Thus what is maintained, presumably, is that the child has an innate theory of potential structural descriptions that is sufficiently rich and fully developed so that he is able to deter­mine, from a real situation in which a signal occurs, which struc­tural descriptions may be appropriate to this signal, and also that he is able to do this in part in advance of any assumption as to the linguistic structure of this signal. Noam Chomsky – Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

The post-war American linguists and scholars approached grammar as philosophers and linguists. They analyzed the current grammar and made additions and as appropriate. As thinkers they sought to seek the truths about languages and try to understand many things that had not been explained before they came to the discipline.

Almost simultaneously they explored the way our brains worked and what was happening when we learned a language. Over the time since the end of World War II, we have reinforced the truths that were handed down from many generations of linguists and grammarians. As we look at the history of languages, we see that language itself began around fifty thousand years ago when a grammar gene became a part of our genome. We can identify this with clear evidence that our DNA held a “grammar gene” that was unique to homo sapiens and not present in any other animal. In Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade says:

A remarkable new line of inquiry bearing on the origins of language has re­cently been opened up by the human genome project. This is the discovery of a gene that is intimately involved in many of the finer aspects of language. The gene, with the odd name of FOXP2, shows telltale signs of having changed significantly in humans but not in chimps, exactly as would be ex­pected for a gene serving some new faculty that had emerged only in the human lineage. And, through the ability of genetics to reach back into the distant past, the emergence of the new gene can be dated, though at present only very roughly.

Sentences are the foundation of understandable speech and texts. One of the underlying or unstated premises of linguistic theory is that a sentence is an expression of a complete thought. This is first expressed in our grammar by Dionysius Thrax (circa 190 b.c. to 80 b.c.) in Techna Grammatika, which is the base text from which much of modern traditional grammar is derived. native speakers and advanced speakers of a language hear or read full sentences in the language.

The purpose of learning grammar is to enable the learner to make sentences that another speaker of the language can understand when they hear them or read them. In order to do that, the new learner must have an inventory of words. Noam Chomsky calls this “our innate lexicon,” or the dictionary that resides inside of our brain. That lexicon or vocabulary is the first order of business when learning a new language.

Whatever language we may speak, forming sentences is the key to speaking a language. Native speakers listen to, read and understand full sentences most of the time. Words are important as ingredients of meaning, but taken alone as discrete elements, words are just a part of the larger model, the sentence [D18]  .

The morphology of a well formed sentence: In order to achieve the well-formed sentence, we need words that we know very well. The reserve of words that stands waiting in our brain to help us express our thoughts is called our active and passive vocabulary. it offers a systematic approach to learning words because there are things that we must understand to create sentences. Whatever else a new learner of another language learns, the fact that they need to learn words is immediate. You cannot be understood in another language without some words that can be made into sentences. Edgar Rice Burroughs had his character, Tarzan of the Apes explain to a female intruder into his life, "Me Tarzan, you Jane [D19]  ." He gave the character simple sentences that consisted of two words each. They were sufficient to convey the idea of his identity to a movie audience. Indeed, most of us go through a period of very short sentences that tell others what we want or need. For the vast majority of discourse, both written and spoken, the medium of exchange is the complete thought that expresses what we want others to know.

When you hear or see a new word that you need to add to your vocabulary, you may look the word up in the dictionary. If you are new to English, you may have to look up the word in the dictionary. For native speakers, this may not seem necessary because we have the information available by logical deduction in what is called, contextual learning. For new learners, vocabularies may not contain enough words to make the jump to the word’s meaning. For new learners, reading the definition or definitions in the dictionary is the best way to learn the meaning of a word.

Those who do not look in the dictionary will they may learn the meaning of a word from the way the word is used in a sentence. We call this process, "contextual definition" and it works like this: we know all of the other words in a sentence and can deduct the meaning. Here is a sentence that contains a word not necessarily in the vocabulary of most speakers:

Robert thought about the dissonance he was hearing in his composition.

What does the word “dissonance” mean? Is it a technical term used in music? If we know all of the other words in the sentence, especially the word composition, we can assume that the word has to do with composition. Composition is not restricted to music, however and is a derivative of the verb to compose. We also have to deal with the idea that dissonance is a part of the composition, but what part?  Merriam Webster English Dictionary says, in definition two: a mingling of discordant sounds ; especially : a clashing or unresolved musical interval or chord.

Can you derive that meaning from a single sentence? No, you cannot, but a native speaker may hear the term several times in a short period of time and get reinforcement of the meaning.

If we want to know what a word means and how to use it in a sentence, we must look them up in a good dictionary.

For example: As we learn more and more words in daily life, contextual understanding of words becomes more and more effective. About eighty percent of the vocabulary of native speakers is thought to be contextually learned. The obvious drawback to this is that this method of learning is incomplete. Most words in the dictionary have at least two or more meanings. The dictionary will give us all of the current meanings of most words. It will also give us the etymology of the word which is important because it ties the word to its relatives in this and other languages.  The dictionary gives us pronunciation, inflected usages and other information about a word we need to retain.

