ENS No.

4
Teaching of Language Practices 1 (PNP)

Prof. Cecilia Ansalone

Prof. Claudia Calió
Prof. Florencia Lamas

SENTENCE GRAMMAR
Part 1

CONTENT

THE GRAMMAR

1.1. Grammar and its teaching

1.2. Some reasons on the importance of delving into the grammar of the language
1.3. What does grammar as a discipline deal with?
1.4. Levels or subfields of sentence grammar
1.5. Sentence grammar and textual grammar
1.6. Grammar and pragmatics

Clarifications:

This workspace folder is a source of information about the diversity of concepts

grammatical aspects and norms of the language; it is not a proposal to carry out.
the classroom as it is presented here. Understanding these concepts and rules will promote
the design of didactic situations that allow for reflection on language, within the framework
of the proposed approach in the Curriculum Design of the City of Buenos Aires.

This material takes and expands upon materials developed by professors Cecilia Ansalone,
Claudia Calió, Beatriz Sarquis, and Liliana Heredia.

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 THE GRAMMAR

The term GRAMMAR can take on different meanings:

"Grammar" can refer to a book, manual, or treatise in which it is described the
structure of a given language and establishes the standard for language use
(rules of agreement, rules of verbal correlation, etc.). For example: Grammar of the
Spanish language, from the Royal Spanish Academy, or Manual of Grammar of
Spanish, by Ángela Di Tullio.
2. 'Grammar' understood as a field within linguistics. Throughout the
history, the delimitation of its scope and its object of study has varied according
with different theoretical models. Thus, in Nebrija's Grammar of 1492, what is
What I understood by 'grammar' was different from what is considered today.
3. 'Grammar' as a system of rules that underlies a particular language.

1.1. GRAMMAR AND ITS TEACHING

The approach of Language Practices proposed in the curriculum designs

current in the City of Buenos Aires takes as a starting point the differentiation
between 'language teaching' and 'teaching language practices'. In this
sense, posits that teaching limited to the study of language as a system
it should be replaced by teaching with an emphasis on the language in use, it is
saying, in the language. Thus, it proposes a teaching based on practice and not on
the description of a system.
Traditional teaching has resulted in students being able to
analyze well the syntax of a sentence, but in whose writings they are often presented
coherence problems. In this regard, Marta Marín comments that, with
frequency, teachers in the area are heard surprised by this fact: "Oh! I
I don't know what's wrong with Fulanita (or Zutanito); the syntactic analysis tests are
perfect, but when he/she writes, it's not clear what he/she wants to say, it jumps from
one thing to another..."
Knowing grammar and understanding its uses are two very different things. The one who masters
the uses have certain knowledge of grammar that are strictly
necessary and that sometimes cannot even be explicitly stated. And also knows many other
things that grammar does not say and that are necessary, for example, which register to use
In certain situations, when is it better to use short phrases than
extensive, etc. One who only knows grammar knows a reduced part of the
uses: spelling rules, morphology of words, sentence structure, etc. And,
many times, it does not make use of this knowledge in a specific situation of use.
The use of language is the main component of the acquisition process.
writing system. Grammar plays a secondary role, but it performs a role
relevant in the correction and review processes during the production of texts.
The recognition of different classes of words or syntactic analysis does not
they have an end in themselves. It is of no use for a child to go to school
recognizing nouns and verbs and pointing them out in the texts or making extensive lists

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useless, separating them according to their semantic or morphological classification. Neither.
It serves that I spent six months dedicated to syntactically analyzing isolated sentences.
So, how should we teach grammatical concepts? In the context of
communicative situations that encourage reflection on their use. How is it
points out in the Curriculum Design, in the section 'Reflection on language': 'Through
From the teacher's intervention, the students will gradually approach knowledge.
systematic of the language in a dialectical game from use to reflection and from reflection
to the use, from the use and reflection to didactic systematization, and from this systematization
to use or to reflection.1
Reflecting on language is therefore a very different activity from doing
syntactic analysis or memorizing spelling rules. Reflection on language
it makes sense as it is intertwined with the practices, to the extent that
that arises in production or interpretation situations and allows for elaboration
responses to the problems faced by the speaker-listener or by the reader-
writer" (ibidem: p. 643).

The deepening on how to teach these contents will be the subject of study in
the subject Language Practices 2. But, in order to design didactic situations
interesting and effective for their teaching, it is first necessary to know well the
concepts.

