Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
6
seen by John.”). 
Transformational grammar has been influential in universal grammar and in 
psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children. 
The more languages of the world linguists investigate and describe the ways in which 
they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. There are 
linguistic universals that pertain to all languages. These universal facts are:
1.
Wherever humans exist, language exists. 
2.
There are no “primitive” languages – all languages are equally complex and 
equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The vocabulary of any 
language can be expended to include new words for new concepts. 
3.
All languages change through time. 
4.
The relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages are for 
the most part arbitrary, i.e. the forms (sounds) of linguistic signs bear no natural 
resemblance to their meaning and the link between them is a matter of conven-
tion, and conventions differ radically across languages. 
5.
All human languages use a finite set of discrete sounds that are combined to form 
meaningful elements or words, which themselves may be combined to form an 
infinite set of possible sentences. 
6.
All grammars contain rules of a similar kind for the formation of words and sen-
tences. 
7.
Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments, that can all be defined 
by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every spoken language has a class 
of vowels and a class of consonants.
8.
Similar grammatical categories, i.e. parts of speech (for example, noun, verb) are 
found in all languages. 
9.
There are universal semantic properties like “male”, “female”, “animate” or “hu-
man”, found in every language in the world. 
10.
Every language has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing commands, re-
ferring to past or future time, and so on. Syntactic universals reveal that every 
language has a way of forming different structural types of sentences.

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof.