Grammar

1. Traditional Grammar

The predominant content of traditional grammar is to classify parts of speech or word classes, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction and article. Meanwhile, it provides the description of language structure in terms of agreement, which should consider the function of “number”, “gender”, “voice” and “person”. Gender can be dissected into two parts, natural gender and grammatical gender. Natural gender is derived from biological distinction between male and female. However, grammatical gender is based on masculine and feminine.

Tense: it refers to the moment of speaking, past tense and present tense.

Aspect: it refers to the specific time of an event, progressive and perfective aspect.

2. Two approaches

 2.1 Prescriptive approach: the structure of English sentences should be like the structure of sentences in Latin, so most rules for English grammar is originated from Latin language.

As a consequence, it is found that some rules may not be inappropriate for English grammar, for example, you must not split an infinitive.

2.2 Descriptive approach: Analysts collected samples of language they were interested in and attempted to describe the regular rules of language as it was used, not according to some view of how it should be used.

3. Analysis

3.1 Traditional analysis: it mainly focuses on the parts of speech or word classes, agreement, tense, aspect, etc.

3.2 Structural analysis: it creates some new categories (noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.) by the use of “test-frames”.

3.3 Constituent analysis: it illustrates the structure, relationship and hierarchy between constituents by the use of “a labeled and bracketed diagram”. Moreover, it not only makes the combination of words, phrases and sentences more explicit, but applies to other languages.