Some topics
Item focus
The approach “we have a little word here; let's see what we can do with it” is familiar from school-teaching and hundreds of philological dissertations of past centuries.1 It is necessary for lexicography; but it does not correspond to any known linguistic reality, in particular not to the point of view of the speaker/hearer or the learner; and it is inappropriate in grammar. A systematic structural description is not item-focused. It first presents the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure and only then arrives at a given position in the syntagma and in the paradigm, occupied by a particular item.
Basic meaning
The semantic and functional analysis of items and constructions of a language the analyst does not speak well must, of course, proceed with caution. The first task is not to look for a translation equivalent in more familiar languages, but to bring out the peculiarities of the phenomenon in this particular language by a sober semasiological analysis.
Once this is done, however, the reader has a right to know what the closest translation equivalents in more familiar languages are. Semantics relies strongly on the hermeneutic method, and the understanding the reader may achieve after working through a page of detached structural analysis can often be reached much more readily by a single translation equivalent in his native language. American structuralists have typically shunned away from this kind of linguistic explanation. However, as long as it is not used to replace an analysis, but just offered the reader as a crib, there is nothing against it. On the contrary, withholding this kind of understanding from the reader may mislead him, as it violates Grice's maxims of manner #6 and #8. Consequently, if the author keeps silent about what appears to be the most straightforward way of conceiving the matter, the reader may infer that the expression does not have the meaning that he thinks he has understood.
System of semasiological grammar
For each syntactic category, there are two criteria of its subclassification:
- its internal structure
- its syntactic function
The primary subdivision of the chapter devoted to the category is after criterion 1. Its possible syntactic functions are only enumerated at the end of the chapter. They are the subject matter of the higher-level category of which the present category is a component.
This is so for complex sentences, too. The primary subdivision of subordinate clauses is by their internal structure. The highest-level criterion is normally the category of the predicate and, if verbal, its finiteness. Functions of subordinate clauses, esp. complement clauses vs. adverbial clauses, are at a lower level of subdivision.
In principle, the internal structure of subordinate clauses must be the object of a chapter on the subordinate clause, which is a section of the chapter on the structure of the clause ...
Doctorandus, Iustus 1865, “De functionibus coniunctionis ut in operibus C. Iulii Caesaris”. Institutum Philologicum Collegii Oxfordiensis.