Grammar?

This post is a bit of an aside to my normal investigation of Pali language. It is a partial overview of the term grammar which will hopefully shed some light on the difference between grammatical subject and thematic agent.

What is this Grammar thing anyway?

Not that long ago, "grammar" meant the study of Latin, the language of choice for educated people. In fact, "grammar" came to referred to any kind of learning. This is reflected in the English term "Grammar School" and as such the word grammar can have many meanings and uses.

More specifically grammar is used to describe an attempt to understand the make up of a language - the ways that words can be put together in order to make sentences. Even in linguistics, there are several types of grammar. What follows is a rough and ready summary of what can fall under the umbrella of grammar.

Generally, when people hear the word “grammar,” they immediately think of “correct” or “incorrect” and “good” or “bad” language. This type of thinking about language is actually now referred to as Traditional grammar or sometime Prescriptive grammar - which is a set of rules and concepts often taught as how certain people think as being the proper way to speak and thereby conform to a pre-established standard of English. The focus is often on the rules of correct punctuation and pronunciation. Thus, the rules of Traditional grammar are set down by an external authority.

Counter-posed to the prescriptive tradition is the descriptive one, which is developed in linguistics. Descriptive grammar gives names to things - the parts of speech nouns, verbs etc. and parts of a sentence, phrase, clauses and such. Descriptive grammar is about understanding what each word is (classification) and what each word does (its grammatical function in the sentence). It's analysis akin to a survey of the landscape.

Contrasting with traditional grammar; in Transformational grammar, the focus is on the principles that people actually, often unconsciously, follow in the production of sentences. The the term rule in this sense means the internalised transformation native speakers use to manipulate words and form a sentence.Thus we can distinguish between the syntactical rules that govern a language and the rules that a culture attempts to impose on language.

There is also comparative grammar which is the study of difference between languages and universal grammar which is concerned with the principles dictating all human language, which can be considered innate to all humans.

Traditional Grammar	Study of language
Phonetics	The organisation of speech sounds & how they combine
Morphology	Study of words & how they change with role
Syntax	How words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences
Semantics	Study of meaning
Orthography	Spelling, Punctuation

Syntax

What we often think of as 'Grammar' is actually Syntax. In traditional linguistics, syntax refers to the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.  The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (i.e. syntactic units), each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. Thus we have units like nouns and verbs functioning in grammatical relations like subjects, direct object and indirect objects.

Syntactic elements
Subjects
Predicates:
	Verbial
	Copulative
	Nominal
Attributes:
	Adjectives
	Complements
	Appositions
Objects:
	Direct
	Indirect
	Prepositional
Adverbials:
	Of time,
	Of place,
	Of cause
	Of manner

Syntax can be said to form the basis of descriptive grammar and the terms syntax and grammar are often used interchangeably.

Morphology

Traditionally, linguists have recognized a basic distinction between syntax and morphology. If syntax is concerned with the ways in which words are put together in sentences, morphology is the study of the words themselves. For instance, the function of any word can be classified into the following "morphologic elements" (also named “parts of speech"):

Word classes
Nouns
Articles
Adjectives
Pronouns
Numerals
Verbs
Adverbs
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Interjections

Importantly, morphology also includes the structure of words - how words break down into more basic parts, morphemes or prefixes, stems & roots etc. and how word forms change with function ie. inflection.  Similarly, phonology is the study of how words sound and the changes in speech sound. It's often referred to as phonetics.

Grammatical Case

Grammatical case can be seen as a subset of syntax & morphology; where the grammatical function of a word is reflected by a morphing of its form. This is termed declension where words like nouns take different inflected forms, depending on their case - subjective/nominative, possessive/genitive, objective/accusative/dative etc.

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. Famously, Noam Chomsky highlighted that the rules governing syntax are distinct from meaning. For instance,

the dream slept furiously 

is syntactically correct - the noun, verb and adverb are arranged correctly - but semantically nonsense because dreams can't sleep. In short, syntax relates to structure, semantics to meaning.

This distinction between syntax and semantics along with the development of transformational & universal grammar lead to the idea of surface structure (arrangement of words) and deep structure (meanings). Thus the surface syntax of traditional grammar - which may differ between languages - is based on a deeper innate semantic structure of meanings. So for instance, when we are talking we assemble a bunch of meanings together (deep structure) and then 'transform' them into actual words that communicate that meaning (surface structure).

To illustrate, sentences such as:

The missionary is ready for eating,
Visiting relatives can be tiresome.

are ambiguous in meaning because the same surface sequence of words can take one of two deeper structural meanings.

And sentences such as:

The key opened the door,

The door was opened with the key, by the man

The man opened the door with a key,

This illustrates varying surface syntactical structures (the subject of the verb in each sentence changes from key, door, to man), but these are overlaid on unchanging semantic roles. In each case 'the key' is the 'instrument', 'the door' is the entity affected by the action (patient), and 'the man' is the agent or actor. Thus, developed the related notions of Case role or Thematic role which is intended to account for functional, semantic, deep-structure relations between verb and noun phrases.

The Case grammar defines semantic roles - Agent, Object/Patient, Benefactor, Location,  Instrument etc - required by a specific verb. For instance, the verb "to give" in English requires an Agent (the giver) and an Object (the given), and a Beneficiary (the recipient).

• The key [Instr] opened the door [Pat] 
• The door [Pat] was opened with the key [Instr], by the man [Agt]
• The man [Agt] opened the door [Pat] with a key [Instr], 

As students of Pali, we are familiar with the idea of case, but grammatical or inflectional case and thematic Case roles described above should not be confused. Nouns marked for case by inflection  are the surface structure representations of the deeper underlying thematic Case roles.

The overlapping terminology can be perplexing. In many languages, the semantic/thematic relations may be reflected in the case-marking on the noun (case declension) - for instance the instrumental case may identify the Thematic instrument - but they are separate systems. To make matters worse, the grammatical relations of subject and object, etc., are often closely tied to the semantic relations of Agent and Patient.

But thematic relations are purely semantic descriptions of the way in which the entities described by the noun phrase are functioning -  the relationship between the meanings. Whereas grammatical relations or cases relate to the surface morphological forms a noun phrase bears in the sentence.



Well I hope that helps clearing up yet more confusing terminology....

Next post is a translation example/guide from Anguttara Nikāya :Book of Ones 
If you want to get get straight back into inflection leap frog to Pali Adjectival Suffixes