grammar

Grammar refers to the way words are used, classified, and structured together to form coherent written or spoken communication.Continue reading...

gram·mar

G0218900 (grăm′ər)n.1. a. The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences.b. The study of structural relationships in language or in a language, sometimes including pronunciation, meaning, and linguistic history.2. a. The system of inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language.b. The system of rules implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences possible in that language.3. a. A normative or prescriptive set of rules setting forth the current standard of usage for pedagogical or reference purposes.b. Writing or speech judged with regard to such a set of rules.4. A book containing the morphologic, syntactic, and semantic rules for a specific language.5. a. The basic principles of an area of knowledge: the grammar of music.b. A book dealing with such principles.

[Middle English gramere, from Old French gramaire, alteration of Latin grammatica, from Greek grammatikē, from feminine of grammatikos, of letters, from gramma, grammat-, letter; see gerbh- in Indo-European roots.]

grammar

(ˈɡræmə) n1. (Grammar) the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology, sometimes also phonology and semantics2. (Grammar) the abstract system of rules in terms of which a person's mastery of his native language can be explained3. (Grammar) a systematic description of the grammatical facts of a language4. (Grammar) a book containing an account of the grammatical facts of a language or recommendations as to rules for the proper use of a language5. (Grammar) a. the use of language with regard to its correctness or social propriety, esp in syntax: the teacher told him to watch his grammar. b. (as modifier): a grammar book. 6. the elementary principles of a science or art: the grammar of drawing. [C14: from Old French gramaire, from Latin grammatica, from Greek grammatikē (tekhnē) the grammatical (art), from grammatikos concerning letters, from gramma letter] ˈgrammarless adj

gram•mar

(ˈgræm ər)

n. 1. the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed, esp. the study of morphology and syntax. 2. these features or constructions themselves: English grammar. 3. an account of these features; a set of rules accounting for these constructions: a grammar of English. 4. (in generative grammar) a device, as a set of rules, whose output is all the sentences that are permissible in a given language, while excluding those that are not permissible. 5. the exposition or establishment of rules based on norms of correct and incorrect language usage; prescriptive grammar. 6. knowledge or usage of the preferred or prescribed forms in speaking or writing: His grammar was terrible. 7. the elements of any science, art, or subject. 8. a book treating such elements. [1325–75; < Old French gramaire < Latin grammatica < Greek grammatikḕ (téchnē) grammatical (art)]

Grammar

See also language; linguistics
accidencethe aspect of grammar that deals with inflections and word order.amphibology1. an ambiguity of language.
2. a word, phrase, or sentence that can be interpreted variously because of uncertainty of grammatical construction rather than ambiguity of the words used, as “John met his father when he was sick.” Also amphibologism, amphiboly. — amphibological, amphibolous, adj.anacoluthona lack of grammatical sequence or coherence, as “He ate cereal, fruit, and went to the store.” Also anacoluthia. — anacoluthic, adj.antanaclasisa repetition of words to resume the sense after a long parenthetical digression. See also rhetoric and rhetorical devices.antiptosisthe substitution of one grammatical case for another, e.g., use of the nominative where the vocative would normally occur. — antiptotic, adj.apodosisthe clause that expresses the consequence in a conditional sentence. Cf. protasis.bagrammatismMedicine. a neurological defect resulting in an inability to use words in grammatical sequence.grammar1. the study of the principles by which a language or languages function in producing meaningful units of expression.
2. knowledge of the preferred forms of expression and usage in language. See also linguistics. — grammarian, n. — grammatical, adj.grammarianism1. Rare. the principles of the study of grammar followed by a grammarian.
2. excessive emphasis upon the fine points of grammar and usage, especially as a shibboleth; dedication to the doctrine of correctness; grammatism.grammaticisma principle or a point of grammar.grammatismexcessively pedantic behavior about grammatical standards and principles. — grammatist, n.hypotaxisarrangement of thoughts by subordination in grammatical construction. Cf. parataxis. — hypotactic, adj.ingrammaticismRare. a word or phrase that violates the rules of grammar. — ingrammatically, adj.paradigm1. a declension, conjugation, etc. that provides all the inflectional forms and serves as a model or example for all others.
2. any model or example. — paradigmatic, paradigmatical, adj.parataxisarrangement of thoughts as coordinate units in grammatical construction. Cf. hypotaxis. — paratactic, adj.periphrasticreferring to the ability in some languages to use function words instead of inflections, as “the hair of the dog” for “dog’s hair.” — periphrasis, n.protasisa clause containing the condition in a conditional sentence. Cf. apodosis. See also drama; wisdom and foolishness. — protatic, adj.solecisma violation of conventional usage and grammar, as “I are sixty year old.” — solecist, n. — solecistic, solecistical, adj.syllepsisthe use of a word or expression to perform two syntactic functions, especially to apply to two or more words of which at least one does not agree in logic, number, case, or gender, as in Pope’s line “See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned.” — sylleptic, sylleptical, adj.synesisthe practice of using a grammatical construction that conforms with meaning rather than with strict regard for syntax, such as a plural form of a verb following a singular subject that has a plural meaning.syntaxthe grammatical principles by which words are used in phrases and sentences to construct meaningful combinations. — syntactic, syntactical, adj.

