The following is a reflection authored by Columbanus Fellow Sneha Jain.
Language’s fundamental purpose is to communicate the intention of the speaker or writer. By nature, however, language is conventional, which can confuse or obscure the desired message. In other words, language relies upon stipulation, and it is often assumed—whether rightly or wrongly— that the speaker’s and listener’s (or writer’s and reader’s) conception of semantics and syntax agree in their stipulations . Through studying grammar, we can better understand the stipulations that guide communication.
Characteristic to all languages, categorematic and syncategorematic terms provide a basic conception of language through separating the substantial and relational. In exploring these components of language, there also appears to be an implicit noun-centrism: we are concerned with substances, attributes belonging to those substances, and relationships between those substances. Indeed, the ability to recognize substances, whether empirical or intelligible, in language is essential to comprehend the entities that play a role in the communication. Notwithstanding, the syncategorematic elements are of equal importance in their capacity to specify how such entities relate to one another; these small, oft-repeated bits serve as syntactic glue that offer clarity on the entities’ function. Such a conception of language in terms of substantives and their relations has better equipped me towards my language learning endeavor s; while I had previously dismissed the relational as something I can pick up along the way, I am now encouraged to pay deliberate attention to studying relational elements of language to be more accurate and more precise in communication.
In the Lyceum Institute’s grammar course, we centered our discussions on stipulations of written English and further studied parts and functions of speech in the English language. Careful sentence analysis allowed greater insight into the meaning of English texts, as I could better understand the relationships between elements of sentences: how one element describes or modifies another, how to clearly identify the actor, acted upon, and recipient of the action, how verbal mood clarifies the purpose of action, etc. Sentence-by-sentence deconstruction, particularly with diagramming, introduced the opportunity to think more deeply about the purpose of each word present. While I certainly have more to study with respect to grammar, I feel that I can more precisely understand written English, which also prepares me to better communicate and compose in English.
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