Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 20
amat ‘he or she or it loves’
amāmus ‘we love’
amātis ‘you (plural) love’
amant ‘they love’
The amount of space given over to other matters was comparatively constrained.
This experience gave rise to the idea that grammar was a matter of
such paradigms. Thus the idea arose that Latin had a lot of grammar, while
English hardly had any (because there is very little to put in equivalent paradigms,
as people discovered when they started trying to write English grammars
on the model of the Latin ones they knew). So we have a meaning of
grammar, perhaps now no longer encountered, according to which grammar
dealt with the shapes of the words (i.e. what we would now call morphology,
specifically inflectional morphology) and the uses to which those words could
be put (typically in sections with titles like ‘The uses of the ablative’ or ‘The
uses of the subjunctive’). This latter part, relatively undeveloped in most
grammar books from before the twentieth century, deals with putting words
together to make sentences, i.e. with syntax. So grammar meant (and still
means for some) ‘morphology and syntax’, specifically here excluding anything
to do with the sound structure of language or the vocabulary of the
language.
Traditional grammar
This picture of what grammar is and what grammar does, deriving from
the classical Greek and Latin traditions, was handed down in Western
society for generations, and remained virtually intact for language-teaching
purposes well into the twentieth century. Each word is assigned to a part of
speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.), of which there are often said
to be eight. These are assumed as given categories (see the section 5).
School students traditionally showed their mastery of the system by considering
each word in a text in turn, and explaining what cell in the
paradigm it came from. This is called parsing, and involves looking at a
word like amāmus and saying that it is the first person plural of the present
tense indicative of the verb amo ‘I love’, for example. Students were also
expected to write on the basis of the classical models provided. We can call
this picture of what grammar is and does ‘traditional grammar’. The extent
to which such methods encouraged good writing, which was clearly the
aim, is perhaps best left unexplored, although it should be recalled that
until the nineteenth century, most of the people being taught to read and
write were those who had the leisure and frequently the desire to learn the
skills well.