Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof. 
Nino Kirvalidze
1
ILIA STATE UNIVERSITY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
NINO KIRVALIDZE 
 
 
 
 
THEORETICAL COURSE 
OF 
ENGLISH GRAMMAR 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
TBILISI 2013 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof. 
Nino Kirvalidze
2
 
Lecture 1 
Grammar in the systematic conception of language.
The development of grammar and its types. 
Language is an essential feature that distinguishes us from other living beings. It certainly 
figures centrally in our lives. We discover our identity as individuals and social beings when we 
acquire language during childhood. 
Language is a means of cognition and communication. It 
enables us to express our ideas and emotions, to think for ourselves or set control over others. 
But language is first and foremost a means of transmitting information which helps us 
cooperate with other people in our community.
Language is so uniquely human, that our 
species might be more appropriately named 
homo loquens
than 
homo sapiens 
(Widdowson 
1997: 4). 
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know the 
same language. Knowledge of a language enables you to combine words to form phrases, and 
phrases to form sentences. But not every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a 
language. Therefore, in addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge 
includes rules for their combination to form sentences and make your own judgments. These 
rules must be limited (finite) in length and number so that they can be stored in our brains. 
Yet, they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences (Fromkin et 
al. 2003: 11). You cannot buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences, because no 
dictionary can list all the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce 
new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. The 
famous linguist Noam Chomsky refers to this ability as a creative aspect of language use: 
creativity is a universal property of human language. Not every speaker of a language can create 
great literature, but all persons who know a language, can and do create or understand an 
infinite set of new sentences in the process of human discourse. Thus, creativity or creative 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof.