ABSTRACT
If we want to describe something, we need special terms to categorise its various parts. Thus, if we want to talk about, say, motor-cars or flowers, we need technical terms: engine, tyre, exhaust, petal, stem, leaf. The same goes for language and the academic discipline, linguistics, which seeks to understand it. To understand how language works, and how it is used, we need a special language for describing it. Without such a set of descriptive terms, any discussion about language is little more than vague generalisation. Thus the ability to describe language (the traditional term is grammar, though this term is used with a more restricted currency elsewhere in this chapter) can be regarded as an enabling skill. This point has to be made since for many folk (and, for many years, for many schoolteachers) ‘grammar’ means a set of prescriptive rules to be followed to accord with socially defined educational norms. In this book, grammar means description, not prescription.
