The chronicles of Grammar

Types of Grammar
Woods (1995) outlines five different types of grammar: prescriptive and descriptive grammar, traditional grammar, phrase structure grammar, transformational- generative grammar and systemic functional grammar. These five types of grammar illustrate different approaches towards analysis and description of language. Consequently, the different approaches reflected in each type of grammar influence the teaching of grammar.
Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar
Prescriptive grammar is when the correct use of language is prescribed by a set of rules. These rules are fixed. Unlike prescriptive grammars, descriptive grammars recognize that language is constantly changing (Quirk et al., 1985).This means that certain utterances that were considered incorrect grammatically at one time are now accepted as correct. For example, the use of ‘a few’ and ‘a little’. In prescriptive grammar, ‘a few’ determines count noun (a few students) and ‘a little’ is related to non-count noun (a little salt). Thus, we say ‘ few ‘ students, ‘ fewer ‘ students, ‘ fewest ‘ students and ‘ little ‘ salt, ‘ less ‘ salt, ‘ least ‘ salt. But today, the use of ‘less ‘with count noun as in ‘less ‘students is also accepted (Woods, 1995).
Traditional Grammar
In traditional grammar, syntax rather than semantics is a central component of a language. In teaching the syntactic organization of the sentences, traditional grammarians have identified and defined eight parts of speech. The eight parts of speech identified are nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. These different parts of speech make up a sentence.
Within traditional grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of taxonomy (i.e. classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language. 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. Given this assumption, the task of the linguist analysing the syntactic structure of any given type of sentence is to identify each of the constituents in the sentence, and (for each constituent) to say what category it belongs to and what function it serves. For example, in relation to the syntax of a simple sentence like:
(1) Students protested
it would traditionally be said that the sentence consists of two constituents (the word students and the word protested), that each of these constituents belongs to a specific grammatical category (students being a plural noun and protested a past tense verb) and that each serves a specific grammatical function (students being the subject of the sentence, and protested being its predicate). The overall sentence Students protested has the categorical status of a clause which is finite in nature (by virtue of denoting an event taking place at a specific time), and has the semantic function of expressing a proposition which is declarative in force (in that it is used to make a statement rather than e.g. ask a question). Accordingly, a traditional grammar of English would tell us that the simplest type of finite declarative clause found in English is a sentence like (1) in which a nominal subject is followed by a verbal predicate. Let’s briefly look at some of the terminology used here. In traditional grammar, words are assigned to grammatical categories (called