The history of grammar theory
The syntactic study of the simple sentence did not advance greatly till the middle of the century. By the time Lowth’s grammar appeared the concept of the principal parts of the sentence had been already elaborated to the number of three. The terminology was rather unsettled. Lowth distinguished an agent, an attribute (i. e. the predicate) and an object. The definitions of the first and second parts of the sentence corresponded to the definitions of the logical subject and predicate. The object was defined as the thing affected by the action of the verb. There was no advance in the conception of the secondary parts of the sentence. Besides the principal parts, Lowth mentioned adjuncts without further differentiation on the syntactic level.
The theory of the compound sentence, dating from the beginning of the 18th century, was during this period at an absolute standstill. The definitions in the grammars of the first half of the century were practically the same as in J. Brightland's grammar, where they first occurred.
The principal feature of a compound sentence, as it was understood at that time, is that it comprises more than one subject or nominative word and verb, expressed or understood. Sentences were therefore classed as compound, when a punctuation unit contained two or more subject-predicate groups, connected by subordinating or coordinating conjunctions, or when there was a single subject-predicate group with coordinate members.
The classification of conjunctions corresponded to the classification of compound propositions or judgments in logic. All conjunctions were divided according to their meaning, but without regard to their syntactic nature, into copulatives and disjunctives. The notions of subordination and coordination were still unknown.
The second part of syntax, which treated the "construction of words", was more developed. In Lowth's grammar the word "phrase" came to be used as a grammatical term, defined as follows: "A Phrase is two or more words rightly put together to make a part of a Sentence and sometimes making a whole Sentence." The concept of the phrase occupies an important place in Murray's grammar and the grammars of his successors, who described the kinds of phrases and the relations between the words making up a phrase.
Though the grammatical system created by the grammarians by the middle of the 19th century (especially in syntax) still differed from that known in traditional grammar of the present period, a great number of prescriptions and rules formulated and fixed by the authority of the grammarians remain in grammars of the modern period. One important series of prescriptions that now forms part of all grammars had its origin in this period, namely the rules for the formation of the Future Tense. The rule was first stated by J. Wallis, and since that time it has been repeated by all grammarians, at first in its archaic form, as formulated by Wallis.
The rule that two negatives destroy one another or are equivalent to an affirmative, was first stated in J. Greenwood's Royal English Grammar in the first half of the 18th century, the influence of Lowth's grammar helped to fix it.
It was in the second half of the 19th century that the development of the grammatical scheme of the prescriptive grammar was completed. The grammarians arrived at a system now familiar, because it has since been adopted by a long succession of grammarians of the 19th and 20th centuries. The best prescriptive grammars of the period, like C. P. Mason's English Grammar (London, 1858) and A. Bain's Higher English Grammar (London, 1863), paved the way for the first scientific grammar of English.
The description of the morphological system in grammars of the second half of the 19th century changed very little as compared with that of grammars of the first half of the century, but the explanation of grammatical forms became more detailed, expressing of a deeper understanding of the nature of the phenomena discussed. Some important changes, however, took place in the description of the syntactic system, though the definition of the sentence remained logical, as a combination of words expressing a complete thought. But the concept of the parts of the sentence differs greatly from that of the grammars of the first half of the 19th century. The changes and innovations concerned both the principal and the secondary parts of the sentence. The number of the principal parts of the sentence was reduced to two - the subject and the predicate, which retained their logical definitions. In this period the grammarians make an attemps to differentiate logical and grammatical subjects and predicates. The former are represented by single words, the latter include word groups with subjects and predicates as head words. A little later subjects and predicates expressed by one word came to be distinguished simple or essential subjects and predicates, and those expressed by a word group as complete subjects and predicates.
The objects came to be viewed as a secondary or dependent (subordinate) part of the sentence in the light of the newly developed theory of subordination and coordination of sentence elements and the introduction into grammar of the content aspect of syntactic relations, such as predicative, attributive, objective and/or adverbial relations.
Thus the notion of the attribute came to be applied, instead of the predicate to a relation expressed by a secondary part of the sentence and adjuncts were subdivided into attributive (also attributival or adnominal) and adverbial adjuncts, which was the first differentiation of the secondary parts of the sentence on a syntactic level.
The objects were classified according to their meaning and form as direct, indirect and prepositional. This classification, though inconsistent logically, is accepted by many grammarians of the modern period. Objects and subjects as well were further classified as compound (i. e. coordinate), complex (expressed by infinitive groups or subordinate clauses), etc.
Besides the object and two kinds of adjuncts, some new notions and terms developed, either as synonyms for the already defined syntactic units or used in a slightly different meaning to describe some new syntactic units, which contributed to a more detailed sentence analysis.
Syntactic processes operate to derive a more complicated structure from a simpler one.
