TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR

There are different approaches to grammar taken by various schools of thought, and
this makes it difficult to define “traditional grammar” as such, or to analyse its definite
features. The structuralists were strongly against the approach in the tradition of the
school grammars. A look into the history of traditional grammar will explain its
inadequacy to some extent. Scholars like Ben Jonson, who wrote the earliest English
grammars, were men deeply learned in Latin and Greek. They considered these
classical languages as superior to the vernaculars. Consequently, they took Latin
grammar as the norm, and tried to analyse English in terms of Latin. The early
grammarians who formulated the grammar of English, based it on Latin grammar.
There were similarities between the two, but gradually English took on a complex
system, giving up the original Indo European form. English was then expected to
conform to the rules of grammar that 18 th century Latin had. In other words, the
grammarians then tried to fit English grammar in the framework of Latin grammar.
The structuralists severely criticised the traditional approach, and the following may
be seen as the shortcomings or the failings of traditional grammar as enumerated by
the structuralists. the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular
country or region.
1. The Latinate Fallacy: The traditionalists considered the Latin language as
superior and as having a perfect grammar when compared to the vernaculars.
Hence, they tried to bring in Latin grammar in the usage of the English
language. For example, the sentence “This is the tool I work with,” with a
a change in the
form of a word preposition at the end, was normal to the English language then, but it was
(typically the condemned by the traditionalists because such a usage was considered
ending) to express inappropriate in Latin. Latin is a highly inflected language with grammatical
a grammatical
function or attribute markers (inflections) for number, gender, etc., while English has very few
such as tense, inflections. The traditionalists tried to impose the grammar of Latin on the
mood, person,
number, case, and
English language, and the correctness of sentences depended upon whether the
gender. usage was correct in Latin or not.
2. The Semantic Fallacy: The traditional grammarians defined many of the parts
of speech based on meaning, and this was objected to by the structuralists. For
example, noun is defined as “the name of a person, place or thing.” Hence,
words like “love,” and “equality,” do not qualify as nouns. Again, the
definition of verb as “that which denotes an action or process” was not fully
acceptable since words like “action,” “destruction,” etc. do denote action but
are not verbs. An interrogative sentence is defined as “one that asks a
question,” but an interrogative sentence like “Would you pass the salt?” cannot
be really considered as a question. Also, all questions need not necessarily be
interrogatives, as in the sentence “You are ready for the test?” with the rising
intonation.
3. Mixing up different criteria: Traditional definitions unlike the structuralists,
were based on different criteria. Some definitions were based on meaning,
 some on function, and some on form. Contrary to the traditionalists, the
structuralists defined word classes on the basis of their forms and occurrences
in different contexts.
4. The Normative Fallacy: Traditional grammarians gave too much importance
to the prescription of rules and norms, or standards of usage. Importance was
given to the rules rather than on the actual usage of language. Traditional
grammars were therefore referred to as normative grammars also. Language is
always in a state of flux. Strict adherence to rules and norms causes the reality
of linguistic changes to be ignored. fixated
5. The Prescriptive Fallacy: A grammar that prescribes rigid rules of correct use
is called a prescriptive grammar. For example, a grammar written for the
purpose of teaching a language to beginners often contains a number of such
rules. Traditional grammars tended to be prescriptive, whereas structuralists
believed in descriptive grammar.
6. The Logical Fallacy: Each language has its own system of rules in
grammatical categories and also in various other features, and it is absurd to
believe that there are universal rules or laws for language.
7. Lack of explicitness: Traditional grammars lacked explicitness with regard to
linguistic descriptions. Unlike them, structuralists made explicit statements
which could be tested and proved. For example, structuralists defined a subject
as that NP (Noun Phrase) which agrees with the verb. This could be applied
mechanically to identify the subject. Such explicitness was lacking in the
traditional approach.
8. Neglect of the spoken form: Traditionalists gave too much importance to the
written form of language and wrote grammars based on the written form. They
considered this as the correct language, and the spoken form only a corrupt
representation of it. The structuralists stressed the importance of speech.
9. Ignoring language variations: The traditionalists regarded only the language
of great literature to be worth studying. They ignored the variations of the
dialects, register, etc, and considered dialectal forms as bad English. The
structuralists took all the varieties into consideration.
10. Historical Fallacy: The traditionalists ignored changes that came to a language
over time and considered them as corrupt influences on the language. The
language of the past masters like Dryden and Goldsmith was looked upon as
the model for present day. Language is constantly subject to change. Therefore
standards should be based on the contemporary usage of the language and not
on what had been written down long ago.
Grammaticality, acceptability and proportionality are other matters, which, according
to the traditionalists and the structuralists make the words/sentences acceptable or
unacceptable.
 Traditional Grammar – Fallacies
Traditional grammar is the Graeco-Latin – based system of parts of speech,
conjugations (the variation of the form of a verb in an inflected language such as
Latin, by which the voice, mood, tense, number, and person are identified.),
declensions (the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective, by which its
grammatical case, number, and gender are identified.) etc., whereas structural
grammar adopts a more technical approach to grammar studies in fields like
phonology, morphology, semantics etc. Structural grammar was, in fact, the outcome
of an attempt to deviate from traditional grammar. Structuralism owes for its rise
more than anything else to the posthumous work of Ferdinand de Saussure. The work
by Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist, was fundamental to the development of
structural linguistics. Structuralist ideas were further developed by members of the
Prague school and American linguists like Bloomfield and Chomsky.
Presenting the anatomy of sentences by parsing them (analyzing into its
component parts and describing their syntactic roles), making a series of divisions
within, was the approach associated with traditional grammar. By contrast, much of
20th century linguistics has been devoted to an approach called theoretical grammar
which, among other objectives, aims to establish what constructs and principles are
needed in order to do any kind of grammatical analysis and to bring the phenomenon
of human language under its purview.
The qualifying term ‘traditional’ is often seen as carrying the notion of an
illogical subservience (willingness to obey others unquestioningly) to classical
principles which, however, held sway over language study well into the 20th century.
The approach was normative (relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm,
especially of behavior) in that prescriptions were made, straitjacketing students of
language from aberrating (a departure from what is normal) into ungrammatical
syntactic territories. Such predispositions led structuralist grammarians to come up
with the proposition of the normative fallacy (fallacy = a mistaken belief.)
The numerous exceptions, not sufficiently explained or brought under any
logical analysis to present theoretical elucidations based on pragmatics, have
prompted 20th C linguists to suggest the existence of a logical fallacy. According to
them the atomistic (characterized by or resulting from division into unconnected
fragments) approach lacks the support of any logically sound grammar theory. Also,
by insisting that the criteria for analyzing classical languages are equally applicable in
the study of the modern world, the prescriptive grammarians were allegedly subjecting
themselves to a fallacy. As etymological considerations were brought to the fore and
lexical items were categorized into formal, standard, non-standard etc. and as
content/function words, traditional grammar was, in a way becoming, by and large,
oblivious of usage. Later grammars perceived a semantic level fallacy in these as well
as in the inexplicitness and the unclear notional criteria with which the grammatical
classes of words, called parts of speech, were defined. Various functions of stress
and intonation, features relevant to semantics, were also largely not taken up for
analysis by the traditional grammarians.