Getting at Grammar

Getting at Grammar

1. Accepting Sentences

   • A description is intended to account for all the gramatical sentences of a language
   • The point is not only to exclude such sentence, but also to explain their excluded status.
     • It is success in a strong sense to show why the grammar provides for other kinds of sentence and for the kinds excluded.
     • Description cannot be restricted to fully "semanticized" sentences.
       • If the semantic import and structure of some parts of sentences is to be understood, and if all the conventionalized units and relation in sentences are to be analyzed.

2. Surface Structure

   • Is not be taken at face value -not only because of underlying syntactic relationship.
     • the principled investigation of such phenomena makes social factors inescapable in grammatical analysis.

3. Every language has a great many such elements, internally uninteresting perhaps, and uninteresting too.

   • If grammatical rules are pursued to the full extent of their application, morever, more then grammar must be analyzed.
   • Many linguists may wish to ignore, or relegate to another day, such relationship and meanings.

4. It is hardly satisfactory to invoke differences of "dialect" here, or ad hoc in other cases of apparent difference of opinion as to the acceptability of a sentence.

   • The mapping between means and context is not in priciple of this book

5. the sentences that trouble syntactic analysis are subject to interpretation and selection in the first instance on the dimentions of social context and speech style.

6. Being Sensitive to Context

   • Grammarians have often enough taken dimensions of context and style into account, but commonly in a ad hoc and unprincipled way.
     • the methodology of context-sensitive grammar normally requires features used in context to have been previously introduced.
     • A need has been recognized to identify lexical elements as native or foreign, or of specific provenience

7. Using Appropriateness Creatively

   • Analysis of social meaning has priority is not to impose an arbitrary requirement, or conduct a critique that linguistic practice can afford to ignore.
   • The analysis also avoids the opposite tendency to obscure the structure of context by attributing all social meanings mechanically to it.

8. Finding and Using universals

   • Finding Universals
     • Functional approach can be seen from a somewhat different vantage point, that universals in a general theory of language.
   • Sound Patterns
     • Despite its great interest in universals, recent transformational generative phonological theory remains explanatorily inadequate because of its restriction to "referential" function.