Grammar as a system of rules
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P4-C1
2025-12-01
16
Grammar as a system of rules
One way to evaluate a person’s progress in learning a new language is to measure their vocabulary: how many words do they know? But it does not make sense to ask, “How many sentences does this person know?” Vocabulary items (words, idioms, etc.) are typically learned one at a time, but we do not “learn” sentences that way. Rather than memorizing a large inventory of sentences, speakers create sentences as needed. They are able to do this because they “know” the rules of the language. By using these rules, even a person who knew only a limited number of words could potentially produce an extremely large number of sentences.
Now when we say that a speaker of English (or Tamil, or Chinese) “knows” the rules for forming sentences in that language, we do not mean that the person is aware of this knowledge. We need to distinguish between two different kinds of rules. There are some rules about using language that must be consciously learned, the kind of rules we often learn in school. Rules of this kind are called PRESCRIPTIVE rules: rules which define a standard form of the language, and which some authority must explicitly state for the benefit of other speakers.
The rules we are interested in here are those which the native speaker is usually not aware of– the kind of knowledge about the language that children learn naturally and unconsciously from their parents and other members of their speech community, whether they attend school or not. All languages, whether standardized or not, have rules of this kind, and these rules constitute the grammar of the language. Our approach to the study of grammar will be DESCRIPTIVE rather than prescriptive: our primary goal will be to observe, describe, and analyze what speakers of a language actually say, rather than trying to tell them what they should or should not say.
We have seen that there are rules in English concerning the sequence of sounds within a word. Similarly, there are rules for the arrangement of words within a sentence, the arrangement of “meaningful elements” with in a word, etc. The term GRAMMAR is often used to refer to the complete set of rules needed to produce all the regular patterns in a given language. Another, perhaps older, way in which the term GRAMMAR is sometimes used means roughly “all the structural properties of the language except sound structure (phonology),” i.e. the structure of words, phrases, sentences, texts, etc. We are concerned with grammar in both senses. It is intended to help prepare you to analyze and describe the word and sentence patterns of a language (sense 2) by formulating a set of rules (sense 1) which account for those patterns.
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