What is grammar - The meanings of the notion of grammar

An informal and broad definition of grammar is that grammar is a branch of linguistics that
studies the form and structure of words (morphology) and the way in which the units of sentence
structure are combined in sentences (syntax).
The grammar of a language may also include a full description of the form and meaning of the
sentences, i.e. the sounds and sounds patterns, units of meaning, as well as the rules which
combine the words to make new sentences. Every language has its grammar, and to
understand the nature of language, we must understand the nature of this internalized set of
rules. In order to speak a language correctly, human beings have to have knowledge of the
grammar of that particular language at their disposal. Grammar represents our linguistic
competence. It is knowledge of grammar that allows human beings to communicate through
language.

1. Grammar as a Prescriptive Compilation for the Use of a Particular Language

A prescriptive approach to language deals with the setting of rules about the structure of
a language. It deals with the “correct” forms of a language that people should use both in
speaking and writing. Such correctness is formulated by prescriptive rules on what is
right or wrong, good or bad language use. Not following these rules leads to incorrect
usage and, in the worst case, to social stigmatisation due to failure in communication.
This effect shows that correctness (or “proper language”) is not a result of general
principles of language, but of the social agreement on accepted or expected usage of
specific forms. Prescriptive grammar, unlike descriptive grammar (see below) , is thus
not an object of research for modern linguists. You may find prescriptive grammars in the
line of traditional linguistics of the earlier centuries.

2. Grammar as a Description of a Particular Language

Grammar in a scientific sense is based on a purely descriptive approach and is defined

by a general theory of language, and is therefore based on linguistic universals that help
to understand what a human language is in general. Therefore a grammar is a full-length
description of a language as it is actually used by its speakers. Modern grammars are
theory-driven and thus fulfil scientific standards.
Such a grammar of a given language consists of a set of precise rules which native
speakers intuitively follow in the production and understanding of verbal well-formed
constructions and which help them to realize well-formed, “grammatical” sentences and
to mark ungrammatical sentences or phrases (as derivations from that grammar). So, for
example, knowing that regular verbs form their past tense by adding ‘ed’, is a rule of
English morphology, and knowing that ‘ed’ may be pronounced as /t/, /id/, or /d/,
depending on the environment, is a rule of English phonology.
The term ‘rule’ has a special sense here. Following the prescriptive tradition, we tend to
think of rules as externally imposed constraints or norms which everyone has to obey,
like Don’t walk on the grass. But linguistic rules of the modern kind are not of this type.
 They are language-internal constraints (as opposed to external constraints) and, as
such, unconsciously present in the minds of native speakers. They are better understood
as general or even universal principles by which the language operates. Descriptive
grammar as a set of rules is a theory of that language, with its hypotheses as rules and
based on a general account of language. Therefore it does not tell people how they
should speak, or what is good or bad language use. It systematically describes the
speaker’s possibility of speaking and understanding language as it actually is and not as
others think it should be.
Nevertheless grammars may differ according how or to what extent they make use of
linguistic methods of idealization and removal of contextual dimensions.

Grammar is descriptive when it describes how English is used by the people who speak it. It
may attempt to describe what “the best writers” do, or it may also inform you about how English
is spoken in all corners of society or in several societies. A descriptive grammar can inform you
about whether a given expression is considered questionable by some speakers, but without
insisting that those speakers are right or wrong.

Grammar is prescriptive when it tells you, as a native speaker, how English should be spoken
(or written.) Prescriptive grammar *may* try to impose artificial or out-dated rules or it may
privilege one cultural form of English over other forms.

Given a sentence such as “Me and Tommy played cards,” prescriptive grammar would tell you
that this is wrong, that the only correct and acceptable way to say it is “Tommy and I played
cards.”

A descriptive grammar would say that this is a common usage by many native speakers in
casual situations, but that it is stigmatized by some speakers.

The vast majority of questions about how to say something in English do not involve any
question of whether it is “correct” by this or that standard. If someone writes, I played cards
with she, everyone will agree that this is not how English is spoke or written. But if someone
writes, I played cards with Tommy and she, then a prescriptivist will inform you that this is
wrong, while a descriptivist will tell you that many educated native speakers *do* say things like
this.
Myths about language

Myth #1: Children learn to speak through explicit teaching or memorization

Children learn language long before they enter a classroom, just from exposure to it, and they
produce language that they couldn’t have ever heard before based on figuring out linguistic
patterns. A classic example showing that children figure out patterns in language that they can
generalize to unfamiliar data is the wug test, but another source of evidence comes from
children’s overgeneralizations of irregular forms. For example, children may produce goed,
eated, foots despite the fact that they’ve only ever heard went, ate, feet.

