What is Grammar and How Do We Study It?
Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck · 2013
This chapter provides a brief overview of some basic facts about language. One is that languages change over time and vary from place to place and from speech community to speech community. The chapter shows that although social value may be attached to one way of using language over another, the scientific study of language reveals that all language varieties are equally expressive, and all are rule-governed systems. It presents a few examples of sentences from varieties of English from both inside and outside the United States. English grammarians attempted to establish a language academy which would codify and enforce this “improved” version of English. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the components of grammar. Prescriptive grammar strives to support Standard Language Ideology, and descriptive grammar strives to explain how language works by investigating the interacting components of grammar of a language: syntax, morphology, semantics, and phonetics and phonology.