ABSTRACT
Many people probably regard grammar as rather a dirty word. It is equated in learning one’s mother tongue with such exercises as dividing sentences into phrases and clauses, then parsing each word, i.e. assigning them to a part of speech, or in the case of learning a foreign language by rote learning of innumerable exceptions. It has even been abandoned by many in favour of learning language in a ‘natural’ way, i.e. the way one acquires one’s native language.
