Structural Approach to English: A Memorandum (II)

In this report the author intends to survey how the structure of Modern English is analyzed and described by structural linguistics, and at the same time to clarify what fundamental notions and principles underlie that new approach to language structure. The author often does not hesitate to offer critical opinions on some radical points in structural grammar. The main topics here treated are as follows: (1) A Historical Survey of English Grammars. Greco-Roman tradition of linguistic analysis. Traditional school grammar. Authoritarian prescriptivism. Comparative and historical linguistics and traditional scientific grammar. Descriptivism as against prescriptivism. American school of structural linguistics and its historical survey. Formalism and behaviorism. Non-evaluational attitude toward usage. Generative grammar-explicit and formal. The explanation of the native speaker's competence and performance. A synthesis of various approaches to English grammar. (2) Grammar and its Analysis. The distributional analysis of the 'chain of speech.' The morphological structure and the syntactic structure. The five grammatical units. Sentence grammar and supra-sentence grammar. The internal structure and the distributional function of linguistic forms. Immediate constituent analysis. The constituent, the constituent class, and the grammatical function. The fundamental notions and principles of English morphology and syntax. The formal identification and classification of 'parts of speech.' The grammatical devices that signal the constituent-structure grammar of the sentence. (3) The Separation and Combination of the Formal Approach and the Notional Approach. (4) The Separation and Combination of the Diachronic Approach and the Synchronic Approach