What Is Grammar?

Grammar describes where we put words in a sentence (the word order) and what we do to those words so that they convey meaning accurately.

How does word order work?

For instance – and let’s take a stupid example to illustrate – let’s say we have the words ‘dog’ ‘fish’ and ‘eat.’ At the moment, we don’t know what’s going on here – we don’t know whether the dog eats fish or the other way around. However, once we place these words into their correct place in the sentence, we know who is doing the action and who is the (in this case unfortunate) recipient of the action.

“The dog eats the fish.”

It is now clear. In English, whoever is carrying out the action (the subject) comes first. And the recipient of the action (the object) is second. We can now say, with some certainty, that this is a grammatical convention or rule that we all adhere to in English because if we change the order, “The fish eats the dog,” then we have a new meaning.

All languages have rules relating to the order in which words should go and they are all unique to the language. In some languages, the object can come first. In others, the verb might come last (“The dog the fish eats”).

We therefore learn the rules governing word order as part of our language studies – and this is called syntax.

What are inflections?

As well as placing words in a certain order, we also make adjustments to words to help them convey more accurate information. We do this by either adding morphemes to them (usually suffixes in English), or by making changes within the word. These changes are inflections. For example, you’ll notice that in our example sentence, “The dog eats the fish,” we have changed the word ‘eat’ to ‘eats.’ This is because English grammar has rules about how different parts of speech should behave. This particular construction demands that ‘eat’ must have the suffix ‘-s’ added because there is only one dog.

There are eight regular grammatical suffixes in English:

Ending	Usage	Example
-es, -s	Make a noun plural	dogs
-‘s	Make a noun possessive	the dog‘s bone
-s	Make the present tense verb third person	eat > he eats
-ed	Make a verb past tense	call > he called
-en	Make a verb past tense	give > he has given
-ing	Turn a verb into a continuous action	give > giving
-er	Make an adjective comparative	the house is bigger
-est	Make an adjective superlative	the biggest house

Another way in which inflection is shown is by changing an element, such as a vowel, within the word.

For example, man becomes men, foot becomes feet and goose becomes geese. Or sing can become sang or sung.

Sometimes the word is so inflected, or it has been derived in a different way, such that it has an entirely different form altogether. For example, ‘good’ becomes ‘better’ and ‘best,’ rather than ‘gooder’ and ‘goodest.’

We often learn words that behave this way separately – they tend to be listed as exceptions.

What is declension?

When you read a grammar book, inflections for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and articles are presented in a table form to show how the words change according to their meaning or function.

This is declension. You decline words according to their number (singular or plural), their use in a sentence or their gender (in languages French and German).

What is conjugation?

Verbs do not decline but they conjugate. Conjugation refers to how the form of the word changes based on person, number or tense through the use of inflections.

It can also include forms of verbs that are made up of multiple parts, such as ‘is eating,’ or ‘has eaten.’

Morphology

Looking at parts of words, how they are formed and how they relate to other words as parts of speech is known as morphology.

Types of grammar

Grammar can either be prescriptive or descriptive.

Prescriptive grammar is the approach used in schools – it presents grammar as a list of rules that must be learned and sentences are either grammatically correct according to these rules, or that are not. Taking this approach to learning grammar for a foreign language also makes sense as it offers the best chance of being understood accurately when speaking it.

However, native speakers of a language frequently break the rules of grammar. If they speak with an accent or dialect, they may not follow the same rules as other speakers. In order to explain these differences we might treat grammar as a descriptive discipline. There is no right or wrong, but we use the concepts outlined here – syntax and morphology – to describe how speakers are forming their language.