The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

Part of the Grade Teacher special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

The function of syntax as a factor in comprehension is described in terms of transformations of basic sentence patterns. Examples of transformations of the basic indirect object sentence are included to show emphasis, questions, negations, and coordinate or subordinate relationships. The term grammeme is defined as the minimum unit of syntactical…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

Strengths and weaknesses of generative grammar are examined by an apologist for the traditionalists. Criticism is directed toward difficulties encountered by the layman in comprehending texts on linguistic theories, linguists' use of jargon and pet formulas, and unwieldy amounts of terminology constantly being developed. Special attention is…

Sentence combining practices works best as a skill-building adjunct to regular composition work. (JH)

This paper proposes a set of hypotheses on the nature of interrogration as a possible language universal. Examples and phrase structure rules and diagrams are given. Examining Tamazight and English, genetically unrelated languages with almost no contact, the author distinguishes two types of interrogation: (1) general, querying acceptability to…

A review of the background of transformational grammar and a discussion of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" begin this introduction to the "new" grammar. Following discussions are on the components of a theoretically complete grammar, the main deep structure components (noun phrase, auxiliary, and verb phrase), grammatical relationships,…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE SELECTION OF A PEDAGOGICAL NORM FOR FRENCH INTERROGATIVE STRUCTURES. SINCE THIS AREA OF FRENCH GRAMMAR IS PARTICULARLY POLYMORPHOUS, OBJECTIVE CRITERIA ARE SET UP TO MAKE THE SELECTION--FREQUENCY, COMPLEXITY, AND EXTENSIVITY. BECAUSE "EST-CE QUE" CAN BE APPLIED WITHOUT EXCEPTION TO ALL TYPES OF KERNEL SENTENCES, IT WAS…