traditional grammar summary

Arum Dwi H
A320080135 Summary 1
Friday, March 04, 2011

TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR
In this section we will follow the development of some of these fundamental ideas and see that it was the medieval that developed a more sophisticated semantic theory.
A. Medieval Linguistic Theory
The world of thrax, discolus was a comparatively orderly one, which favored the flow of informational and the development of the scholarly idea of one’s predecessor. This continuity was broken with the fall of the Roman Empire, which resulted in a period of political and intellectual chaos. There was a brief revival of learning in Europe during the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century, but it lost its impetus with the death of Charlemagne. Another intellectual revival gathered momentum in the elevens and the twelve centuries when works in Aris Totle.
Peter helias
The most respected grammar of the medieval period was that of Priscian. His based his grammatical descriptions on the writing and speech of the best models available to him. in the twelfth century a new method of explaining the regularities of Latin was introduced. Beginning with the Peter Helies, commentary on Priscian’s grammar. The time was favorable for change. Both Latin pronunciations and usage different from the classic models, since in the universities, which were open to students from many countries. Latin was a living language for international communication. The new pronunciation and grammar were preferred in spite the lack of correspondence with classical norms. Instead of basing their rules for correct usage on the ancients, the medieval under the influence of the logical approach to all problems, began to appeal to what they considered the inherent logic of their language. For this reason this period was called that of the “legalization of grammar”.
Petrus hispanus
As the work of helias’s indicates, little progress was made in the twelve century in the formal analysis of language with the exception of the breaking up and substantial and adjectival nouns into the more familiar classifications of nouns and adjectives. What the logicians added, however, was a more refined way of discussing the semantic aspect of language. Grammarians of his period, following aris totle and the stoics, gave positive class meaning to the part of speech in term of aris totle’s categories: the noun means “substance” or “quality”, the verbs meant “action” or “passivity”, and so on. With the development of further logical studies there came a subtle but important shift in emphasis, which can be accounted for in terms of linguistic form. Instead a discussing what a part means, the logician began to discuss how a part signifies something. This shift was a consequence of two developments: a more refined psychological theory and a more detail method of studying how expressions have meaning when they are constructions with the other expressions of the language.
MEANING
The general term that Hispanic used which corresponds to our vague expression “meaning is “signification”, define as “the representation of a thing through a conventional vocal sound”. Of course, this is a paraphrase of Aristotle definition of “voice”, but because of the more developed psychological theories of Hispanus’s day, the “representation” was not restricted to that of sensitive imagery. The “things” that could be represented were any of the products in the various stage of knowledge discussed earlier in this chapter.
TYPES OF SUPPOSITION
After distinguishing of two basic types of meaningful expression in the kind of language he examined (that is, categorematic and syncatagorematic). Hispanic review some facets of “meaning modification” for the categorematic terms. He distinguished: first: between formal and material supposition. This distinction is readily appreciated by comparing the use of John in the two sentences “John is my friend” and “John is a noun”. In the first example John represent formal, or personal, supposition, since in the expression is interpreted for the object it was intended to designate. In the second example, John is taken in material supposition, that is, as a name not for a noun linguistics object but for itself.
Hispanus studies were undertaken for a limited goal, which concerned the formalization of Latin for the purposes of logic, and especially for dialectic. As a result, he studied only a limited number of the total constructions of the language. But because of the nature of his work he came to show very clearly that the parts of speech could not be studied profitably in insulation but only in constructions in which they actually occurred. He also showed, in his examination of sophisms, that constructions with identical grammatical relations could be interpreted in more than one way, so that neither the pretended lexical definitions of the parts of speech (“a noun is the name of a person, place or thing”) nor the mere grammatical discussions of the functions each part typically assumed (the so-called modes of meaning) could solve problems of ambiguity.
Because they concerned themselves with these “modes” of being, understanding, and signifying, those who wrote the speculative grammars, which were entitled “on the modes of signification,” were called Modistae. They flourished in the late thirteenth and fourth teen centuries at the height of the scholastic period. What they had in common was not, as in often thought, a coherent and agreed on philosophy but a common logical and dialectic method. Just as there was no single philosophy that could be called “scholastic” as far as content was concerned, there was no common doctrine concerning how the various modes are related. The manner in which the modes are related were seen to depend on the particular kind of ontology (what there is to know), psychology (how we know what we know), and semantics (how we signify what we know) that was held. The modistae were in agreement about two things:
