Different Approaches to English Grammar from Traditional to Minimalist and Their Pedagogical Effectiveness

1.IntroductionThroughout history the main concern of investigation of all schools of grammar has been sentence structure. That is why grammarians have constantly endeavored to employ various approaches in order to define and explain this mental knowledge of language. They started from traditional approach. But owing to its deficiencies in satisfying some requirements of the learners, they proceeded further to structural grammar which was followed by transformationalism, government-binding, and finally to minimalism. These approaches to English grammar regarded as the primary ones will be taken into consideration in this paper; in other words, the study aims at introducing and describing the main types of grammar. Then the weak points related to each t hat might have led to the subsequent type of grammar will also be stated. Finally whether they can exert any positive impact on language pedagogy will be discussed.2. Main Schools of GrammarThe grammar of a specific language is somehow totally different from the grammar of another language. Even though the whole typical components of grammar are taken into account from among a large number of definitions, another problem may come up which is how this type of grammar should be explained and analyzed? This point has led to the emergence of many schools of grammar, each of which regards grammar on the basis of their own descriptions. Among all types of grammar five appear to be better recognized than others, that is to say, traditional, structural, transformational, government binding, and minimal approach.2.1. Traditional GrammarTraditional grammar originated from European languages, especially Latin and Greek. It is the most pervasive and intricate type of grammar which is extensively applied in language teaching, hence called pedagogic grammar. Parsing, the method applied for analyzing sentences, commonly comprises five features: (1) specifying elements of the sentence, classifying them as subject, predicate, object, attribute, adverbial, etc.; (2) recognizing part of speech of each word; (3) indicating the inflection of the words; (4) identifying the correlation between the words; and (5) describing the order of words. Basically, this approach to sentence structure analysis is theoretical in nature and classifies words and parts of sentences mainly on the basis of their meanings (Anonymous, n.d.)In spite of the fact that traditional grammar is properly constructed and extensively applied, modern linguists have identified a number of deficiencies related to it. First, it is prescriptive in essence, which strives to set down principles for speakers of a language. Secondly, its grammatical units are solely developed from European languages and are considered inappropriate for characterizing other languages. Thirdly, owing to the absence of a theoretical organization, this type of grammar is inadequate to explain the characteristics of language. Therefore, structural grammar came into being as an effort to diverge from traditional grammar (Anonymous, n.d.).2.2. Structural GrammarDue to the extinction of various local languages, American anthropologists and linguists started to give an account of American Indian language at the beginning of the twentieth century. They attempted to introduce new approaches to language analysis as they discovered that traditional grammar failed to describe native languages of America. Two notions can be regarded as the most significant in their new linguistic method (Anonymous, n.d.).The first one is form class that is more extensively used than part of speech. Linguistic categories emerging in the same unit are in the same form class. For example, a(n), the, my, that, every, etc, that appear before nouns fall into one form class. Practically, these linguistic categories are found to have identical classification. This formal approach to syntactic categories is more feasible in describing and characterizing unfamiliar languages. …