THE BIRTH OF GRAMMAR

"Of all the areas investigated by developmental psycholinguists, the acquisition of grammar has been studied the must intesive. Much of this can be related to the development of transformational - generative (TG) grammar, the most influential school of linguistics to affect the study of language over the past four decades. It has always been involved most centrally with the study of sentences."


1) A dictionary has many thousands of words but not just any words can be put together to make a sentence.

2) Grammar must still be our concern, especially because English is not our native language. If we are not going to take it seriously, there will always be something missing.

3) On of the example why rules in sentences / paragraphs were invented because of the following sample lines:

longagopeoplewrotewithnospacebetweenwordstheyuseinfactnomarksofunctioationatallbutwritingwasveryhardtoread

Ancient Greek writers saw the difficulty of reading this kind of line...So, about twenty five hundred years ago, they began to place a short line under or beside the words in a sentence that began a new topic or idea. They called this line paragraphos, which means " writing beside".

" Finally, it is quite rare for youngsters to repeat the same word twice in forming their little sentences; children are parsimonious with their language and make each word count." ( pg.15 - SURVEY ACQUISITION)

In my opinion, " parsimonious", is a wrong choice of word. Because, if we are going to look the meaning of the word in the dictionary it doesn't match. Children are not parsimonous with their language but rather they are just restricted/bounded with words or phrases due to lack of exposure.