1.2. SOME REASONS FOR THE IMPORTANCE OF DEEPENING

IN THE GRAMMAR OF THE LANGUAGE

...three good reasons for the 'why' of grammar in school:

the mastery of one's own grammar facilitates the learning of second languages, already
that allows to reveal differences and similarities with the foreign language;
Fundamentally, learning grammar serves to share a metalanguage.
by which to justify whether a text is well or poorly written, beyond the 'I'
sounds good or sounds bad to me". How to say and understand that a construction is
incorrect, because there is no agreement between the verb and the subject's nucleus without using the
terms 'agreement', 'subject', 'verb'? Or that a narrative is well written
it's reported, because the rules of verbal correlation are applied correctly without
mention 'time', 'mood', 'sentence'?
knowledge of grammar is built on a theoretical basis
essential for the study of other aspects of language. How to approach the
study of cohesion without handling the concepts of 'pronoun', 'ellipsis'
'conjunction'? How to understand and explain the differences between dialects without
apply the terms 'phoneme', 'intonation', 'accent', 'word'? How to study
seriously the history of language without certain knowledge of phonology and
morphology?2

1.2. WHAT DOES GRAMMAR AS A DISCIPLINE DEAL WITH?

Curricular design 2nd cycle. Language practices (p. 744). Note that the DC does not title 'grammar' but
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which emphasizes the terms "reflection" and "use".

Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: The Grammarian. Buenos Aires, Cántaro, 1999, p. 17.
2

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 Currently, there is not just one way to understand grammar and to define it.
object of study3Grammar is just a model of the language and that model can
vary according to the theoretical framework in which those who define it are inscribed, which
they raise different questions or concerns about their subject of study. For
In general, a model questions or produces a theory based on the cracks or the
cracks in the previous or contemporary model, or also from omissions. It is
That is why, throughout history, different models have been built to provide
account of the linguistic system. Among them, the so-called traditional grammar and the
structural grammar.
The term traditional grammar refers to that grammar whose
The first reflections date back to Ancient Greece, their developments have
place mainly in the Middle Ages and Modern Era and, since its beginnings, is
marked by a clearly normative objective. [...] The basic study topic of
this model is the word and its classification, studies oriented towards conservation
from the 'cultured' language (literary Greek, literary Latin, literary Spanish) to prevent that
out 'corrupted' by everyday speech. [...]
The non-traditional and contemporary models of grammar coincide in two
revisions of that tradition: a) the central interest is no longer solely in the word, but
also in the construction or phrase; b) the normative purpose shifted towards the
descriptive or towards the descriptive and the explanatory.4
The traditional model dominated school teaching in our country until
around the mid-20th century. In front of this, since the early 20th century,
Structural grammar seeks to explain the structure and functioning of the system.
linguistic. In this sense, it focuses its study on language as a set of
elements that maintain a systematic relationship with each other, and not as a
conglomerate of isolated phenomena. The structuralists took a corpus of
linguistic emissions and focused on identifying the constant elements and
their variables, to establish the rules that govern the relationships between them. Thus,
they offered a rigorous description and classification of language as a system.
During the first decades, his studies focused basically on the levels
phonological, phonetic, morphological and syntactic. That is, they incorporated the sentence as
object of analysis. This grammatical model entered teaching in our
schools in the 70s. And coexisted with the teaching of content of the
called traditional grammar.

In this note we will focus on what has been studied by descriptive grammars and
regulation. That is to say, the focus will be on language as an abstract object and,
In particular, we will focus on the study of the sentence.
But it is necessary to keep in mind that, as we have seen (1.1), the curriculum design
from the city of Buenos Aires advocates for the teaching of the language IN USE, that is, it advocates for the
reflection on language within the framework of reading and writing practices that
students develop in the didactic situations designed by the teacher.
Descriptive grammar is a theoretical construction whose purpose is to
description and/or explanation of the language system; while the GRAMMAR
3
There are theoretical, descriptive, normative, historical, comparative grammars, etc. Marta Marín, in
grammar for everyone, presents these variants, which we will not delve into in this note.
4
Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: "The grammar"; in Alvarado, Maite (ed.): Problems of the
Teaching of language and literature. Buenos Aires, National University of Quilmes, 2004, pp. 92-93.

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NORMATIVA is concerned with the correct use of language according to the rules that
describe descriptive grammar; in this framework, establish rules by which
Some uses are correct or not.

