Structural Linguistics
The first method of grammatical analysis that developed from the concept of the phoneme was structural linguistics. At present this approach is widely studied in colleges and universities and is taught in some secondary schools. A grammarian following the structural approach does not concern himself with words and their meanings, which cannot be readily and objectively measured, but concentrates on phonemes and on structure, which is the way units occur in sentences. Individual speech sounds, or phonemes, are built up into meaningful units of language, called morphemes. An example of a morpheme is hed, which is equivalent to the word “head.” However, if two morphemes are joined together, they constitute what structural grammarians call a phrase. For example, the morpheme hed plus the morpheme z, which is the sign of the plural, together constitute the phrase hedz, which is equivalent to the word “heads.”
Aside from analyzing the morphemes in a sentence, structural grammarians also take into account other factors that determine the sound pattern of a sentence. These factors include pitch (highness or lowness of sound), stress (degree of emphasis), and juncture (pauses between words or parts of words).
In structural grammar the parts of speech are defined by their function and position in the pattern of the sentence. For example, a noun is described as the kind of word that can serve as a subject and that is likely to end in an -s or -z sound in the plural or to have a particle like the, a, or an before it. Units like “the” and “forty” are called determiners, not adjectives, because they do not work in a sentence as do such adjectives as “red” and “noisy.” For similar reasons, words like “very” and “greatly” are called in-tensifiers, not adverbs.
Some new grammars are generative; that is, they describe the generation, or birth, of a sentence. These grammars analyze language in the process of being used rather than language that has already been used or written down. The first of such grammars to be developed is known as transformational grammar. This method consists of describing certain basic sentences, called kernel sentences, and then stating formulas by which these can be transformed into other types of sentences, called transforms. An example of a kernel sentence is “Girls studied.” Transforms of this kernel can include “The girls were studying” and “Were the girls studying?” Grammarians using the transformational approach have developed specific formulas for all the various forms that a sentence can take. Transformational grammar differs from structural grammar in its greater reliance on the meaning of words. It also relies more on words and less on morphemes.
Other new types of grammatical analysis include tagmemic grammar, which breaks up sentences into tagmemes, or natural parts, and string grammar, which puts emphasis on the morphemes as they are strung along in the sentence. At this time no one can predict which of these approaches, if any, will even tually become the standard grammatical description for modern English. However, they all illustrate that grammarians produce different descriptions of grammar, depending on the assumptions with which they begin.