grammar

The way in which elements of a language are put together to make sentences, or the study of the structure of a language.

Thesaurus

Noun

grammar - the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology (and sometimes also deals with semantics)linguistics - the scientific study of languagedescriptive grammar - a grammar that is produced by descriptive linguisticsprescriptive grammar - a grammar that is produced by prescriptive linguisticssyntax - studies of the rules for forming admissible sentencesmorphology - studies of the rules for forming admissible wordsdescriptive linguistics - a description (at a given point in time) of a language with respect to its phonology and morphology and syntax and semantics without value judgmentshead word, head - (grammar) the word in a grammatical constituent that plays the same grammatical role as the whole constituentquantifier - (grammar) a word that expresses a quantity (as `fifteen' or `many')grammatical category, syntactic category - (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical propertiessubject - (grammar) one of the two main constituents of a sentence; the grammatical constituent about which something is predicatedobject - (grammar) a constituent that is acted upon; "the object of the verb"grammatical constituent, constituent - (grammar) a word or phrase or clause forming part of a larger grammatical constructionclause - (grammar) an expression including a subject and predicate but not constituting a complete sentencearticle - (grammar) a determiner that may indicate the specificity of reference of a noun phrasemodify, qualify - add a modifier to a constituentparse - analyze syntactically by assigning a constituent structure to (a sentence)agree - show grammatical agreement; "Subjects and verbs must always agree in English"dynamic, active - (used of verbs (e.g. `to run') and participial adjectives (e.g. `running' in `running water')) expressing action rather than a state of beingstative - ( used of verbs (e.g. `be' or `own') and most participial adjectives) expressing existence or a state rather than an actionactive - expressing that the subject of the sentence has the semantic function of actor: "Hemingway favors active constructions"passive - expressing that the subject of the sentence is the patient of the action denoted by the verb; "academics seem to favor passive sentences"attributive, prenominal - of adjectives; placed before the nouns they modify; "`red' is an attributive adjective in `a red apple'"predicative - of adjectives; relating to or occurring within the predicate of a sentence; "`red' is a predicative adjective in `the apple is red'"coordinating, coordinative - serving to connect two grammatical constituents of identical construction; "`and' in `John and Mary' or in `John walked and Mary rode' is a coordinating conjunction; and so is `or' in `will you go or stay?'"subordinating, subordinative - serving to connect a subordinate clause to a main clause; "`when' in `I will come when I can' is a subordinating conjunction"main, independent - (of a clause) capable of standing syntactically alone as a complete sentence; "the main (or independent) clause in a complex sentence has at least a subject and a verb"dependent, subordinate - (of a clause) unable to stand alone syntactically as a complete sentence; "a subordinate (or dependent) clause functions as a noun or adjective or adverb within a sentence"descriptive - describing the structure of a language; "descriptive grammar"prescriptive, normative - pertaining to giving directives or rules; "prescriptive grammar is concerned with norms of or rules for correct usage"endocentric - fulfilling the grammatical role of one of its constituents; "when `three blind mice' serves as a noun it is an endocentric construction"exocentric - not fulfilling the same grammatical role of any of its constituents; "when `until last Easter' serves as an adverb it is an exocentric construction"finite - of verbs; relating to forms of the verb that are limited in time by a tense and (usually) show agreement with number and personnon-finite, infinite - of verbs; having neither person nor number nor mood (as a participle or gerund or infinitive); "infinite verb form"syndetic - connected by a conjunctionasyndetic - lacking conjunctionstransitive - designating a verb that requires a direct object to complete the meaningintransitive - designating a verb that does not require or cannot take a direct objectaoristic - of or relating to the aorist tensenominal - pertaining to a noun or to a word group that functions as a noun; "nominal phrase"; "noun phrase"nominative - serving as or indicating the subject of a verb and words identified with the subject of a copular verb; "nominative noun endings"; "predicate nominative"accusative, objective - serving as or indicating the object of a verb or of certain prepositions and used for certain other purposes; "objective case"; "accusative endings"genitive, possessive - serving to express or indicate possession; "possessive pronouns"; "the genitive endings"

