Grammar

Grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics.

Definition

Grammar is the study of words, how they are used in sentences, and how they change in different situations. The Ancient Greeks used to call this grammatikē tékhnē, the craft of letters. It can have any of these meanings:

• The study of a language: how it works, and everything about it. This is background research on language.
• The structure of a language. A grammar is a description of a language's grammatical rules. For example, in English, we would say that sentences must have the correct word order.
• A book describing the grammatical rules of a language.
• A set of actual utterances; or the potential utterances of a language group.

History

The first grammars were written in Ancient India and were called the Vyākaraṇas. The most famous of these, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, was written by Pāṇini. Later grammars were written in Latin by Aelius Donatus and Aelius Priscianus and in Arabic by ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Qurayb al-Asmaʻi and Sibawayh.

Types of Grammar

There are many different types of grammar, including:

• Descriptive grammar: This is an objective description of the grammatical constructions in a language.
• Prescriptive grammar: This refers to the rules of a language as certain people think they should be used.
• Generative grammar: This is a set of rules that predicts which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences.
• Transformational grammar: This is a type of generative grammar that involves transforming one type of sentence into another.
• Relational grammar: This type of grammar looks at the relationships between words in a sentence.

See Also

• Linguistics
• Syntax
• Morphology
• Phonology
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

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