riassunto capitolo 13 the cambridhe encyclopedia of the english language, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Lingua Inglese

Scarica riassunto capitolo 13 the cambridhe encyclopedia of the english language e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! CHAPTER 13: GRAMMATICAL MYTHOLOGY TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR: The study of english grammar may have its share of mythology, but many people have unhappy memories of an early close encounter wuth the suject wiche wasn’t myth: DRY, BORING and POINTLESS are some of the critical adjectives which have been used. These attitudes might appear puzzling. An explanation can, be found, deriving from the approach to language study which developed in the middle of 18th century and which led to the first influential generation of what were called TRADITIONAL english grammar. HALLMARKS: 2 chief hallmarks of the traditional era are account for much of the negative reaction which can arise when people talk about grammar:  Traditional grammars insisted that only certain styles of english were worth studying. Textual sampls selected for analysis or commentary were typically sophisticated, taken rom literary, religious, or scholarly sources.  Traditional english grammars also treated their subject in an abruse way, describing grammatical patterns through the use of an analytical apparatus which derived from latin grammars. The technique went under different names (parsing, clause analysis) but at the end the result was the same. PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR Traditional grammar reflects the approach to language know as prescriptivism, the view that one variety of a language has an higher value thab others. A distinction is drawn between  prescriptive rules, which state usages considered to be acceptable.  Proscriptive rules, which stateusages to be avoited. THE 20TH CENTURY LEGACY By the beginning of the 20th century, the extreme positions had modereted, many traditional grammarians, while continuing to operate within a latine desciptive framework, began to accept that the influence of cntemporary usage couldn’t be ignored, and became more pragmatic in their approach. THE MAIN BRANCHES OF GRAMMAR The field of grammar is often divided into 2 domains:  Morphology  Syntax The former focuses on the structure of words, dealing with the inflectional endings and the way words can be built up out of smaller units. A large part of a traditional grammar was devoted to aspects of morphology but the traditonal term was accidence which dealt with numbers, gnder and case of nouns and the voice, mood, number person and tense of the verbs. By contrast, most of the modern grammar of english is given over to syntax.