Page 40 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

In the modern era, the European structuralism emerged as a traditional theory
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a bit earlier to the first quarter of the 20 century and attempts of the grammarians
centred on describing language not based on one's unique individual features but
following models of the European classical languages. Instead of covering the actual
speech categories of a particular language, such grammatical descriptions imposed the

canonical models on almost all the target languages as Romans used to do. This
approach, basically descriptive in nature, exhibits what languages are like but fails to

explain why languages are the way they are (Dryer 2006:207).
There emerged the structural approach to the language in Course in General

Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure first published posthumously by his pupils in
1915. It was based on the concepts of language like arbitrariness, langue and parole,

and synchronic and diachronic study of language. Lyons (1968:38) states that
Saussurean concept of structuralism influenced various schools of structural
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linguistics in Europe for at least fifty years in the 20 century.
Bloomfield (1923) laid foundation of American structuralism in the field of
linguistics as the most dominating theoretical work for the next thirty years. Language

based on the objective data is emphasized under this structural approach to only study
the phonological, morphological and syntactic aspects of a language. Bloomfield

adopted Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis method for the syntactic study of a
language in which a sentence is broken into smaller units such as clauses, phrases,

words and morphemes.
Chomsky (1957) emerged as the transformational-generative approach to
grammar and influenced the next two decades in the field of linguistics. Since its

inception, it has gone through several modifications, but the transformational-generative
grammar is the one that makes use of sequential, hierarchical and transformational

breaking up (Pandey 2013:62). It accepts the Saussurean concept of langue and parole
in terms of competence as the set of internalized rules of grammar in a native speaker's
mind, and performance as the actual utterance produced by speaker in the process of

communication respectively. In this concept, competence controls performance.
As an alternative to the formal linguistic theories of either Saussurean or

Bloomfieldian structuralism or of Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar,
functional approach to grammar was developed in the mid-1970s out of the work of a

group of linguists mostly centred in California, including Talmy Givón, Charles Li,
Sandra Thompson, Wallace Chafe, Paul Hopper, among others (DeLancy 2019:6).

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