English grammar as a field of knowledge in terms of its historical development

One of the areas of the English language with the richest history, as well as an abundance of rules, phenomena, grammatical structures and forms, undoubtedly, is grammar. In this subsection, we decided to dwell on its various forms and interpretations in the course of history. The term “grammar” itself appeared from the Greek word “grammatike”, where the “gram” component denoted “written”, and part of the word tike translated as “art”. Accordingly, the term was originally understood by the Greeks as "the art of writing." The ancient Greeks, like the ancient Romans, considered this word as a common name for all means of language. In the Middle Ages, under the "grammar" understood the study of the Latin language, because he then occupied the role of the language of international communication and everything that in one form or another was associated with the letter, belonged to Latin. Such an understanding of grammar existed in England until the end of the 16th century. The grammar of the Latin language was the only one that was taught in schools. Accordingly, up to this point, English grammars did not exist in our usual form. For the first time, the English grammar was described in the book by U. Bullocar entitled “A Brief English Grammar” (orig. “Bref Grammar of English”) and published in 1585.

It is authentically known that U. Bullokar has a lot in common with U. Lily’s “GrammaticaeRudimenta” (published in 1534 the Latin grammar officially endorsed by Henry VIII as the only one suitable for study at school), on the basis of which he created his. When writing his work, U.Bullokar adhered to his only goal: to facilitate students' understanding of grammars of other languages. The most significant in the course of the history of English grammar was published in 1762 "A brief introduction to English grammar" (orig. "A brief introduction to English Grammar" by R.Lout. This work marked the beginning of a period of prescriptive grammar, an area consisting of a series of rules prescribing exactly which norms and rules are acceptable in English speech and how to use them in the process of various kinds of communication in English. Is a closer understanding of grammar more modern l by the end of the 19th century, marked by the emergence of scientific (descriptive or descriptive)grammar.

Representatives of this concept were of the opinion that grammar is a systematic description of the structure of the language [2, p. 8] Also, this period was marked by the conflict between two schools of thought. they believed that the rules of the Greek and Latin languages were applicable to the English language, while others insisted that English grammar should be studied separately from them. The well-known author of grammatical collections of the time, Lindley Murray, supported the idea that the grammatical realities and phenomena of the English language were fundamentally different from ancient Greek or Latin. Among other things, the period from the 19th to the 20th century was marked by the release of a number of dictionaries, such as John Pickering’s Dictionary of Americanism (1816), James Murray’s New Dictionary of Historical Principles in English (1879), later renamed "Oxford English Dictionary". These dictionaries have played a very significant role in separating the English grammar in the modern sense from the comprehensive concept of “grammar,” which took place over a rather long period of time. In the 20th century, the growth and codification of the English language continued at a rather rapid pace. One of the key dates at this stage was the year 1926, when

Henry Fowler published the first edition of the Dictionary of Modern English, and the grammar player Hendrik Putsma - The Grammar of the Latest English.

A huge number of words expanded the vocabulary of the English language, most of which had Greek and Latin roots, but another part migrated from the British colonies. The beginning and rapid development of globalization processes and the establishment of English as an international language are evidenced by the fact that in the 1950s the number of people who speak English as a foreign language exceeded the number of speakers of this language Lithuanian scientists LaimutisValejka and YaninaBitkine note that, historically, Considering the difference in principles, methods and objectives, the grammar is usually divided into traditional (prescriptive and non-structural), structural-descriptive and transformational-generative (transformational generative). Let us dwell on the characteristics of each species in more detail. Traditional grammar was the foundation of modern grammar and originated in ancient Greece and Rome.

Formally, the period before the emergence of structural linguistics as a science falls under the definition of traditional grammar. Accordingly, this type of grammar is divided into two subspecies - prescriptive (prescientific) and descriptive (scientific). Traditional grammar is rooted in the principles formulated by the scholars of Ancient Greece and Rees - Dionysius Thrax, Plato, Aristotle, etc. In his works, D. Trax identifies two descriptive units - the sentence that defines the upper limit of the grammatical description and the word, respectively, is minimal descriptive unit. He defines the sentence as "expressing a complete thought." The words that make up a sentence he first calls meros logos, which in Greek means parts of a sentence. His main merit at that time was that he was one of the first to divide the entire lexical volume of a language into different parts of speech, depending on the functions it performs. For each of the parts of his speech, D. Trucks selected various characteristics, that is, in his own words, grammatically significant differences between the forms of words, including the derived signs and signs, which appear in the endings. Lithuanian authors cite as an example a number of signs of a noun according to D. Trax:

• 1)    The gender is male, female, middle;

• 2)    Type - initial form and derivative;

• 3)    Form - simple or compound;

• 4)    The number is singular, dual, plural;

