Grammar

Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. The set of rules governing a particular language is the grammar of that language; thus, each language can be said to have its own distinct grammar. Note that the word grammar has two meanings here: the first is the inner rules themselves and the second is our description and study of those rules. When a grammar is fully explicit about all possible construction of a specific language it is called generative grammar. A particular type of generative grammar that has become the leading framework in modern linguistics is transformational grammar which was first proposed by Noam Chomsky.

As the word is understood by most modern linguists, the subfields of grammar are phonetics, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Traditionally, however, grammar included only morphology and syntax.