ABSTRACT
A type of grammar first developed in Europe in the eighteenth century, based on Aristotelian logic and ancient Greek and Latin grammars, often as an aid to learning these languages and interpreting classical texts. Its general characteristics are: (a) classification of data into formal categories, e.g. sentence type, part of speech (since these categories are taken from Greek and Latin, they often cannot be directly transferred onto other languages); (b) classification based on logical, semantic, syntactic, and extralinguistic criteria, with little attention paid to functional aspects of communication; (c) primarily a prescriptive attitude ( prescriptive grammar) i.e. concerned with judgments such as ‘correct,’ ‘incorrect,’ ‘affected,’ ‘awkward’; (d) usually written rather than spoken language as the subject; (e) grammatical explanations often confusing synchronic and diachronic aspects-a point especially criticized from a structuralist perspective ( synchrony vs diachrony, structuralism); (f) rules that are not explicit or exhaustive; they appeal to the reader’s intuition.
