The Two Systems of Grammar: Report and Paraphrase

Abstract

From an attempt to isolate the independent elements of sentence construction, we arrive at two different and separately acting grammatical systems, which contribute to this construction: a system of predicates (with and, or) and a system which can be considered an extension of morphophonemics (which is change purely of phonemic sequences). The predicate system carries all the objective information in the sentence, and the most natural interpretation of its structure is that of giving a report. The morphophonemic system is interpretable as being paraphrastic, and changes at most the speaker’s or hearer’s relation to the report. The grammar of the language as a whole is simply the resultant of these two systems.