Grammar

Types of grammar

A Prescription and description|prescriptive grammar presents authoritative norms for a particular language, and tends to deprecate non-standard constructions. Traditional grammars are typically prescriptive. Prescriptive grammars are usually based on the prestige dialects of a speech community, and often specifically condemn certain constructions which are common only among lower socioeconomic groups, such as the use of "ain't" and double negatives in English language|English. Though prescriptive grammars remain common in pedagogy and foreign language teaching, they have fallen out of favor in modern academic linguistics, as they describe only a subset of actual language usage.

A Prescription and description|descriptive grammar attempts to describe actual usage, avoiding prescriptive judgements. Descriptive grammars are bound to a particular speech community, and attempt to provide rules for any utterance considered grammatically correct within that community. For example, in many dialects of English, the use of double negatives is very common, though ungrammatical from the point of view of a prescriptive English grammar. A descriptive grammar of a speech community where "I didn't do nothing" is acceptable will treat that sentence as grammatical, and provide rules that account for it. A descriptive grammar of formal English would rather provide rules for "I didn't do anything."

Traditional grammar is the collection of ideas about grammar that Western societies have received from Greek and Roman sources. Prescriptive grammar is always formulated in terms of the descriptive concepts inherited from traditional grammar. Modern descriptive grammar aims to correct the errors of traditional grammar, and generalize them, so as to avoid shoehorning all languages to the model of Latin. Nearly all materials used in teaching language, however, are still based on traditional grammar.

A formal grammar is a precisely defined grammar, typically used for computer programming languages.

A generative grammar is a formal grammar that can in some sense "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. An entire branch of linguistic theory is based on generative grammars. Generative grammars were popularized by Noam Chomsky.

Development of grammars

Grammars evolve through usage and human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are 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 grammars do 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 a "grammar" in the sense most linguistics|linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. Planned language|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 languages). Each of these artificial languages has its own grammar. It is a myth that analytic languages have simpler grammar than synthetic languages. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology (linguistics)|morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. Chinese language|Chinese and Afrikaans language|Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic and meaning is therefore very context dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.) Latin, which is highly synthetic language|synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, an intelligible Latin Sentence (linguistics)|sentence can be made from elements placed in largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite. ----- In computer science, the syntax of each programming language is defined by a formal grammar. In theory of computation|theoretical computer science and mathematics, formal grammars define formal languages. The Chomsky hierarchy defines several important classes of formal grammars.

See also

:Category:Grammars of specific languages

Grammatical devices

Affixation

Derivation (linguistics)|Derivation

Reduplication

Word order

Grammatical terms

Adjective

Adjunct

Adverb

Appositive

Article (grammar)|Article

Grammatical aspect|Aspect

Auxiliary verb

Grammatical case|Case

Clause

Closed class word

Comparative

Complement

Compound noun and adjective

Grammatical conjugation|Conjugation

Dangling modifier

Declension

Determiner

Dual grammatical number|Dual (form for two)

Expletive

Function word

Grammatical gender|Gender

Infinitive

Measure word (classifier)

Modal particle

Movement paradox

Grammatical modifier|Modifier

Grammatical mood|Mood

Noun

Grammatical number|Number

Object (grammar)|Object

Open class word

Parasitic gap

Part of speech

Grammatical particle|Particle

Grammatical person|Person

Phrase

Phrasal verb

Plural

Predicate (grammar)|Predicate (also verb phrase)

Preposition

Personal pronoun

Pronoun

Restrictive clause|Restrictiveness

Sandhi

Singular

Subject (grammar)|Subject

Superlative

Grammatical tense|Tense

Uninflected word

Verb

Grammatical voice|Voice

Related topics

:Category:Grammar frameworks

:Category:Grammars of specific languages

Ambiguous grammar

Analytic language vs. Synthetic language

Government and binding

Linguistic typology

Syntax

Systemic functional grammar

References

Bede Rundle, Grammar in Philosophy, Oxford 1979

External links

http://www.krysstal.com/grammar.html

http://www.gramster.com/

http://www.figarospeech.com/