grammar

noun syntax, rules of language the basic rules of grammar see grammatical casesQuotations
"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" [Raymond Chandler Letter to Edward Weeks]
"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put" [Winston Churchill]

Translations

文法语法语法书语法知识

grammar

(ˈgrӕmə) noun1. the rules for forming words and for combining words to form sentences. He's an expert on French grammar.语法2. a description or collection of the rules of grammar. Could you lend me your Latin grammar?; (also adjective) a grammar book.语法书3. a person's use of grammatical rules. This essay is full of bad grammar.语法知识gramˈmatical (-ˈmӕ-) adjective1. (negative ungrammatical) correct according to the rules of grammar. a grammatical sentence.符合语法规则的2. of (a) grammar. a grammatical rule.语法的gramˈmatically adverb语法上grammar school1. a type of secondary school. 普通中学，]初级中学 2. (American) a primary school. （美国）小学

grammar ends in -ar (not -er).

grammar

→ 文法zhCN

grammar

Grammar refers to the way words are used, classified, and structured together to form coherent written or spoken communication.Continue reading...

grammar,

description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonologyphonology,
study of the sound systems of languages. It is distinguished from phonetics, which is the study of the production, perception, and physical properties of speech sounds; phonology attempts to account for how they are combined, organized, and convey meaning in
..... Click the link for more information. ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax. School grammars for the speakers of a standard language (e.g., English grammars for English-speaking students) are not descriptive but prescriptive, that is, they are rule books of what is considered correct. Such grammars have popularized many unsound notions because they often fail to take into account common usage and they do not differentiate language styles and levels, such as formal or colloquial; standard, nonstandard, or substandard; or dialect differences.

