Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
5
Finally, all these remarks apply to 
spoken language
. Writing, which is not acquired sub-
consciously but must be taught, follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage and style 
that the spoken language does not, and is subject to little if any dialectal variation. Summing 
up, we can say that 
a descriptive grammar of language does not tell you how you should speak; 
it only describes your unconscious linguistic knowledge while
a 
prescriptive grammar tells 
what rules you should know to speak the standard language.
Different from them, a teaching grammar is used to learn another language or dialect. 
Teaching grammars are used in school to fulfill language requirements. They can be helpful to 
persons who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous 
socially and economically to do so. Teaching grammars state explicitly the rules of the language, 
list the words and their pronunciations and aid in learning a new language and dialect. It is 
often difficult for adults to learn a second language without being instructed, even when living 
for an extended period in a country where the language is spoken. Teaching grammars assume 
that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language 
with the grammar of the native language. 
In 1957 Noam Chomsky developed a theory of Transformational Grammar, sometimes 
called Transformational-Generative Grammar in his work 
Syntactic Structures
. This theory 
revolutionized the scientific study of language. According to this theory, Instead of starting 
with minimal sounds, 
Chomsky began with kernel, i.e. elementary sentences, the number of 
which is limited in any language. According to Transformational-Generative Grammar, by a 
limited number of kernel (elementary) sentences and a set of transformational rules you can 
generate (create) innumerable syntactic combinations. Each sentence in a language has two 
levels of representation – a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represents 
the core semantic relations of a sentence which is mapped, i.e. explicated in the surface 
structure via transformations.
Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities 
between deep structures of different languages, and that these structures would reveal proper-
ties, common to all languages. 
Chomsky and his followers formulated transformational rules, 
which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e. g. “John saw Mary.”) into a 
sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
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