Grammar

• 1. Introduction

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  Grammar is the system of rules that governs how a natural language is structured and used, as shown by its speakers or writers. Those rules reach into clauses, phrases, and words. Yet most people who follow them flawlessly could never recite a single one. A child does not study a rulebook. The child listens, watches other speakers, and absorbs the structure of a language without intentional instruction. Much of this internalizing happens in early childhood. Learn a language later in life and the path changes, usually demanding more direct instruction. So what exactly is being learned, and who decides what counts as correct? The word itself carries divergent meanings once it leaves the linguist's hands. To some it includes spelling and punctuation. To others it shrinks down to a set of prescriptive norms, a list of things you must and must not say. The story runs from Iron Age India to a national day on a March calendar, and it begins with a Greek phrase meaning the art of letters.

• 2. The Art Of Letters

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  Greek γραμματικὴ τέχνη, grammatikḕ téchnē, means art of letters. It descends from γράμμα, grámma, letter, which itself comes from γράφειν, gráphein, to draw or to write. That same root surfaces in unexpected places. The words graphics, grapheme, and photograph all trace back to it. The Greek scholar Dionysius Thrax, active around 170, wrote the oldest known grammar handbook. Its title was the Art of Grammar, Τέχνη Γραμματική, a succinct guide to speaking and writing clearly and effectively. Thrax had studied under Aristarchus of Samothrace, who founded a school on the Greek island of Rhodes. His handbook proved astonishingly durable. It remained the primary grammar textbook for Greek schoolboys until as late as the twelfth century AD. The Romans built their grammatical writings on it, and its basic format still underlies grammar guides in many languages today. Before Thrax, grammar had emerged as a discipline in Hellenism from the 3rd century BC, with authors such as Rhyanus and Aristarchus of Samothrace. Latin grammar then followed Greek models from the 1st century BC, shaped by writers including Orbilius Pupillus, Remmius Palaemon, Marcus Valerius Probus, Verrius Flaccus, and Aemilius Asper.

• 3. Traditions Across The World

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  Iron Age India produced the first systematic grammar of Sanskrit. Its makers included Yaska in the 6th century BC, Pāṇini in the 6th to 5th century BC, and his commentators Pingala around 200 BC, Katyayana, and Patanjali in the 2nd century BC. Tolkāppiyam, the earliest Tamil grammar, is mostly dated to before the 5th century AD. The Babylonians too made early attempts at language description. The grammar of Irish originated in the 7th century with Auraicept na n-Éces. In that same century, Arabic grammar emerged with Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali. The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appeared in the High Middle Ages, within the context of Midrash, the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. The Karaite tradition began in Abbasid Baghdad. Among the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible is the Diqduq, from the 10th century. In the 12th century, Ibn Barun compared Hebrew with Arabic inside the Islamic grammatical tradition. Belonging to the trivium of the seven liberal arts, grammar was taught as a core discipline throughout the Middle Ages, following authors from Late Antiquity such as Priscian.

• 4. Naming The Vernaculars

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  Vernacular languages waited a long time for their own grammars. Treatment of them began gradually during the High Middle Ages, with isolated works such as the First Grammatical Treatise, but only became influential in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In 1486, Antonio de Nebrija published Las introduciones Latinas contrapuesto el romance al Latin. Six years later, in 1492, he produced the first Spanish grammar, Gramática de la lengua castellana. The 16th-century Italian Renaissance brought the Questione della lingua, a discussion on the status and ideal form of the Italian language. Dante's de vulgari eloquentia had initiated it, and Pietro Bembo carried it forward with Prose della volgar lingua, published in Venice in 1525. The first grammar of Slovene appeared in 1583, written by Adam Bohorič. Grammatica Germanicae Linguae, the first grammar of German, came out in 1578. Some grammars were compiled for evangelism and Bible translation from the 16th century onward. One example is Grammatica o Arte de la Lengua General de Los Indios de Los Reynos del Perú, a Quechua grammar published in 1560 by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás. From the latter part of the 18th century, grammar became a subfield of the emerging discipline of modern linguistics. Jacob Grimm first published his Deutsche Grammatik in the 1810s. Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar, the starting point of modern comparative linguistics, came out in 1833.