1. The basic kinds of modes there are and
2. How these modes are principally expressed.
The different sorts of modes were expressed in terms in Aristotles’ catagories, and there were only ten of them: the typical expressions of these modes were to be sought in the Latin language, as analyzed by Priscian.
ETYMOLOGY
One way in which the meaning of an expression was assigned by the medieval – a method skill often used today- was to consider its etymology. There was a little accurate information about the history and development of language at the time, although Latin and Greek texts from various periods were available for comparison. It was simply a known that language did change. In particular that the medieval form of Latin was not that of the classic period. The medieval were also well aware of the existence of many other languages, but few were interested in learning language other than those in which the Scriptures had been written or into which they had been translated. It should be clear then that the definition the medieval gave “etymology” was not what we would expect to find in a modern dictionary.
Further quotations from Isidore’s work will indicate the kind of information it’s contain. We can also see how little “folk etymology” has progress over the centuries:
- Different language
- Different nations
- Grammar
PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
When we discussing traditional grammar in America or England we are referring to two main sets of data: the general and speculative views about the nature of the language, which we have seen developed from the Greek period and the work of a number of English grammarians in the eighteenth century who subscribed to these views. It will be useful to inquire about the kind of information of they had about language and the work that had been done before the definitive character was given of English grammar in the eighteenth century.
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR VERSUS LINGUISTIC
We can briefly compare the position of the traditional grammarians and the linguistics in the following outline. By traditional grammar is meant the basically Aristotelian orientations toward the nature of language as exemplified in the work of the ancient Greek and Roman, the speculative work of the medieval, and the prenscriptive approach of eighteenth century grammarians. By linguistic is meant the empirical, structural approach to language as represented principally by American linguistics during the period of the early 1930s to mid 1950s, since this is the work best known to those of the traditional approach. Since the comparison focuses on the extremes of both groups, it is probably fair to no single worker.
Differences between structural and traditional grammar
1. By defining classes and assigning rules for language based on meaning. Traditional grammars proceed, subjectively, explaining how important features of language can be related to me.
2. Traditional grammars appear to assign the reason why certain grammatical features of a language occur, and how they must behave.
3. Traditional grammar confuses levels of analysis that can be easily distinguished by using expressions such as “understood as” or “used in place of” to describe the overlap in the class membership of morphologically defined classes. In a sentence like “walking is healthful”. Walking is often said to be “considered as a noun”
4. The fact that traditional grammar is generally understood is due to its cultural history.
5. Because the Greek investigations of language started with logic. Traditional grammar has unthinkingly taken the declarative sentence as “basic.”
6. Traditional grammarians accuse the structuralism of giving no explanations of language.
It has the strength case each others:
A. The strength of traditional grammar
1. It is the most widespread, influential, and best understood method of discussing Indo-European language in the western world.
2. It is fairly well understood and consistently applied by most of those who teach it and have studied it. Many grammars of many languages are available.
3. It is humanistic in origin and therefore an answer, however, inadequate, to the kind of problems it raises.
4. It distinguishes rational, emotional, automatic and purely conventional types of discourse in theory, if not in grammatical practice.
5. It gives a fairly thorough and consistent analysis of the declarative sentence, the most frequently used type in written and spoken discourse.
6. It contains a theory of reference by which the meaning of declarative sentences can be explained and to which other uses may be reduced.
7. It is the vehicles by meant of which ordinary students and scholars have mastered many languages successfully for centuries.
B. The weakness:
1. It is normative
2. It suggest that usages which are not amenable to its rules are “ungrammatical”
3. It is based mainly on European language
4. While giving a reasonable account of Latin and Greek, its has distinction of morphology and syntax result in an inadequate notion of “modification” and of the criteria for “part of speech”.
5. It does not adequately distinguish.

C. The strength of structural grammar
1. It is empirical
2. It examines of language
3. The uniqueness of each language is recognized and done justice
4. It describes the minimum
D. The weakness
1. For many linguist only the descriptions language and not its explanation has been the goal of their discipline.
2. It prescinds from psychological factors that are important to all speakers
3. It has produced almost no complete grammars comparable to the exhaustive treatments by traditional method , concentrating on critical studies of how grammars should be written.
4. Some linguist has examined all forms of discourse on the same level.
5. It is difficult to attach importance to their statements that meaning has been avoided.