1.3. LEVELS OR SUBFIELDS OF SPEECH GRAMMAR

For their study, grammarians organize the object of study, the sentence, into
levels or subfields.
"In a narrow sense, grammar only studies the meaningful units and
on combinatorics. It comprises two parts: MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX. The first one
it deals with the internal structure of words. Its unit of analysis is the morpheme,
the minimum meaningful unit. A word like 'book' is segmentable into parts
that preserve the duality between sound and meaning: it is a simple word. In
change, book-s, book-seller, book-it contains each two morphemes. The morphology
stops its analysis upon reaching the word. Syntax, in turn, studies the
combinatorial of words within the framework of the sentence, its maximum unit. Among the
morpheme and the sentence, minimum and maximum units, respectively, of the analysis
grammatical, the word is located, a unit shared by both parties, and the
intermediate units, the phrases, constructions like the book, my old book of
grammar, very interesting, far from the city, read carefully. The grammar
traditional focused its study on the word and its classification ('the parts of the
sentence'), so it was closer to morphology than to syntax
properly speaking. In contrast, in modern grammar, fundamentally, since
mid-century, the sentence becomes the basic unit whose formants
they are the intermediate units.
The key notion for the work of the grammarian is grammaticality: this allows
delineate well-formed constructions (morphological and syntactic) from sequences
anomalous (which are represented preceded by asterisks: *). [...]
In a broad sense, grammar includes, in addition to the component
morphosyntactic, other components: the PHONOLOGICAL, which concerns the system of
sounds of a language and that determines the pronunciation of a certain one
sequence, and the SEMANTIC, which includes the meaning of words and that of the
constructions of which they are a part.5

PHONOLOGY
Investigate the sounds of languages, the rules for combining those sounds and
other aspects such as intonation and accent.
Investigate, analyze, classify, and systematize the constant phonetic traits they have.
linguistic functions. It studies those phonetic elements, the phonemes, that have
a differentiating value, distinctive in terms of meaning and how those elements
behave with each other and according to which rules they can be combined with one another to
form words or phrases.
Although phonology is not the subject of study in teaching, it is related to
a part of the teaching of spelling.

5
Di Tullio, Ángela: Manual of Spanish Grammar. Buenos Aires, Edicial, 1997.

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THE MORPHOLOGY
The object of study of morphology is the word, that is, its form.
It occupies itself with the internal structure of words and studies which are the parts with
meaning that forms them.
These parts of words with meanings are called MORPHEMES. THE MORPHEMES
they are the roots (they give the base of meaning to the word), the prefixes (they are located at the
beginning of the word) and the suffixes (go at the end).
For example: re write to go

prefix morpheme base suffix

Only those words that contain more than one have internal structure.
morpheme, which is a minimum unit that consists of a phonetic form and of a
meaning. Let's compare the following words: drop, drops, droplet, drip pan,
dropper. Drop is the only one of these words that consists of a single morpheme;
then, it lacks internal structure; the others do have it because they have more than
a formant.
gout s
aa
prefix morpheme base suffix

Morphology deals with all the variations that can occur to the
words, which include gender, number, person, tense, mood and aspect.
In nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, some morphemes (suffixes) indicate the
gender and number. For example: in writers, A indicates female gender and S
indicate plural number.
In verbs, the suffixes indicate tense, mood, number, and person. They were writing,
IA indicates the imperfect past tense of the indicative mood; N indicates 3rd person plural.
Some words do not accept prefixes or suffixes; they are called unchangeable.

THE SYNTAX
Study how words combine to form sentences or units
less than these (syntactic constructions). [In section 3 of this folder,
this level is developed in greater depth.

SEMANTICS

It deals with the meanings of words and constructions. Now then,

the plane of meaning is a diffuse object and disputed by different disciplines; by
Thus, it has always been difficult to establish the boundaries of semantics.
Suppose that within the framework of a television program, a political journalist
he begins his speech by saying: 'The president shone with his speech.' The
viewers will be able to interpret the meaning of that statement without problems. Without

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embargo, it is evident that it can be used in very different situations.
It is possible that the journalist intends to account for the brilliant speech he delivered.
the president. Or, on the contrary, that he intends to allude in an ironic way to the failed ones.
of a disastrous performance.
In the first situation, the meaning that the journalist intended to give to his
The statement was the literal, also called the sentence grammatical meaning, which
it consists precisely of the meaning that would be assigned to the sentence
regardless of the context. In contrast, in the second case, the meaning that
the journalist intended to assign that statement only interprets if one has in
It also accounts for the particular communicative situation. In strict terms, in all
In the statements, it is possible to identify at least two meanings: the meaning
orational, which is deduced from the lexical items and their relationships in the sentence, and the
pragmatic meaning, which adds to the sentence meaning the data of the situation
communicative. [...] Semantics [...] does not deal with pragmatic meaning but with
lexical and sentential meaning.
Grammars and dictionaries try to describe and freeze the units of
a language; however, each individual does not know or use all those units, but
only a few. Specifically regarding the lexicon, the mental storehouse of words of
Every person is not static, but rather constantly renews themselves. That renewal
it occurs in different ways: through the incorporation of new words
or the forgetting of others, and through the establishment of new relationships between
existing words. [...] the mental warehouse is organized not like a list of
words, but as a network of interrelated units in different ways;
those relationships are established by meaning, by the signifier, by associations
free.
The traditional objectives of lexical semantics have been, on one hand, to represent
the meaning of each word of a language and on the other hand show how the
the meanings of words are interrelated. Although both can
formulate separately, the truth is that the meaning of a word is defined,
to a large extent, because of its relationships with other words of the language, relationships that
They can be of very diverse types: synonymy, opposition, hypernymy, part-whole, etc. A
those relationships are called relationships of meaning.6

