Introduction, History of

Structural Grammar
JENIFFER R. CONDE &
DYANALIN PENAFLOR
Key Understanding to be developed

 Understand the history of structural

grammar
 Understand the concept of structural
grammar
 Know the important persons who gave
contributions to the history of structural
grammar
Learning Objectives

 Share ideas history of structural grammar;

 Learn the concepts of structural grammar;
 Describethe contributions of the important
persons on the history of structural
grammar
Activity

Share thoughts and pass– an – Answer

 Directions:
1. Each group is given an envelope with a question pasted in front of
it. The group will brainstorm on the possible answers and write them on
a meta card.
2. At a signal, the group will pass the envelope to another team.
3. The receiving team will write some more answers on another meta
card and put it inside the envelope, which at a signal will again be
passed to another group.
4. When the group gets back the original envelope, the group reads
and summarizes all the answers.
5. After 10 minutes, a representative from each group will present
the summary to the whole class.
Activity

Group Activities:

 Groups 1 and 2- Share thoughts on:

Classifications of words

 Groups 2 and 4- Share thoughts on:

Structural Grammar
 How would you react to the activity? Any
realizations?
 How would you relate this in the actual
teaching of grammar? To the actual
performance of pupils in your class?
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it

a. Sir William Jones

 In the 1780’s, Sir William Jones contributed
invaluable linguistic information.
 He had come across the work of an ancient Indian
scholar, Panini, who had written an extremely
detailed grammar of Sankrit during the fifth
century B.C.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it

a. Sir William Jones

 Panini had analyzed and classified words and word parts into
roots, prefixes and suffixes.
 Jones examined Panini’s classifications – the particularly the
roots – he draw a number of conclusion.
The conclusions are:
 Jones had convinced that the enormous number of
similarities between the roots of Sanskrit and those of Greek
and Latin provided strong evidence that all three of these
language were in some way related.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it

a. Sir William Jones

 Jones hypothesized that a great many other European and
Asian languages probably had histories which could be traced
back to the same original parent language.
 Jones speculated that whatever that original source
language might have been, it had been spoken so far back in
history that it no longer existed.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it
 b. Franz Bopp
 In 1816, Franz Bopp is often called founder of historical
and comparative linguistics, published Uber Das
Conjugationssystem, in which he did two things.
 First, he supported the result of his own comparative studies
of verb inflections in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and
several of the European Teutonic (Germanic) languages.
 Second, he contended that his own results, furnished
convincing support for the theory that not only had all
these languages developed simultaneously.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it
c. Charles Darwin
 In 1859, Darwin published his book The Descent of Man.
 In these volumes, Darwin argued that humans had evolved,
very gradually and over an enormous period of historical
time, from more primitive ancestors.
 In between the late 1810’s and the early 1870’s, great
numbers of archeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists
and philologists spent time in the field unearthing vast
bodies of evidence which ultimately convinced most
language scholars that many of the previously
incomprehensible mysteries of language could be reasonably
accounted for.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it
c. Charles Darwin
 Among the conclusions:
1. Enough evidence had been accumulated to convincingly
the theory of related languages, or language “families”,
English, most of the European language, and a number of
Asiatic language were all now thought to have developed from
a single parent language which linguistics called Indo-
European.
2. The development of the existing “sister” languages had
taken place independently but simultaneously.
History of Structural Grammar and
some people contributed to it
c. Charles Darwin
 Among the conclusions:
3. This development had, furthermore, taken place over a
very long period of time.
4. The original Indo-European language had finished long
ago.
5. All existing vernacular languages where still changing and
developing.
6. Language change is a continuous, open-ended process
that never stops so long as a language continuous to be viable
spoken tongue.
Structural Grammar

 A grammar intended to explain the working of

language in terms of the functions of its components
and their relationships to each other without
reference to meaning (educationengliand.org.uk).
 It includes semantics (construction of meaning)
while analyzing individual phonological units of
sounds (phonemes), the construction of words
(morphemes and inflections), and syntax (function
and relationship between sentence parts).
 Present in any appropriate Graphic
Organizer the history of structural
grammar.
 “If words are not things, or maps are not
the actual territory, then, obviously, the
only possible link between the objective
world and the linguistic world is found in
structure and structure alone.”
Anonymous