Understanding Grammar in Linguistics: Types and Evolution
What is Grammar?
Grammar is a crucial part of linguistics, including phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics. There are various types of grammar such as prescriptive, descriptive, teaching, and generative. Linguists believe that grammatical correctness is essential for mutual intelligibility. Formal rules about language usage appear with written representations, leading to the development of prescriptive grammar. The study of grammar is important in education, but school-taught rules may differ from linguistic usage. Additionally, planned and computer programming languages have their own grammatical systems. Finally, the complexity of grammar varies between languages and is not solely dependent on whether they are analytical or synthetic.
Grammar
Grammar is part of the general study of language called linguistics. The subfields of grammar are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. In traditional terms, grammar includes only morphology and syntax.
Linguists recognise several types of grammar.
- Prescriptive grammar – an attempt to tell the users of the language how to use it to speak correctly. This is the sense in which “I didn’t do nothing” is bad English grammar.
- Descriptive grammar – an attempt to describe the language as it is being used, regardless of whether it is considered correct or not. In many dialects, people say “I didn’t do nothing”; a descriptive grammar of such dialects would accordingly treat that sentence as grammatical and provide rules that account for it. Likewise, a descriptive grammar of formal English would provide rules accounting for “I didn’t do anything.”
- Teaching grammar – a combination of prescriptive and descriptive approaches with the aim of teaching a language to children and foreigners. In teaching grammars, it is often necessary to simplify in order to achieve success, as neither the prescriptive nor the descriptive approaches are logical or easy to understand in all details.
- Generative grammar – A technical linguistic term. A generative grammar for a particular language specifies, for each string of words, whether or not that string constitutes a grammatical sentence in that language. It does not provide a set of rules for constructing or parsing sentences.
Descriptive grammar takes the approach that speakers of a language follow that language’s grammar as a common convention of mutual intelligibility. Violation of the grammar makes one’s speech difficult to understand (as in “barked dog me at time for long”). A majority of modern linguists accept that no person whose brain functions are not severely impaired speaks ungrammatically in this sense.
Grammars evolve through usage and human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammar are codification of usage that is developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammar does not have any justification beyond their authors’ aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say “I didn’t do nothing”, some say “I didn’t do anything”, and some say one or the other depending on social context.
The formal study of grammar is an important part of education from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not “grammar” in the sense most linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive.
Planned languages are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (such as Esperanto or the intercultural, highly logic-compatible artificial language Lojban) or created as part of a work of fiction (such as the Klingon language and Elvish language). Each of these artificial languages has its own grammar.
Computer programming languages have grammar but do not resemble human languages very much. These are called formal grammars. In particular, they conform precisely to a grammar generated by a pushdown automaton with arbitrarily complex commands. They usually lack questions, exclamations, similes, metaphors, and other features of human languages.
It is a myth that analytic languages have simpler grammar than synthetic languages. That languages have different levels of grammatical complexity can be shown to be false by realizing the fact that changes to words are not the only kind of grammar. Chinese is very context-dependent. In other words, context accomplishes the same role as declension and conjugation. (Chinese does have some inflections, and had more in the past.) Latin, which is synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to accomplish the same role that Chinese do with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, a sentence can be made from scattered elements. In short, Latin has a complex affixion and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite.
Grammar of specific languages
- Arabic grammar
- Chinese grammar
- Dutch grammar
- English grammar
- Esperanto grammar
- Finnish language grammar
- French grammar
- German grammar
- Hebrew grammar
- Italian grammar
- Japanese grammar
- Latin grammar
- Lithuanian grammar
- Russian grammar
- Slovene grammar
- Spanish grammar
- Swedish grammar
Grammatical terms
- adjective
- adjunct
- adverb
- article
- aspect
- auxiliary verb
- case
- clause
- closed-class word
- comparative
- complement
- compound noun and adjective
- conjugation
- dangling modifier
- declension
- determiner
- dual (form for two)
- expletive
- function word
- gender
- infinitive
- measure word (classifier)
- modal particle
- movement paradox
- modifier
- mood
- noun
- number
- object
- open class word
- parasitic gap
- part of speech
- particle
- person
- phrase
- phrasal verb
- plural
- predicate (also verb phrase)
- preposition
- pronoun
- pseudo-Anglicism
- sandhi
- singular
- subject
- superlative
- tense
- uninflected word
- verb
- voice
Grammatical devices
- Affixion
- Alternation
- Reduplication
- Word order
Related topics
- Analytic language vs. Synthetic language
- Categorical grammar
- Disputed English grammar
- Functional grammar
- Generalised phrase structure grammar (GPSG)
- Government and binding
- Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
- Lexical functional grammar (LFG)
- List of acronyms
- Linguistic typology
- List of frequently misused English words
- Minimalist program
- Phrase structure rules
- Principles and parameters — see government and binding
- Role and reference grammar
- Syntax
- Systemic functional grammar
- Transformational grammar
- Transformational-generative grammar — see transformational grammar
- Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG)
- Word grammar
- Ambiguous grammar