Date of Award

4-1973

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

English

Abstract

Traditional grammar originated in Greece in the fifth century B.C. and has been closely connected with philosophy and literary criticism ever since. Through the course of centuries, numerous grammars have been presented, with new ideas and definitions each "varying greatly in purpose, quality, basic assumption, and method of analysis." Each system of grammar has been productive in its own way as well as erroneous and has been succeeded by other systems still faulty. Consequently, in spite of the tremendous amount of theoretical data processed by investigators and experts, neither an explicit nor a complete grammar of a language has ever been approached. The reason simply is that grammar can­ not be both explicit and at the same time complete. More specifically, by approaching an explicit grammar, we retreat to an incomplete one owing to the insertion of many numbers of exceptions which test and destroy the rules.

It is only during the past forty to fifty years that modern linguistics as a discipline has been introduced to investigate language as it is. Modern linguistics is mainly concerned with the description and explanation of the language as it is communicated, transmitted, and changed.

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