          Vocabulary word lists are not especially effective in learning new words. Words often have several meanings, they often are semantically related to other words such as verbs that help form many other words. On the other hand, frequency of use of a word is fundamentally important but they only way we have today to measure the frequency of use of a word is to measure it in a text. One of these is the British National Corpus of English. Computer based compilations of the “most used words in English” are often based on screening frequency in the British Corpus. So far there is no effective way to measure frequency of use in spoken English, but that may be done sometime in the future. Spoken language is quite different from written language.

          To avoid being sidetracked into discussions that have been going on for hundreds of years by grammarians and scholars who look at the minutiae of language and try to glean out some kind of linguistic wisdom from that, we will try to avoid these discussions. I will try to use authors who are readable for reference. These authors will, in turn guide serious scholars and those writing scholarly papers to the core reference that may be required for  you to prove your argument.

          Whether we are learning English to make a trip to London , New York City, Wellington or Sydney , there are some words that we will need in order to make ourselves understood. This Core Vocabulary is standard in all languages. It is the words that we need for most sentences most of the time. We all eat, drink, talk, sleep, shop, search etc. None of this stops because you are in a country that speaks another language. If we look closely we soon see that this group of words is the same in meaning in any language that we need to use.

          Learning the Words.

          It is important to understand that we get words from a number of sources. The important idea is how to get the important words of the core vocabulary into our personal lexicon. We may get the meaning of the word from its use in a sentence through contextual understanding. We may be in a class and the teacher may tell us the meaning of a word. We may ask the speaker to tell us that a word means.  If the word is not significant, we can rely on hearing it used again and verify what we think it may mean. If it is a word used frequently by many people and we want to retain it in our own lexicon, we may look up the definition in a dictionary.

          When looking up words in the dictionary, it is important to get the right information. The first part of that is the functional grammatical use of a word. You need to know if the word is a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb or something else. The important point here is to remember that almost all words have more than one function. Let us take the word, “project” as an example. The verb means “to extend” “to reach out” “to predict” etc. “The winning party projected victory before the polls were closed.” Project is also a noun that describes a work of some sort. “We meant to raise a few vegetables and maybe some flowers, but all of it turned into a project.” Most speakers learn quickly that a “building project” is the actions taken to build something. Many also immediately recognize the adjective “project” when a newspaper reports that “…the project cost increased each  month they were building.” We can understand a sentence like, “We projected the project cost of the entire project, based on their figures.”

          English is filled with multi-functional words like this. “The Queen’s Consort is not allowed to consort with anyone else.” “We adjusted the price to include an adjustment for paying cash.” The point is that words are generated by inflections that create new and different words with the same semantic roots. We create creations through the use of creative linkage between the verb, “to create,” the noun, “creation,” and the adjective “creative” or the adverb, “creatively.” There are also additional nouns such as “creator,” “creativeness,” and variations that may or may not be used like “creating” which is the participial form of the infinitive, to create. When we have a common idea that defines a word, we call the derived words, “semantically linked.”

          We have already introduced the idea of syntax as being a logical arrangement of words in a sentence. The formula, NP > VP > NP [D20]   expresses this relationship in a sentence with a transitive verb.  The logic that makes a sentence make sense is a governor of whatever thought the sentence is intended to convey. The Noun Phrase that heads up the subject of a sentence may be any one of several words or word combinations. It may be a verb that has been inflected for the job of serving as the noun subject [D21]  . Here is an example:

1.    I drive to work most mornings.

2.    Driving to work is faster and gives me extra time after I get there.

3.    I have been driving to work most of the time since my first job.

4.    To drive is to give yourself some extra time for starting your day.

This relationship between a verb and its derivative words is important to understanding how words form into a logical or grammatical pattern in a sentence. This relationship also affects the frequency of use of some words because it may create a problem when all of the inflected forms of a word are presented in a raw word count [D22]  .

          This analysis is presented to show how verbs may change into nouns or other grammatical uses during the creation of sentences.  Like all other components in deep structure, the term VP or Verb Phrase is a metaphor, a figurative thing that relates only to the real world in a establishing a comparative relationship with another formula entity.

          The understanding of deep structure is much more than just understanding that sentences are logical and can be described by a logical formula. We had done that long before Noam Chomsky was born. Two teachers and scholars of the nineteenth century established their own graphic method of describing sentences. Brainerd Kellogg and Alonzo Reed gave us the Kellogg Reed Sentence Diagrams [D23]   in a work entitled, “Higher English.” People who went through American elementary and middle school education will usually remember them and many thought that they led us out of the darkness’s of grammar Hell.

          I will try to explain some of the reasons why we want to see sentences as pictures rather than text. I will try to explain why people should resist  having an accent as much as possible but most of all, I will try to give you the tools needed to understand grammar at a level that doesn’t require a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Linguistics, English Literature or other communications degrees.