QUESTION 22 - CLASSIC vs. DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

October 10, 2018

Based on our recent investigations, it came out that—surprisingly!—most linguists have absolutely no idea of what is the entire fuss about, with classic grammar and descriptive grammar. Naturally, ordinary people are completely out of the loop.

This is not good, dear friends, because our World has become a large village, lately. Therefore, important information (as is, say, social/economical/political contracts, scientific data, statistics, rates, new discoveries etc) need to be properly translated from English to other languages, and backwards. We can do that, but only if we use a single grammatical reference—an adequate one that covers all the possible and impossible aspects of grammar.

Descriptive grammar is just a limited, incomplete and, unfortunately, an incorrect interpretation of grammar. Why is that? How comes? Well, we are going to explain things, in some details, right on this page.

[Attention: theoretically, this article is addressed to (top) English language grammarians. However, it is also our intention to explain "things" as plain and logic as possible, so that (almost) anybody should get a solid grasp of the entire problem.]

1. grammar principles;
2. syntactic functions (+case analyses);
3. morphologic elements.

Grammatical processes specified above are going to be detailed, more or less, into the following paragraphs.



B. DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR ORIGINS

Whenever we intend to analyze something, the best thing possible is to start with a little bit of history, in order to explain "the cause" and "the roots" of things. As mentioned, descriptive grammar has captivated grammarians' attention after the 2^nd WW. What happened, the IT programmers (plus many other scientists) went on developing the protocols on theoretical requirements of AI [Artificial Intelligence].

As a result, a true AI needs to "understand" messages (to perfection), to learn from experience and from the environment (including from written texts), and then to express itself (also perfectly clear). Such specialized requirements mean one thing only: AI must know grammar!

Now, in order to program a machine to understand grammar, all grammatical aspects need to be dissected to the finest and simplest "forms"—of the "0/1" type, and that is extremely difficult to program. Consequently, teams of linguists, mathematicians, and programmers have elaborated a few "grammar protocols", each one developed as a new mathematical interpretation of grammar. Those were the very first "versions" of the future descriptive grammar.

Re-evaluated by O G POPA in LSEG4, it is sufficient to consider only sentences and expressions in a classic grammatical analysis. Accordingly, there are a few specific requirements for a sentence to become qualified as being a "syntactic sentence"; otherwise, it remains a "morphologic expression".
 

Descriptive grammar ends its analysis at group/phrase level, for each word, intentionally, so that it remains an "open system of endless possibilities"—the perfect ground for countless grammatical speculations. Fine with us; however, descriptive grammar has no practical value, in society, since it is totally useless.

The result today is, education throughout the World has no universal, correct, logic grammatical interpretations to sustain it. That is a pandemic tragedy that has already manifested itself in a global economy crisis, hectic and unpredictable international and national politics, plus in generalized terror, violence and vulgarism in our day to day social life. In addition, intelligent evolution, revolutionary inventions, plus advanced intellectual developments are all severely impaired, due to the blunt descriptive grammar's lack of universal communication (and of logic cohesion).

C.3 Another major characteristic of descriptive grammar is the fact that it works with the so called "morpho-syntax" methodology. This presumably implies that the linguists are free to mix syntactical notions with the morphological ones, to their hearts' content. Sorry, Sir, but it doesn't work that way. Morphology and Syntax domains have too little in common; in order to relate morphological elements to syntactical functions we need to perform a "case analysis" first.

The category of case works as an indicator, to help us relate one specific morphologic element to the corresponding syntactic functionality it has, within its particular sentence structure. Unfortunately, the case has never been thoroughly investigated by the (English) linguists, since ever, therefore most grammar books (and particularly those published in the English nations) do not present (and they do not work properly with) the category of case. That results in a mumbo-jumbo of grammar.

It is worth highlighting here that O G POPA has investigated the category of case as never before in grammar history. Consequently, grammatical correspondence between morphology and syntax, via the (proper) case, has become perfectly functional, logic, and . . . it simplifies the theory a lot! Sure, except, all those advanced wonderful developments of grammar are currently unpublished, for the time being.  
 

1. Particularly important—fundamentally, in fact—in PFEG are presented the requirements needed to qualify sentences as being syntactical and/or morphological.
2. The entire Morphology is presented in a most simple and logic pedagogical format, to help the students most.
3. The mechanism of "Relational-Logic Syntactic Framework" [© O G POPA] simplifies the entire Sentence Syntax functionality dramatically, to just "the bare bones".
4. The backbone of Sentence Syntax, the Predicate, is presented correctly, as never before in grammar history.
5. Sentence Syntax analysis is seamlessly extended to Complex Sentence Syntax analysis.
6. Fundamental notions of (the literary) Style, particularly those that take precedence over grammar, are explained in "live" discriminating examples.
7. Using Punctuation to control grammar comes in a complete, compact presentation, marked by exhaustive examples + comments.
8. Plus many, many more tiny aspects needed to assembly a complete, pedagogical, grammatical instrument: the simplest possible, entirely functional and logic, and valid for any language on the Planet (and in the Universe).