What *is* Grammar (academic question)

henning
July 25, 2007, 09:41 AM posted in General Discussion
While trying to track Grammar Points in the Intermediate and UI lessons a definition issue arose:

Often I am not sure whether a discussed lanugage point counts as "Grammar" or is still pure *vocab*.  That is especially true for the UI lessons where lots of content is introduced that might be found in the Grammar Guide under "parts of speech".

Some of the entries in the Grammar Guide I would definitatly not have counted as grammar before CPod, especially function words like 逐渐 - although they are undisputedly crucial both for understanding and for sentence building.

Wikipedia defines Grammar as I would have done: As "the study of rules governing the use of language". Is 逐渐 a rule in its own right or just an example for an adverb?

What about those billons of Chengyus that often come with function-word characteristics? 

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babliku
July 25, 2007, 12:26 PM

I would say that for most things for which you need to learn more than the word and the associated meaning, you can count that as a grammar point, at least in the context of a language podcast. Much to learn, we have.

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henning
July 25, 2007, 04:20 PM

But because many words in Chinese are of ambiguous nature regarding there word category (activity verb, achievement verb, noun, adjective,...), and often adhere to very individual usage restrictions, you end up with an annotated dictionary. Which would be fine to have of course. ;)

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babliku
July 26, 2007, 01:42 AM

nice, isn't it? Chinesepod will never run out of grammar points. (though I have no idea what are those word categories you're talking about. haha)

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John
July 26, 2007, 02:30 AM

Henning, When I first started the grammar tags (before there was a Grammar Guide), I took a structural approach, giving us "pattern tags" such as keyi + V or Adj + de hen. This form gave us tags which were very clearly grammar points, but there was a problem. Many people don't relate to grammar that way. They see it as "how do I use 可以" or "why does 很 come after the adjective here?" It seems that most people are more word-oriented in their approach to grammar. This reminded me of the best book on grammar I had ever used, a two volume series on Japanese grammar put out by the Japan Times. I decided to check it out again. Guess how they organized their grammar entries? By word. Organizing by word clearly causes a few problems, however. When a word appears in key grammar patterns then it needs to be covered, but what about a word with some strange grammatical properties? Well, in this system it can easily be covered as well. The problem is that there is no end to this game of inclusion, and if you don't know where to stop you end up starting a dictionary. In general, our approach is to only include words that require special grammatical attention. This is because the word is difficult to use, or easy to use incorrectly. If a word's usage can easily be picked up from a dictionary and swapping it out with a word of similar meaning creates no grammatical problems, then it probably does not belong in the Grammar Guide. I hope that clears things up. There may be a few tough calls here and there, but in general we will err on the side of inclusion to make the guide as comprehensive as possible.

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henning
July 26, 2007, 05:12 AM

John, thanks for youre explanation. It makes perfectly sense. In fact I prefer the word-approach myself. It has the additional benefit that it might one day even be interlinked with the glossary.

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John
July 26, 2007, 05:30 AM

henning, Exactly! Don't think that it hasn't occurred to us... :)