Morphemes

Morphemes may have lexical meaning, as the word bird, or syntactic meaning, as the plural –s (see inflectioninflection,
in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common the root walk and the affixes -ing, -s, and -er.
..... Click the link for more information. ; etymologyetymology
, branch of linguistics that investigates the history, development, and origin of words. It was this study that chiefly revealed the regular relations of sounds in the Indo-European languages (as described in Grimm's law) and led to the historical investigation of
..... Click the link for more information. ). Words are minimal free forms, but a word may contain more than one morpheme. For example, treatment contains two, treat and the derivational noun-forming suffix -ment. In traditional grammar, parts of speech are defined semantically, i.e., a noun is a person, place, or thing; but in linguistic morphology, parts of speech are defined according to their syntactic function: The difference between nouns and verbs is that they cannot appear in the same environment in a sentence. One method of language classification is based on structure; languages are classified according to the degree of synthesis, or the number of morphemes per word. Analytic languages, such as Chinese, have only one morpheme per word, while in synthetic languages one word represents more than one morpheme; in the case of some Native American languages, a single word may have so many morphemes that it is the equivalent of an English sentence. The list of morphemes and their meanings (see semanticssemantics
[Gr.,=significant] in general, the study of the relationship between words and meanings. The empirical study of word meanings and sentence meanings in existing languages is a branch of linguistics; the abstract study of meaning in relation to language or symbolic logic
..... Click the link for more information. ) in a language is usually not part of a grammar but is isolated in a dictionarydictionary,
published list, in alphabetical order, of the words of a language. In monolingual dictionaries the words are explained and defined in the same language; in bilingual dictionaries they are translated into another language.
..... Click the link for more information. or vocabulary.

Syntax

In syntax, units larger than morphemes, such as phrases and sentences, are isolated in manner that reflects a hierarchical structure; thus the sentence "My sister Mary slowly took the cake from the shelf" would have as primary constitutents "My sister Mary" and "slowly took the cake from the shelf." Each primary constituent then may be broken down into a series of hierarchical secondary constituents. The analysis of syntax is also concerned with the ordering of the grammatical sequences within the phrase, with agreement between concomitant entities (i.e., agreement of number and gender between subject and verb, noun and pronoun), and with case, as mandated by the position and function of a word within a sentence. Other aspects of syntax include such sentence transformations as negativization, interrogation, coordination, subordination, passivization and relativization.

History

The first attempts to study grammar began in about the 4th cent. B.C., in India with Panini's grammar of Sanskrit and in Greece with Plato's dialogue Cratylus. The Greeks, and later the Romans, approached the study of grammar through philosophy. Concerned only with the study of their own language and not with foreign languages, early Greek and Latin grammars were devoted primarily to defining the parts of speech. The biblical commentator Rashi attempted to decipher the rules of ancient Hebrew grammar. It was not until the Middle Ages that grammarians became interested in languages other than their own. The scientific grammatical analysis of language began in the 19th cent. with the realization that languages have a history; this led to attempts at the genealogical classification of languages through comparative linguistics. Grammatical analysis was further developed in the 20th cent. and was greatly advanced by the theories of structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar (see linguisticslinguistics,
scientific study of language, covering the structure (morphology and syntax; see grammar), sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics), as well as the history of the relations of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behavior.
..... Click the link for more information. ).

Bibliography

See N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use (1986); R. W. Langacker, Language and Its Structure (2d ed. 1973); F. J. Newmeyer, Grammatical Theory (1983); V. C. Cook, Chomsky's Universal Grammar (1988).

grammar

the systematic description of the structure of a language. Grammars seek to state the rules by which the elements making up a language are formed and combined. These elements, although they now seem obvious and natural, are theoretical terms within grammar, such as noun, verb and adjective. At its most familiar level syntax, grammar looks at the construction of sentences from combinations of elements, including those elements that make up words, and the phrases that words make up. The discipline of LINGUISTICS is grounded in grammar. The procedures now extend to other ‘levels’, e.g. those of meaning (SEMANTICS) and the context of action (PRAGMATICS). See also SAUSSURE, CHOMSKY, DEEP STRUCTURE AND SURFACE STRUCTURE.

Grammar

the aspect of linguistics that deals with the regular patterns of the formation and usage of word forms; often understood more generally as a synonym for linguistics.