• 5. Description Versus Prescription

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  Descriptive grammar reveals a language fully, setting out the grammatical constructions of a particular speech type in great detail. Linguistic prescription pulls in the opposite direction. It is a plan to marginalize some constructions while codifying others, either absolutely or within the framework of a standard language. Grammars evolve through usage. With the advent of written representations, formal rules tend to appear too, though they describe writing conventions more accurately than the conventions of speech. Formal grammars are codifications of usage, developed by repeated documentation and observation over time. As rules harden, the prescriptive idea of grammatical correctness can arise, and a gap opens between contemporary usage and what has come to be accepted as standard. Linguists tend to see prescriptive grammar as having little justification beyond its authors' aesthetic tastes. Style guides may still offer useful advice on standard language use, grounded in descriptions of contemporary writing. Prescription also helps explain variation in speech. It is part of why some speakers say I didn't do nothing, some say I didn't do anything, and some choose one or the other depending on social context. The rules taught in schools are not a grammar in the sense most linguists use, since they are prescriptive in intent rather than descriptive.

• 6. Syntax And Morphology

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  Syntax handles linguistic structure above the word level, such as how sentences are formed, while leaving intonation to phonology. Morphology, by contrast, works at and below the word level, such as how compound words are formed, though it stays above the level of individual sounds. No clear line can be drawn between the two. The distinction reshapes whole languages. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that synthetic languages encode by inflection. In a purely synthetic language, word order carries little weight and morphology carries much. In an analytic language, the balance flips. Chinese and Afrikaans are highly analytic, so their meaning depends heavily on context. Both have some inflections, and both had more in the past, drifting over time toward a purer analytic form. Latin sits at the other extreme. Highly synthetic, it uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese conveys with syntax. Because Latin words are quite self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be built from elements arranged almost arbitrarily. Latin pairs complex affixation with simple syntax, and Chinese does the reverse. To model rules like these with scientific precision, theoretical linguistics has produced frameworks such as dependency grammar, introduced by Lucien Tesnière in 1959, and the generative tradition, whose transformational grammar arrived in the 1960s.

• 7. Schools And Standards

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  A grammar school once meant something narrow and specific. The term historically referred to a school, attached to a cathedral or monastery, that taught Latin grammar to future priests and monks. Earlier still it described a school where students learned to read, scan, interpret, and declaim Greek and Latin poets, among them Homer, Virgil, and Euripides. These should not be confused with the distinct modern British grammar schools. Prescriptive grammar is taught in primary and secondary school, yet a series of metastudies found that explicitly teaching parts of speech and syntax has little or no effect on writing quality, whether in elementary, middle, or high school. Other methods worked far better, including strategy instruction, collaborative writing, summary writing, process instruction, sentence combining, and inquiry projects. A standard language is a dialect promoted above others in writing, education, and the public sphere, contrasting with vernacular dialects. Which dialect wins is rarely obvious. Standard Italian is based on the speech of Florence rather than the capital, because of Florence's influence on early literature. Standard Spanish rests not on the speech of Madrid but on educated speakers from more northern areas such as Castile and León. In Argentina and Uruguay, the Spanish standard follows the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, known as Rioplatense Spanish. Norwegian carries two standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and the choice between them stirs controversy, with Nynorsk backed by 27 percent of municipalities.

• 8. Living Rules

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  Standard Chinese holds official status as the standard spoken form of Chinese in the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and the Republic of Singapore. Its pronunciation is based on the local accent of Mandarin from Luanping, Chengde, in Hebei Province near Beijing, while its grammar and syntax follow modern vernacular written Chinese. Modern Standard Arabic is based directly on Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an. The Hindustani language splits into two standards, Hindi and Urdu, and Portuguese for now keeps two official standards, Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Constructed languages, also called planned languages or conlangs, are more common now, though still extremely rare beside natural languages. Many were designed to aid human communication, among them the naturalistic Interlingua, the schematic Esperanto, and the highly logical Lojban, each with its own grammar. The way people revise grammar differs between first-language and second-language writers. Second-language writers, composing in a language learned after childhood, face the harder task of managing language acquisition and writing development at once. According to Ester Odilia Breuer, revision in second-language writing is cognitively demanding and occurs not only after writing but during the planning and drafting stages. In the United States, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar designated the 4th of March as National Grammar Day in 2008.