PRESCRIPTIVE EG

Summary: Prenormative & prescriptive G made the 1st type of E-sh G-s which is known as prescientific G-s. They were of a purely descriptive character, they were accumulating linguistic facts & quite often suffered from influence of Latin G. Their main contribution in the theory of E-sh G. It can be trusted in syntax, where they reduce the number of principle parts of the sentence from 3 to 2. They developed the trichotomic sentence division, introduced the concept of the clause & introduced the idea of the phrase. Thus they were preparing the grounds for the rise of scientific G-s of E.

There were main ideas of pre-nominative G which lasted until the mid 18^th c. They are sprang up the 2^nd type of G— prescriptive or normative (pre-scientific) too but it proclaimed its aims explicitly.

Robert Lowth (1762) published the G “Short introduction to E-sh G”. There he wrote that the task of G to teach people to speak correctly & make them able to avoid false or wrong forms. Thus they said the 1^st task to prescribe correct forms & proscribe the wrong forms.

Prescriptivists refused to take the language of writers for an authority & instead they tried to solve all the disputable problems by applying to the laws of human reason. They believed that it is possible to work out the universal G which would be based on the laws of reason & logic. & these laws should be common to all languages. Those E forms which had no correspondence with Latin were abused & proscribed. E.g. Double negations were abused by R. Lowth. Like in mathematics 2 minuses refer a positive result, in the same way 2 negatives produce an affirmative sentences. Double comparatives like: lesser, worser. They succeeded in expelling these forms from usage. The construction: “it’s me ” - also abused & recommended form was: “ it’s I”, “it’s he” etc.

In prescriptive G the aim is dictating. The use of the prepositions: among, between was interchangeable until the beginning of the 18^th c. But R. Lowth analysed the ethimology of the word ‘b/w’ and found the root two. The preposition can be used referred to 2 objects. “Among” should be used in all other cases.

In the history of prescriptive G there can be traced 2 unequal periods: 1) mid 18-mid19c. (most prominent works by R. Lowth “Short Introduction to EG” (London 1762); Lindly Murray “EG adopted to different classes of learners”.2) mid 19-nowdays (famous scholars: Walter Mason “EG including grammatical analysis”; R. Fowler “EG”; Arthur Bain “A higher EG”; R. Close “A reference G for the students of E” (1979).

Achievements of prescriptive G in treating problems of theoretical G.

In morphology: there are no innovations because they practically borrowed the ideas of pre-nominative G.

In syntax: in prenominative G there were 3 principle parts of speech: subject, predicate, object. In prescriptive G the object was lead out of this number & began to be treated as the secondary part of the sentence because the object subordinated to the verb. Objects were classified: direct, indirect, prepositional. This classification though not very logical turned out to be popular & is in common use till nowdays.

Prescriptive G made a considerable contribution into the theory of the complex sentence. Until the mid 19^th c E-sh grammarians use dichotomic sentence division: simple, composite.

In the mid 19^th c grammarians turned to the trichotomic sentence division: simple, complex & compound (or composite). Also in the mid 19^th the term clause was to denote the structural part of complex sentences. And it was defined as a combination of the subject & predicate which however doesn’t produce a simple sentence. (clause—предикативная единица). Clauses were subdivided into: object, attributive, adverbial.

For the 1^st time in prescriptive G there appeared the notion of the phrase (словосочетание). R. Lowth defined it as a combination of any 2 words. The definition sounds ambiguous because a combination may be equal to a phrase.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02