Osnovni problem sa zbrkom sintaktičkih kategorija i funkcija u našim gramatikama je bio prisutan i u engleskom jeziku. U ovom tekstu
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ZAA_final_proof.pdf jedan od ko-autora Cambridge Grammara, Geoffrey Pullum lijepo izlaže ovaj problem i objašnjava razlike izmedju ovih pojmova. Evo zapažanja iz uvodnog dijela teksta koja su apsolutno validna i kad su u pitanju naše gramatike i nauka o jeziku:
1. The primary confusion
Most of the deepest blunders in English grammar as traditinally presented over the past two or three centuries stem from a single longstanding confusion between (i) grammatical categories or word classes; (ii) syntactic functions or grammatical relations; and (iii) semantic and discourse-related notions.
It is surprising to see the tenacity of this confusion. It does not appear in other domains. People do not confuse butter knives with screwdrivers, even though occasionally someone who cannot find a screwdriver may use a butter knife to turn a screw. Yet in grammar people just cannot keep syntactically relevant categories or classes of words separate from the relational properties they have w hen used in particular constructions, and cannot keep either separate from meaning. They insist on trying to define the first of these in terms of the other two, and they have done so since the very earliest attempts to write grammars of English.
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