students because it describes the regularities of language behaviors so that students can use it as a pattern to make an enormous number of new sentences and
help them monitor their language use. Finally, it will prevent them from fossilizing early.
3. Grammatical Aspects of Language
To explain the grammatical aspects of language, inevitably, it has to involve the explanation of the nature of grammar itself. If tracing back the history of
grammar, it will be found that there are two approaches which can be used to describe the nature of grammar.
The first is a descriptive grammar. It is a grammar approach which describes the nature of grammar as a description of the language grammar that exists in the
minds of its speakers.
10
It considers that every human being who speaks a language knows its grammar. So, by describing the language grammar that exists
in the speaker‘s minds, someone can know about the nature of grammar itself. On the other hand, prescriptive grammar comes with a different perspective.
According to this approach, language always changes by the time and the change of language itself is regarded as a corruption. So, instead of describing the
language grammar which is then regarded as a corruption, prescriptive grammar tends to prescribe grammar rules that are regarded as correct forms that the
speaker should know.
11
However, nowadays, the approach that is widely used is a descriptive grammar. Although, there will be some differences among speakers‘ knowledge,
this approach believes that there will be a shared or common knowledge too. Such knowledge is then regarded as laws which can represent the universal aspects of
all languages or what is called as a universal grammar. So, universal grammar is defined as principles that characterize all human
language such as grammatical aspects of language itself.
12
And, to discover the
10
Victoria Fromkin, et.al, An Introduction to Language: Seventh Edision, Boston: Wadsworth, 2003, 14.
11
Ibid., p. 15.
12
Ibid., p. 19.
universal grammar is the goal of linguist. In other word, to get the explanation about the grammatical aspects of language, students have to look it out in the
linguistic theory. In linguistics, grammatical aspects of language are divided into four levels.
13
The first level is phonology. It is a linguistic analysis which deals with sound systems. Then, the next level is morphology. It is a linguistic analysis which deals
with word-structure. The third level is syntax. It is a study of language grammar which deals with sentence-structure. Finally, at the upper level, there is semantics.
It is a linguistic analysis which deals with meaning. So, the grammatical aspects of language are phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
4. Tense
Tense is included as a grammatical aspect of a language in the word level i.e. morphology. It is one of morphological aspects which modify the form of a word,
particularly a verb, so that it can fit into a particular syntactic slot.
14
In this case, it acts as a verb time which suits and relates the happening described by the verb to
time in the past, present, or future.
15
So, tense is a grammatical aspect which can suit and connect an event with its time and its connection is showed through the
use of certain verb. For instance, when someone says, ―I visited my grandmother‘s house‖, it shows that the event happened in the past. It is because the sentence
uses certain verb i.e. ‗visited‘ which shows that the event happened in the past.
Actually, there are three main tenses in English grammar. First, it is present tense. It uses present verb to indicate that the event occurs at present. The verb is
like ‗playplays‘, ‗isare playing‘, ‗hashave played‘, or ‗hashave been playing‘, and so on. Second, it is past tense. It uses past verb to indicate that the event
occurred in the past. The verb is like ‗played‘, ‗waswere playing‘, ‗had played‘, or
‘had been playing‘, and so on. And, last, it is future tense. It uses future verb to
13
Francis Katamba, Morphology, London: Macmillan Press, 1993, p. 4.
14
Ibid., p. 51
15
G. Leech and J. Svartvik, A Communicative Grammar of English, Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2002, p. 66
