units (morphemes) and sentence-building units (constituents) can best be described. This approach is called descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammars contain actual speech forms recorded from native speakers of a particular language and represented by means of written symbols. Descriptive grammars indicate what languages—often those never before written down or otherwise recorded—are like structurally.

These approaches to grammar (prescriptive, historical, comparative, functional, and descriptive) focus on word building and word order; they are concerned only with those aspects of language that have structure. These types of grammar constitute a part of linguistics that is distinct from phonology (the linguistic study of sound) and semantics (the linguistic study of meaning or content). Grammar to the prescriptivist, historian, comparativist, functionalist, and descriptivist is then the organizational part of language—how speech is put together, how words and sentences are formed, and how messages are communicated.

Specialists called transformational-generative grammarians, such as the American linguistic scholar Noam Chomsky, approach grammar quite differently—as a theory of language. By language, these scholars mean the knowledge human beings have that allows them to acquire any language. Such a grammar is a kind of universal grammar, an analysis of the principles underlying all the various human grammars.