In fact, children may even resist explicit teaching of language, as this example shows:
Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child: Other … one … spoon.
Father: Say … “other."
Child: Other.
Father: "Spoon."
Child: Spoon.
Father: "Other … Spoon."
Child: Other … spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

Myth #2: Animals have language just like humans

Animals can communicate with each other, but human language is unique for several reasons.
Firstly, human language is recursive: sentences can be infinitely long (or as long as your
breath/memory will hold out) by embedding one phrase or sentence into another. Some
examples from children’s songs: “the branch on the tree and the tree in the hole and the hole in
the ground…”, “…she swallowed the spider to catch the fly, and I don’t know why she swallowed
the fly…”, “…who lived in the house that Jack built”.

Human language is also creative and productive: you can make sentences and even words that
no one has ever heard before (e.g. snowpocalypse, I’m all cookied-out). Finally, human
language is more abstract than animal communication: we can talk about past and future and
even hypothetical events and entities. Although bee dances can communicate information about
food and distances, and dogs can recognize names of toys and even whether you’re happy or
angry, neither of them can tell you about how their weekend was or what they’d do if they had a
million dollars.

Myth #3: Reading and writing are an essential part of language

Not all languages are written, and language has been around at least a hundred thousand years
before any writing. Spoken and sign languages (at least for young children) are acquired
naturally and without conscious effort, whereas reading and writing can take years of formal
instruction and effort that results in varying levels of proficiency. Writing is also idiosyncratic and
doesn’t reflect everything about spoken language (and is often even less accurate for sign
languages). Spelling doesn’t change as quickly as speech and is more standardized.

English spelling is also complicated and inconsistent. For example, the sound /i/ can be spelled
at least 8 different ways, as in meet, eat, Pete, funny, key, quay, machine, and ceiling. And the
symbol “e” can represent at least 4 different sounds, as in pen, game, redo, and the. Even in
languages with more logical spelling systems, like Spanish, the spelling doesn’t reflect the
whole language because it misses important aspects like prosody (the intonational pattern of a
sentence or phrase).
Linguistics looks at the sounds of language and analyzes the words based on their sounds, not
their spelling, although “non-standard” spellings can often give clues as to how words were
pronounced when we don’t have recordings of speakers.

Myth #4: Some languages/dialects are more complex or better than others

Children learn whichever language they are exposed to at a similar rate (although
children exposed to multiple languages may learn each language slightly slower, they will catch
up and often exceed their monolingual peers within a few years). What seems “simple” or
“complicated” to you as an adult depends on what you already know: for example, if you speak
a language that already has tone or case marking or definite/indefinite articles or a tense/lax
vowel distinction, these concepts will seem easy to you, but if you haven’t been exposed to
them early, these concepts will seem hard.
Languages that are straightforward in one area are often complicated in another area.
For example, a language with a rigid system of word order and many prepositions may lack
case marking, while a language with many cases may have freer word order and/or fewer
prepositions. Another example is that a language with fewer sounds overall is likely to have
longer words than a language with many sounds (the number of possible words of length CV is
the number of consonants C in the language times the number of vowels V in the language),
and languages with less complicated syllable structure tend to be spoken faster.
There’s some evidence that languages that have been learned by a lot of speakers in
adulthood are likely to be more isolating, while languages that have predominantly been learned
by speakers in childhood are more likely to be more agglutinative/polysynthetic, suggesting that
these might be factors in relative ease or difficulty, but children are still equally capable of
learning any language and even if we end up finding some differences, this is not evidence for
one language being superior. (There are definitely easier and harder writing systems though:
English-speaking children, for example, take longer to learn to read and are diagnosed with
dyslexia at higher rates than Spanish-speaking children, because the English orthography is far
more irregular than the Spanish one.)
Languages or dialects that people think of as “better” reflect a social (and often racist)
judgement about who has power or who is considered more important, not anything intrinsic
about the language itself (here’s one example).

Myth #5: Languages deteriorate over time

It’s common to think that “kids these days” aren’t talking as well as previous generations,
but all living languages change over time and it is not a sign of inferiority: any language at any
stage still consists of complex subconscious patterns. Borrowing words also doesn’t make a
language inferior or corrupt: all languages borrow, and borrowed words get adapted into the
sound system and grammar of the borrowing language.