The extension of the meaning of the term “grammar” was known as far back as the ancient Greeks and has been preserved to the present day in the combinations “comparative grammar,” “historical grammar,” and “stratificational grammar.” In contemporary linguistic study the term “grammar” is often used in a narrower sense, although the range of phenomena pertaining to grammar is not defined in quite the same way by the various linguistic schools.

The most generally accepted sense divides the science of language into phonology, grammar, and lexicology. In accordance with the traditional approach, the first two divisions deal with general categories (such as vowels, consonants, the verb, and the predicate), and lexicology deals with individual lexical units. It is precisely through this grouping that phonology and grammar proper are sometimes combined under the general category of “grammar” and together are set apart from vocabulary. However, it is more common in contemporary linguistics to exclude phonology from the sphere of grammar. The term “grammar” is then sometimes used in a broad sense, defined as everything in language except phonology and correspondingly as “the science dealing with signs—as opposed to phonology, which deals with the constituent elements of signs.” In a more specific sense, only part of the phenomena on the sign level pertain to grammar. These phenomena are isolated according to various criteria, the application of which, however, sometimes leads to results which generally coincide. Thus, the widely accepted opposition of grammar to vocabulary (within the sign level) is in some linguistic conceptions based upon the feature of the length of the corresponding units; vocabulary deals with words as integral units of the lexicon, and grammar with units either larger or smaller than words. The traditional division of grammar into two sections is accordingly retained: morphology (etymologically, “the science of forms”) and syntax (etymologically, “arrangement together,” or “combination”), the first of which examines the internal structure of words and the second, the rules for combining words into sentences. This division of grammar is linked with recognition of the word as the basic grammatical unit. In traditional grammar it was considered an accepted fact that the “forms” studied by grammar are word forms, and that words then are the units that combine with one another.

Many representatives of contemporary linguistics consider the basic unit of grammar not the word, but rather the smallest meaningful element, usually called a morpheme (or moneme), and they are not inclined to consider as fundamental the difference between combinations of morphemes forming words and combinations forming more complex syntactic units (word groups, sentences). In this sense the necessity of dividing grammar into morphology and syntax is eliminated, and grammar is defined as “the meaningful arrangement of forms” (L. Bloomfield) or as “morphotactics” (that is, the rules of combinability of morphemes), as opposed to “phono-tactics” (that is, the rules of combinability of phonemes, studied by phonology—C. Hockett). The line between vocabulary and grammar in this instance is drawn by some linguists on the basis of whether the corresponding units are part of an unlimited stock or a limited stock.

The opposition of grammar to vocabulary is sometimes argued through the fact that the categories of grammar are general, so that statements about corresponding phenomena pertain to a whole class of grammatically homogeneous units, whereas lexicological statements are of a special nature, bearing upon each separate lexical unit individually. Thus, the nongrammaticality of combinations such as kruglogo stolu pod lezhish’ tolsiyi kniga ([the] round [adjective, genitive masculine] table [substantive, dative masculine] under [taking the instrumental] lie [verb, second person singular] [the] thick [adjective, nominative masculine] book [substantive, nominative feminine]), instead of pod kruglym stolom lezhit tolstaia kniga (under [taking the instrumental] [the] round [instrumental] table [instrumental] lies [third person singular] a thick [nominative feminine] book [nominative feminine]) is determined by their lack of correspondence to the general rules governing the combinability of the units of the Russian grammatical system. In contrast, a statement about the restricted combinability of the adjective peklevan-nyi (fine rye), which can be combined only with the substantive khleb (bread), is a statement of a lexicological order. The use of the terms “grammaticalization” for the further extension of rules with a previously narrower sphere of effect, and “lexicalization” for the opposite process, corresponds to the idea of the general nature of grammatical rules.

