Active and passive grammar

Active and passive grammar - these terms belong to the famous Soviet linguist Academician Lev Vladimirovich Scherbe. He meant the following.

The same language can be described in different ways. If you compare how the Russian language is described, for example, in a school textbook and in the so-called academic (that is, strictly scientific) grammar or in a textbook for philological faculties, you will see that these descriptions do not all coincide. Of course, in no Russian grammar can there be twenty six cases instead of six or one person of a verb instead of three. But, let's say, we can consider the so-called partitive (from the Latin. Pars , partis   - "part") like sugar, tea in a separate case, but you can - a kind of genitive case. Or, say, all pronouns can be attributed - based on the peculiarities of their meaning - to a separate part of speech (this is usually done in Russian grammar, especially school grammar); but nothing, in essence, prevents us from “spreading” them into other parts of speech (proceeding from grammatical form and syntactic functions) and calling this pronoun adjective, it is a pronoun noun, and here it is pronounced in almost all French grammar textbooks).

And so, L. V. Shcherba came to the conclusion that it is possible to describe a language in accordance with the way a person speaks, or it is possible in accordance with the way he perceives someone else’s speech, and these descriptions will be different. Indeed, in one case, a person comes from some kind of content or meaning that he wants to express, and for this purpose selects the necessary language means. And in another, to him, so to speak, these means have already been given, and the problem is to understand what they mean and what they serve for.

An active grammar, therefore, is built on the principle “from content to form”, and passive - “from form to content”. The form of the instrumental forest in active grammar will have its neighbors all other forms, words and phrases that denote a place: I go forest - I walk through the forest, go along the forest, go straight ... And in passive it, this form, will be associated with other significant forms of the instrumental case (chopping with an ax, admiring his son) and with other case forms — forest, forests, forest ...

Active grammar is very convenient for textbooks and in general for learning foreign languages. It was for this purpose that L. V. Scherba “invented” her. But in practice, it is difficult to make such an active grammar of, say, the Russian language - it is necessary to rethink too many familiar things in a new way. Therefore, at present there is no such active grammar of the Russian language, although attempts to write it were more than once.

Active grammar is especially convenient for comparing different languages. After all, the most important thing in such a comparison is the manner in which different languages ​​express the same content.