Students can improve their writing skills by studying grammar. In learning to apply a logical system in their analysis of sentence parts, for example, students develop mental discipline. This discipline can be strengthened through the grammatical analysis of their own papers. In these evaluations, which include error and stylistic analyses and a…

Formal grammar study is important in schools above the elementary level because it can lead to improved understanding of the nature and functions of language. Although newer grammars, based on structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar, have not met the needs of the schools, their potential should not be ignored with a return…

Modern linguistic theory offers two main contributions to the improvement of writing: readability and appropriateness. Readability can be developed by improving the correctness of forms used and achieved by carrying out an error analysis on the student's writing to provide insights into errors and clause structure. Linguists have determined that…

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…

Two developments in 20th-century grammar are discussed, focusing on aspects that may be useful in training teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL). The two developments are (1) the large descriptive grammars based on usage surveys, which give a systematic and detailed presentation of facts of usage, and (2) procedures for analyzing a…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

The serious student of language, English or foreign, and especially the future language teacher must receive a solid training not only in theoretical but also in applied syntax. Such a course should be offered at the advanced level and deal with the syntax of the language involved in a rigorously systematic way. The search for a systematic, yet…