What is grammar?

Grammar describes the ways in which English words are combined to form meaningful and acceptable sentences.

It consists of two parts:

• syntax: how we group and order words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.
• morphology: how words are changed according to their use in phrases, clauses, and sentences.

What grammar is not

This leaves out a lot of things some people think of as ‘grammar’.

It does not include:

• spelling
• punctuation
• how texts larger than sentences are constructed
• style.

Real language

Grammar is about how real people use real language.

It is not about what some people think we should or should not do with our language.

©John Seely 2008