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plays a significant role to make someone clearly understand what people said or wrote. Grammar helps a person to speak and to write well because it enables
people to comprehend and produce language.
2. Types of Grammar
Linguists recognize a number of types of grammar in linguistics studies: a
Prescriptive grammar Prescriptive grammar attempts to legislate what grammar should be. This
grammar is usually called as the role of various parts of speech. It attempts to tell the users of the language how to use it in order to speak correctly. This grammar
was a formative influence on language attitudes in Europe and America during the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries. Prescriptive grammarians lay out rules about what they believe to be the correct or incorrect
use of language. “They wished to prescribe rather than describe the rule of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of
perspective grammars.”
15
Some linguist even called this grammar as traditional grammar.
b Descriptive grammar
Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language that is actually used by speakers and writers. It observes and records how language is used in
function, and advocates teaching the function of grammatical structure. It does not tell the learners how they should speak but it describes the learners‟ linguistic
knowledge or capacity of its speakers. “It explains how it possible for someone to speak and understand what the learners know about sounds, words, phrases, and
15
Victoria Fromkin 2003, op.cit. p. 15.
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sentences of learners‟ language.”
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Descriptive grammarians generally advise people not to be overly concerned with matters of correctness in a language;
which one is good or bad. c
Universal Grammar Linguists investigate thousands of languages of the world and describe
the ways in which they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. There are linguistics universals that pertain to each of the
parts of grammars, the way in which these parts are related and the forms of the rules. These principles comprise universal grammar, which defines the basis of the
specific grammars of all possible human languages and constitutes the innate component of the human language faculty that makes normal language
development possible and shared by all human languages.
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B. Grammatical Interference