• 5)    A case - nominative, nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. If we talk about the verb, then he has identified a number of characteristics that are taking place up to the present moment - inclination, appearance, voice, form, number, face, time and declension. It is worth noting that the interpretation of parts of D. Trucks' speech is relevant in our time, but its main drawback was the lack of classification syntax, which was later considered in the works of AppolonDiscolia. The traditional approach in ancient Rome is almost completely connected with the author of the first grammar of the Latin language in 25 volumes of Varro. Basing his research on grammar on the basis of Greek, which had many common features with Latin, Varro modified the interpretation of D. Trax and began to distinguish between the formation of various forms of words and the formation of single-root words. Let us proceed to the next stage in the development of grammatical thought — prescriptive grammar. As mentioned earlier, until the end of the 16th century, the only grammar taught in schools was the Latin grammar. The purpose of this was to teach the English to read, write, and implement conversation in this language, which was considered the single language of Eastern Europe.

At the sunset of the Renaissance, in view of a number of cultural and social prerequisites, there was a desire to start learning other languages. Scientists have turned their attention to the living languages of Europe. Continuing the study of Greek and Latin, they were no longer focused only on them, but paid attention to a number of other languages. It is not surprising that the English grammars that appeared at that time were based strictly on their predecessors in Latin, since Latin was used for centuries as the main language for communication, it was perceived as something ideal. Thus, scientists tried to adjust the realities and norms of English under the "gold" standards set by the Latin language. The first grammars of this period were prescriptive in nature, and the most significant of them was the grammar of R. Lout mentioned above, entitled “A brief introduction to the grammar of the English language”, which was published in 1762. R. Louth set himself the goal "to teach people to express themselves appropriately ... and give them the ability to critically analyze a particular phrase or construct for its compliance with the rules and norms."

• G. Sweet and proposed to classify parts of speech depending on their meaning, form and function in the language. He also put forward a theory concerning the relationship between words within phrases and sentences, such as control and subordination, arguing that the “rank” of a word depends on the level of influence of the word on the rest within a syntactic unit. The heyday of the nonstructural-descriptive approach to the language fell on 1900–1930, after which it was replaced by structuralism. The founder of this approach is considered to be Leonard Bloomfield, who presented in one of his books a new approach as follows: "Language learning can be carried out only if one does not attach importance to the meaning of what is being said." [1, c. 75]

• 2 .Valeika L., Buitkiene J. An Introductory Course in Theoretical English Grammar. - Vilnius: Vilnius Pedagogical University, 2003. - 135 p.

• 3 .Whitman, R. L. / English and English Linguistics. - New York, 1975.

Adherents of this approach studied the structure of the language as objectively as possible, without referring to the meaning of other languages (primarily Latin and Greek, on the basis of which pre- and descriptiveists based their analysis of the language). The language was understood by them as a phenomenon that has a special structure, the identification of which could be carried out by a linguist with the help of scientific (formal) methods of analysis. Meaning in language has become considered an unreliable phenomenon, since, being invisible, it could be perceived by various linguists in completely different ways. Accordingly, the task of the linguist within the framework of this approach was: when using formal methods for analyzing language material, replace value with form. It was also common for structuralists to draw conclusions based on an analysis of the proposals created by native speakers of English, the oral form was considered the priority form of communication and the recording of proposals for further analysis. Structuralists perceived English as a kind of structure in which small units when combined formed units a little more, slightly larger units were combined into large units, large ones into very large ones, etc. “Brick” for each of the stages had its own name - phonemes, morphemes, tokens, sentence. The final link in the chain leading to modern grammar is transformation-generative grammar. Unlike structuralism, the grammar-followers of this approach were not interested in describing the structure of a particular utterance, but focused on predicting the speaker’s likely question-answer replicas, analyzing how competent he is in language. This type of grammar included several subspecies. The authorship of the first of them is attributed to Harris, together with his student N. Chomsky in the 1950s. According to the model he developed, the language consisted of a strictly limited set of key (kernel) sentences, which are as simple as possible from the point of view of structure, and from derivatives, that is, a large number of constructions derived from them. For example, Lithuanian scientists cite the following key sentence: The man hit the ball. In accordance with the transformational-generative approach from it, the following derivatives can be formed: The ball was hit by the man; Did the man hit the ball ?; It was the man who hit the ball, etc. The second subspecies in the framework of the transformational-generative grammar was already developed separately by N.Chomsky, who, in principle, departed from the original model of key sentences and distinguished two completely different levels of sentence -superficial and deep. The deep structure of the sentence, he called a combination of words related to the rules of constructing phrases and rules relating to vocabulary, for example, not John past can sing well. And accordingly, the surface structure was nothing other than the transformed grammatically deep structure of the sentence, for example, John could not sing well.

Speaking more simply, under the deep structure, he saw certain language models based on the rules of lexical and semantic compatibility, and he understood the structural model as a grammatical "thread" that could be used to link these same models so that the sentence corresponding to the language norms was obtained. His most important achievement was the fact that within the framework of this approach, grammar was perceived as a tool for creating a correct one from the point of view of all areas of the sentence language.