The criterion of differentiation between the lexical and grammatical spheres has to do with the characteristic of the meanings expressed by the corresponding units. Thus, a material, concrete character is ascribed to lexical meaning and a formal, abstract character to grammatical meaning. However, in many instances it is difficult to perceive the distinction between these two types of meaning in terms of “concreteness” and “abstractness.” Therefore, the greater abstractness of denotations of quantity as compared with denotations of quality or size is doubtful. However, the distinction between the meanings of the forms dom (house) and domá (houses) is considered to be grammatical, and the distinction between the meanings of the words khoroshii (good) and plokhoi (bad) or domik (little house) and domishche (large house) is considered to be lexical. Many linguists prefer therefore to speak of the distinction between lexical (or nominative) and syntactic (or relational) meanings and about the opposition, independent of this distinction, of grammatical to nongrammatical meaning. The distinction between nominative and syntactic meaning can be reduced to the fact that the first directly reflects (“names”) extralinguistic reality (objects, events, attributes, relationships), whereas the second reflects only a given word form’s capacity to enter into certain types of syntactic relations with certain classes of word forms in the construction of a phrase. From this standpoint the word forms stoly (tables), stol (table), and stolik (little table) possess different nominative meanings, while the word forms stolu (table [dative]) and stolom (table [instrumental]), or begushchii (running [present active participle] and bezhit ([he] runs) possess different syntactic meanings.

The opposition of grammatical to nongrammatical meaning is based upon the property of necessity, inherent in the former and absent in the latter; thus, the general-categorial meaning of “parts of speech” in those languages in which the speaker is obliged to represent the corresponding extralinguistic matter as an object, attribute, or action (that is, in which the speaker is forced to make some selection from a limited number of possibilities for representing grammatically the given signified, even when the distinction between one or another means of representation is not essential for the speaker himself). Thus, the same situation (“it’s freezing outside”) may be expressed in Russian by the phrases na ulitse moroz (nominal construction), na ulitse morozno (impersonal adverbial construction), and na ulitse morozit (verbal construction), but the designation of the phenomenon of freezing cold must necessarily be represented as an object, attribute, or action, in view of the impossibility of designating this phenomenon without corresponding specification. The selection of some grammatical representation implies in turn the presence of certain necessary (that is, grammatical) meanings. For example, the meaning of number in connection with substantives is grammatical in Russian (since any Russian substantive is either in singular or plural form) and nongrammatical in Chinese and Japanese, since in these languages a noun may be used to designate both one and several objects, as long as the corresponding specification does not enter into the speaker’s intention. In accordance with the opposition of nominative to syntactic meanings, division has been proposed for the study of the plane of content into syntax and the theory of nomination (vocabulary, onomatol-ogy). Since both nominative (for example, number, for Russian substantives) and syntactic (for example, gender, number, and case, for Russian adjectives) meanings can be grammatical, grammar must occupy an intermediate position between vocabulary and syntax: it studies both lexical and syntactic meanings, but only those whose expression is necessary in the given language. Given this division, it is expedient to leave the study of the means of expression of meanings to morphology.

A division that seems successful is a suggestion which is comparatively recent but which corresponds, in general, to linguistic tradition; specifically, it is suggested that those means of expressing any linguistic meanings that are realized within the word boundaries (affixation, alternation, reduplication, incorporation) be considered as morphological, and those realized outside the word (such as by means of syntactic words and word order) be considered as nonmorphologi-cal. Thus, the long-standing controversy over whether all morphology or only a part of it (excluding, for example, word-formation) should be included as grammar is being resolved according to whether a given morphological method serves a grammatical or nongrammatical function. The property of necessity of expression of grammatical meaning, however, seems a more universal criterion (that is, one independent of language type) for defining the sphere relevant to grammar in the proper sense. It may be noted that the fact that grammatical units belong to a limited stock and the fact that grammatical “rules” have a general and regular nature (permitting the reduction of all the diversity of linguistic utterances to limited complexes of systems and structures) are in essence a consequence of this property of necessity.

