ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—The term grammar refers to both a familiar object and an ancient activity (Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit dates back to 500 B.C.E.). In its descriptive sense, the term refers to the set of all phonetic, morphological, and syntactic regularities observable in a given language, along with the representation of those regularities (→MORPHOLOGY, REPRESENTATION, SYNTAX). When someone speaks of a language “with no grammar,” the language in question can only be one whose rules have not (yet) been described. In its normative sense-generally criticized by linguists-grammar is the set of conventions defining a dialectal variant deemed by the society to be superior and chosen as the one to teach (don’t say *with John and I, say with John and me, or don’t say * I just seen him, say I’ve just seen him) (→NORMATIVITY). In its linguistic senses, grammar is either the analysis of the observable regularities of a given language (e.g., the grammar of French anaphors), or the theoretical model used to conduct such an analysis (syntagmatic grammar, functional grammar, etc.; →FUNCTION). The advent of generative grammar added another meaning to the term: according to Noam Chomsky, a grammar is a model not of existing languages but of the faculty of language, that is, the ability of every child to learn and to speak any language (→LANGUAGE). Although the term has been overextended (to refer to any system of regularities, as in the “grammar” of the cinema or the “grammar” of behavior), it should be reserved for linguistic entities.
