Contenu du sommaire : La tradition grammaticale

This paper addresses, in French linguistics, three complementary aspects of “grammatical tradition”, as a concept, as a term, and as a corpus of texts aiming at describing objective properties of languages. What does mean “tradition” exactly ? Is the term of “grammatical tradition” used to refer to a scientifically deficient approach to grammar, as exemplified by the term of “traditional grammar” ? What is a “tradition” in the scientific field ? What are the criteria (historical, epistemological) which allow us to consider this corpus homogeneous ? How is this corpus constitued ? Could “grammatical traditions” be subsumed into a generic category (the “grammatical tradition”) ?

Generally speaking, the grammatical tradition is either disparaged or venerated, but never questioned. In analyzing the Arab grammar tradition we are trying to better define the contributions and especially the dead ends brought about by regarding tradition as sacred. The result is a severing from the object described, which is daily language. This paper tries to prove that an objective approach to language and tradition could help better adapt the methodological tools to the object described.

This contribution looks into some grammatical concepts in German and the influence of national traditions on them. To clarify the relationship between the grammatical terms (e.g. Feld, Satzklammer) and traditions, I present linguistic models based on interdisciplinary paradigms. Among these are associative psychology and gestalt psychology. The success of valence theory in Germany can be explained via the prexistence of traditions already providing some of this model's features. In the long run, Humboldt's ideas have had a strong influence on German linguistic thought.

An interesting paradox is that the Greek tradition is considered in the West as the source of Western linguistics, and in Russia as the source of Russian linguistics, whereas the Russian tradition is said to be entirely different from the Western one by many Russian scholars. It is held in this paper that the notion of grammatical tradition is of no use in the history of grammars. As a matter of fact, what is at stake in the Middle Ages is a deep rooted opposition between a rationalist and anti-rationalist (fideist) approach of grammar, both in the West and in the Orthodox Slavic world : grammar is made either to generate new texts or to repeat old ones. The history of medieval religious struggles in the East slavic world is a fascinating source for studying the ideologies underlying gramatical debates.

This paper deals with some methodological questions preliminary to grammatical description – namely, the oppositions between rules and options, formal grammatical relations and instrumental grammatical structures at the service of autonomous conceptual relations, phrasal and textual expression, in the areas of extended processes and interclausal linkage. The idea is that the structure of complex expressions is the outcome of a dynamic interaction between the poles of these oppositions.

All grammars of the English language resort to a classification of words into “parts of speech” or syntactic categories and none of them can do without prepositions. Even though the class seems to be well-established, a number of divergences appear in the way prepositions are dealt with. The main points at issue are discussed through a comparison of two major handbooks : Quirk et al., Contemporary Grammar of the English Language (1985) which represents the traditional approach to prepositions and Huddleston & Pullum et al., Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002) which adopts a significantly different conception.

A grammatical upheaval is turning upside down the Japanese philological grammatical tradition, rooted in the study of literature of the VIIIth-XIIth centuries, with the introduction of the Dutch Grammar during the XVIIIth century. This paper intends to highlight the grammatical hybridising process that gave rise to the modern grammatical categories, through the genetic study of two terms zidôsi/tadôsi. We will see how this pair of terms emerged from crossing the native dichotomy zi/ta with the transitive/intransitive verbs classification in European grammars.