Course paper (English Detached Constructions)

The purpose of this paper is to supply a frame of reference for analysis of conversational language as a theory of grammar. Here we shall consider the three major grammatical theories, emphasizing the points on which theory is most comparable to them. The three general approaches to grammar which are most significant for contemporary linguistic theory are: 1. the “traditional” approach, which dominated the theory of grammar from about the second century B.C. until the twentieth century, 2. the “structural” approach, which was the dominant theory in American linguistics from the 1920’s until the mid-1950’s and 3. the “transformational” approach, whose present primacy dates from the publication of Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” in 1957.