Descriptive grammar

Definition:
It is a grammar that "describes" how language is used by its speakers. A descriptive grammar looks at the way a language is actually used by its speakers and then attempts to analyse it and formulate rules about the structure.
For example:
I am older than her.
An individual can update their profile with their name and address.
I graduated Japan university.
I graduated from Japan university. (standard usage)

TYPES OF DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
Non-Structural Descriptive Grammar
Structural Descriptive Grammar

Non-Structural Descriptive Grammar
Henry Sweet (1845–1912).
His work New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (1891).
Otto Jespersen(1860–1943)
The Philosophy of Grammar (1924)

Henry Sweet
Parts of speech are syntactic categories – they manifest themselves in the sentence as relational categories: the noun is related to the verb, the adverb is related to the verb, the preposition is related to the noun, the adjective is related to the noun.

Otto Jespersen(1860–1943)
His theory is set out in The Philosophy of Grammar (1924)
He proposes three principles of classification – meaning, form, and function.

Otto Jespersen(1860–1943)
The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) is based on the concepts of ranks distinguished in predication and subordination.
The term rank is used of successive levels of subordination, or dependency.

The Philosophy of Grammar
E.g. very cold water.
water has the highest rank and is a primary;
cold has the next highest rank and is a
secondary;
very has the lowest and is a tertiary.(третичный )

The Philosophy of Grammar
Otto Jespersen(1860–1943)
He (primary) writes (secondary) a letter (primary) every day(tertiary).
This sentence contradicts his theory of ranks since a letter is

Non-Structural Descriptive Grammar
Descriptivist's focus their attention on actual usage without trying “to settle the relative correctness of divergent(расходящийся)usages”
Descriptivist's rely on the English of the best authors of their day as well as the English of the past. To them, change in language is not associated with corruption;
Descriptivists use meaning and function in their definition of parts of speech.

Structural Descriptive Grammar
Leonard Bloomfield
Language (1925-1930)
Charles Fries (1956 )

Structural Descriptive Grammar
English was regarded as a language having its specific structure, and the task of a linguist was to reveal it by using scientific (i.e. formal) methods of analysis.
Meaning as a criterion was not reliable since, being unobservable,it could be interpreted differently by different linguists.
The linguist was to devise formal methods of analysis and replace meaning by form;
The linguist must be interested in what he observes, i.e. objective data.

Structural Descriptive Grammar
Smaller units are built into larger units(phonemes and morphemes ).
Lexemes serve to build the largest unit, the sentence.

Structural grammarians have pointed out four devices used in English to indicate structural meaning:
1) word form;
2) function words;
3) word order;
4) intonation and accent
patterns (prosodic patterns).

Function words having little or no lexical meaning of their own, they serve to vary the functions of the lexical words.
E.x. The mother of the boy will arrive tomorrow.
The words mother, boy, arrive, and tomorrow have meaning in themselves quite apart from their grammatical relation, or meaning, in the sentence

Structural grammarians used formal methods of linguistic analysis, such as immediate constituent,distribution, substitution, transformation (deletion, permutation, etc.).
The term immediate constituents (IC) was introduced by L. Bloomfield

The aim of IC (immediate constituent) analysis is to discover and demonstrate the interrelationships of the words in a linguistic structure – the sentence or the word-combination.

Immediate constituent analysis
Ex.: Poor John ran away
sentence could be described by a traditional grammarian as a simple sentence whose subject is a nounphrase,made up of the noun John modified by the adjective poor, and whose
predicate is a verb-phrase consisting of the verb ran modified by the adverb away.

The analysis of the sentence Poor John ran away can be represented
graphically in a number of ways:
a) we may use brackets: (Poor/John) (ran/away)
b) we may construct a tree diagram:
The words ran and away are the immediate constituents of another construction (layer) indicated by ‘node’
The two constructions Poor John and ran away are the immediate constituents of the highest-level construction, the sentence itself.