The methods of modern grammar have their origin in ancient Indian philological science, the most well known representative of which was Panini (fourth to third century B.C.). The system of notions and categories of modern “school” grammar, including even its terminology (for example, the names of the parts of speech and the cases), goes back to the grammatical theory of the ancient Greeks (Aristotle, the Stoics, the Alexandrian school). Of the Roman grammarians, Varro (116–27 B.C.) is the most notable. Greco-Roman grammatical theory was adopted by European philologists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment by way of the Late Latin grammars (M. V. Lomonosov produced the first Russian grammar in 1755; the first Church Slavonic grammars appeared in 1591 and 1596), so that both the concepts and the categories of Latin grammar were transferred to the grammars of new languages. In the 17th and 18th centuries interest in the logical and philosophical foundations of grammatical theory (for example, the problem of “universal” grammar) grew significantly. The development of typological research and the creation of the first morphological classifications of the languages of the world in the early 19th century stimulated the creation of differentiated notional systems for describing languages of different grammatical systems; however, the first systematic work in this direction was not begun until H. Steinthal and continued by the neogrammarians. The idea of “emancipating” the grammars of new languages from the Latin-Greek grammatical system in essence began to penetrate the descriptive grammars of real languages only by the early 20th century; in particular, the grammatical system elaborated by F. F. Fortunatov has been used in Russian grammar.

The basic lines of development of grammar in the 20th century have been concerned not so much with the methods of describing specific languages (although even this aspect has been given some consideration, for example, in descriptive linguistics) as with the problem of grammatical theory itself.

REFERENCES

Smirnitskii. A. I. “Leksicheskoe i grammaticheskoe v slove.” In the collection Voprosy grammaticheskogo stroia. Moscow, 1955.
Kuznetsov, P. S. O printsipakh izucheniia grammatiki. Moscow, 1961.
Mel’chuk. I. A. “O nekotorykh tipakh iazykovykh znachenii.” In O tochnykh metodakh issledovaniia iazyka. Moscow, 1961.
Matezius, V. “O sistemnom grammaticheskom analize.” In the collection Prazhskii lingvisticheskii kruzhok. Moscow, 1967.
Zalizniak. A. A. “Iskhodnye polozheniia.” In his book Russkoe imennoe slovoizmenenie. Moscow, 1967.
Issledovaniia po obshchei teorii grammatiki. Moscow, 1968.
Jakobson, R. “Boas’ View of Grammatical Meaning.” American Anthropologist, 1959, vol. 61, no. 5. p. 2 (Memoir no. 89).

T. V. BULYGINA

grammar

A formal definition of the syntactic structure of a language(see syntax), normally given in terms of production ruleswhich specify the order of constituents and theirsub-constituents in a sentence (a well-formed string in thelanguage). Each rule has a left-hand side symbol naming asyntactic category (e.g. "noun-phrase" for a natural language grammar) and a right-hand side which is a sequenceof zero or more symbols. Each symbol may be either aterminal symbol or a non-terminal symbol. A terminal symbolcorresponds to one "lexeme" - a part of the sentence withno internal syntactic structure (e.g. an identifier or anoperator in a computer language). A non-terminal symbol isthe left-hand side of some rule.

One rule is normally designated as the top-level rule whichgives the structure for a whole sentence.

A grammar can be used either to parse a sentence (seeparser) or to generate one. Parsing assigns a terminalsyntactic category to each input token and a non-terminalcategory to each appropriate group of tokens, up to the levelof the whole sentence. Parsing is usually preceded bylexical analysis. Generation starts from the top-level ruleand chooses one alternative production wherever there is achoice.

See also BNF, yacc, attribute grammar, grammar analysis.

grammar

grammar

gram·mar

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gram•mar

Grammar

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grammar

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Morphemes

Syntax

History

Bibliography

grammar

Grammar

REFERENCES

grammar

grammar

Synonyms for grammar

noun syntax

Synonyms

Words related to grammar

noun the branch of linguistics that deals with syntax and morphology (and sometimes also deals with semantics)

Related Words