A Study On Lin Yu-tang’s Ideological System Of Grammar

Lin Yu-tang has almost been ignored as a linguist, as previous researches were involved in Lin’s literary and translation works, however, few attention has been paid to his achievements in linguistics. Under the imprint of Kaiming Shudian, his magnum opus on ideological system of grammar published in1933, which might be counted as one of the first serious attempts at a practical comparative or contrastive grammar of English and Chinese, the need for which has been felt for so long. Nevertheless, less research has been done on his thought of linguistic philosophy and ideological system of grammar both in China and abroad. In addition, the existing theoretical results seem inadequate and from monotonous research angle. There has been few comprehensive and serious studies focus on Kaiming English Grammar.Based on comparative grammar of English and Chinese, through intensive reading of Kaiming English Grammar, in this study, firstly the organization of Kaiming and ideological system of grammar therein are explained systematically. Afterwards, considerable value in theory and application therein are to be found. All we do in this thesis are intended to present a new identity:Lin Yu-tang as a linguist, which is different from what most people are accustomed to. The specific research procedures are then proposed as follows:1) Having combed through Kaiming carefully, we found that Lin Yu-tang actually broke through the old system of grammar and approached the English grammar in an innovative and unique way, i.e., from inner meaning to outward form.2) Having analyzed the linguistic philosophy reflected throughout the book, a close association and inheritance relationships from Jespersen to Lin Yu-tang have been interestingly clarified, as well as their theoretical and practical significance.3) Having explored the thoughts of comparison presented in this book, we found that Kaiming reduce itself to a comparison of the English and Chinese notional categories and the different means employed to express these notions from six aspects.4) Having compared Kaiming English Grammar to the Chinese current English grammar books, a great deal of enlightenment could derive from it for pedagogical grammar.5) Having followed anterior all-around reading and analyzing of Kaiming, the defects and shortcomings in this book are picked out. The main findings by which grammar teaching and grammar materials compiling inspired are concluded as well. This study shows that although Lin’s new concept of grammar comes from Otto Jespersen, Lin was not bound by this; the heritance of notional comparative grammar is consciously. Starting out from the core idea "living grammar" or "living language", he then sharply detected the similarity and difference between Chinese and English, and realized creative developments and transformation. One of the most important differences between Kaiming and other grammar books is that this book is based on notional principle, which is to proceed from the inner meaning to the outward form in the treatment of English grammatical facts. Based on notional comparison principle, Kaiming made a detailed comparison of the English and Chinese from the following six aspects:1) the two languages may express the same notion or idea by different grammatical means;2) not only the English and Chinese expressions different, sometimes the notions themselves differ in the two languages;3) there are also notions we could found both in the two languages, but we rarely use them in Chinese to the same extent as in English;4) some notions are inherent in English while are new to Chinese;5) we can also find some Chinese notions which are absent in English;6) not only common notions exist in both languages, but also the two languages express these notions in the same way. We could say Kaiming opened the door to comparison between English and Chinese, from notional principles, from thought to expression, from content to form, also from inner to outward. In addition, it helped bring about later English functional notional grammar in China. Despite some detects, such as the language used would appear a bit old-fashioned and some of them appeared to be errors etc., such an old grammar book has retained to this day much of theoretic and practical meaning in the light of some latest developments in the methodology of foreign language teaching and studies on English grammar, comparative grammar, English pedagogical grammar and compiling grammar materials.