In general terms, grammarians classify and describe words, their classes

and their functions. They also describe what the minimum elements that integrate are
the words and how they combine to constitute constructions and sentences.
Thus, they establish, for example, that in Spanish adjectives can be placed before or
after the noun (in other languages, no). Another example: it is established that the
the word 'first' loses the O in front of a masculine noun ('first day'), but
does not lose the A before a feminine one ('first class').

1.4. SENTENTIAL GRAMMAR AND TEXTUAL GRAMMAR

Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: 'The Grammar'; in Alvarado, Maite (ed.), 2004, pp. 81-82.
6

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 The grammar of sentences deals with words and their combinations in
constructions and sentences (that is, in phrases). For this reason, it focuses on the study
of the classes of words (their form and function) and in sentence syntax.
Textual grammar (emerged around 1970) deals with texts and adopts a
functional perspective for its study. This perspective takes into account how
language creates meanings and how it allows them to be exchanged through texts. The
speakers exchange meanings through texts. Unlike the sentence,
the text cannot be thought of without the context, as it is the unit of language in
used in a certain context.7Textual grammar deals with how they are intertwined.
the statements that make up the texts, so that the whole constitutes a
everything consistent. Take into account all kinds of written and oral texts. It is
to say that it considers both song lyrics and television and radio news,
diaries, expository texts, novels or political speeches.8Part of the model
proposed by textual grammar has been adopted by the current curricular design.

1.5. GRAMMAR AND PRAGMATICS

Now, some current grammatical studies introduce more reflections.
about the concrete use of language. This is the field of PRAGMATICS, which studies
How language works in communication processes. Marta Marín points out:
Pragmatic studies argue that the use of language encompasses more than
functions, the meaning, the form of words and the way they combine:
it also includes intentions and reciprocal actions of those who use the language. In
in this sense, to understand how language works in human communication
It is necessary to go beyond linguistic structure and observe the facts.
communicative and the different modes of carrying out communication.
Pragmatics seeks to answer questions such as the following: If he told me 'already
Let's talk, is it a promise or a threat? In what situations
Is it one or the other? [...]

Grammar and pragmatics do not exclude each other; on the contrary, they complement each other.
For example, if grammar describes what the verb tenses are, pragmatics
describe the meaning of certain verb tenses and why some are used to indicate
the main events in a story and others, on the other hand, indicate that an event is
accessory. Similarly, if the grammar describes what the endings are
about diminutives, pragmatics explains how the diminutive can signify smaller
size, but also a certain affective or disdainful attitude of the speaker towards the object
named.9

Consulted bibliography

In another note from the department, we delve into the notion and characteristics of texts.
7

8
At this point, it is necessary to draw attention to a widespread and erroneous interpretation of the
textual grammar that led to the design of a type of activities in which the kids were given
a text requesting them to syntactically analyze their sentences. For the design of sequences
didactics, it is important to be clear that talking about textual grammar does NOT mean taking a text
for the mere identification, classification, and analysis of classes of words or sentences.
9
Marín, Marta: A Grammar for Everyone.

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Di Tullio, Ángela: Manual of Spanish Grammar. Theoretical developments, exercises,
solutions.Bs. As., Edicial, 1997.
Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: The Grammarian. Buenos Aires, Cántaro, 1999
Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: “The grammar”; in Alvarado, Maite (ed.): Problems
from the teaching of language and literature. Buenos Aires, National University of Quilmes, 2004.
Gaspar, Ma. del Pilar and Laiza Otañi: "On grammar". In Alvarado, Maite (ed.) Between
lines. Theories and approaches to teaching writing, grammar, and literature. Bs.
As., FLACSO- Manantial, 2001.
Marín, Marta: Key Concepts. Grammar, Linguistics, Literature. Buenos Aires, Aique, 2012. (1st
ed. 1992).
Marín, Marta: A grammar for everyone. Buenos Aires, Voz Activa, 2011.