The notion of completion of the meaning of transitive or copulative verbs, defined as verbs of incomplete predication, may be understood as a designation of a syntactic process.
A very important innovation in the concept of the compound sentence was its subdivision into the compound sentence proper, with coordinated component parts, and the complex sentence, characterized by subordination of clauses. In this way the dichotomic classification of sentences into simple and compound was changed into a tricholomic division, according to which sentences are divided into simple, compound and complex. This theory has since been accepted with very few exceptions by prescriptive, classical scientific and some structural as well as transformational grammars. The recognition and differentiation of the two principal syntactic modes of joining subject-predicate units, subordination and coordination (the former expressing syntactic dependence and the latter — equality of syntactic rank), was a great advance in the development of grammatical theory. Of great interest also is the elaboration of the concept of a clause as a syntactic unit containing a noun and a finite verb and forming part of a complex or compound sentence. Clauses are classified as independent and dependent or coordinate and subordinate. The latter were also classified morphologically as noun, adjective and adverb clauses, because grammarians considered clauses to be of the nature of a word, and not of a part of the sentence. These three kinds of clauses were further subdivided according to their syntactic functions in the sentence.
The concept of the compound sentence in the new sense, as containing independent clauses or sentences, did not, it seems, satisfy those grammarians who had gained a deeper insight into the nature of the grammatical phenomena described in their grammars. They give examples illustrating the possibility of isolating the parts of the compound sentences, of pronouncing each part of such a sentence by itself, without any change of meaning or intonation and they stress the complete independence of each part.
The concept of the phrase has been retained in the grammars of the second half of the 19th century, though not all grammarians use this term, describing the syntax of the parts of speech instead. The phrase is differentiated from the clause, as containing no finite verb.
The Rise of Classical Scientific Grammar. By the end of the 19th century, after the description of the grammatical system, especially that of syntax had been completed, prescriptive grammar had reached the peak of its development. A need was fell, therefore, for a grammar of a higher type, which could give a scientific explanation of the grammatical phenomena. The appearance of H. Sweet's New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (1891) met this demand. As Sweet wrote in his Preface: "This work is intended to supply the want of a scientific English grammar." The difference in purpose between scientific and prescriptive grammar is stated in the following terms: "As my exposition claims to be scientific, I confine myself to the statement and explanation of facts, without attempting to settle the relative correctness of divergent usages. If an ‘ungrammatical’ expression such as it is me is in general use among educated people, I accept it as such, simply adding that it is avoided in the literary language." This was a new approach, in keeping with the Doctrine of General Usage which had been first formulated by an 18th-century grammarian, a contemporary of Lowth's, J. Priestley, in his Rudiments of English Grammar. But Priestley's views had been rejected, as we have seen, in favour of the Doctrine of Rules or Correctness. Sweet clearly stales the new viewpoint: "...whatever is in general use in language is for that reason grammatically correct." Scientific grammar was understood by its authors to be a combination of both descriptive and explanatory grammar. The same views on the purpose and methods of scientific grammar were held by 20th-century linguists.
ENGLISH GRAMMARS IN THE 20th CENTURY
(THE SECOND PERIOD)
The modern period may be divided into two chronologically unequal parts, the first from the beginning of the 20lh century till the 1940's, when there were only two types of grammars in use —the prescriptive and the classical scientific, the second from the 1940's, during which time structural grammar, and then transformational have been added. As has been pointed out, structural grammar tended to supplant the older scientific grammar, which we call classical in order to distinguish it from the new theoretical grammars of English.
There is a borrowing of some of the concepts of prescriptive and classical scientific grammars by the authors of both structural and transformational grammars, especially in the field of syntax, which proves that structural grammar has not quite succeeded in breaking with traditional grammar to the degree that is proclaimed by the authors of these grammars, while transformational grammar, as professed by its exponents, is closer to traditional grammar, than descriptivism.
Prescriptive Grammars in the Modern Period. Among the 20th-century prescriptive grammars which are of some interest, J. C. Nesfield’s grammar should be mentioned. Although published at the end of the 19th century (1898), it exerted a certain influence on prescriptive and even scientific grammars of the 20th century, comparable to the influence of Murray's grammar upon 19th-century grammars. The editions which preceded the revision continued the tradition of 19th century grammar: morphology was treated as it had been in the first half of the 19th century, syntax, in the second half of that century. Of the various classifications of the parts of the sentence current in the grammars of the second half of the 19th century the author chose a system, according to which the sentence has four distinct parts: (1) the Subject; (2) Adjuncts to the Subject (Attributive Adjuncts, sometimes called the Enlargement of the Subject); (3) the Predicate; and (4) Adjuncts of the Predicate (Adverbial Adjuncts); the object and the complement (i. e. the predicative) with their qualifying words, however, are not treated as distinct parts of the sentence. They are classed together with the finite verb as