What is grammar?
Definition opens teaching possibilities

The majority of English language arts teachers rarely use grammar for anything in the ELA curriculum beyond test preparation exercises.

However, even if you cannot even answer the question "what is grammar?" right now, using just what you know, you can open a whole realm of ELA content that your students might find vastly more interesting than Pride and Prejudice.

Grammar deals with relationships

As a topic of study, grammar is part of linguistics, the scientific study of language.

If a student asks "what is grammar?" you should say it is the rules for making sentences.

Each language has its own rules for generating sentences. Those rules are the language's grammar.

To study grammar means to study the structural relationships between words (and their component parts) within a particular language.

The differences in the rules for arranging words into sentences in, for example, Hindi and English may amuse native speakers of one language who hear native speakers of the other language translating their ideas into the foreign tongue. Getting the individual words right is less difficult than getting their structural relationships right.

Linguists and neuroanatomists tell us that unless a person experiences extremely severe brain damage, within the brain what is the grammar of the language that person learned as a child remains intact. That neurological persistence is one reason teaching a foreign language to teens and adults is a tricky business.

Descriptive grammar

Descriptive grammar studies the ways people actually put words together to form sentences.

In English, for example, the standard way of forming a sentence is to follow the order subject-verb-object. A language could just as easily use the order:

• Verb-subject-object, or
• Object-subject-verb, or
• Object-verb-subject.

Each of those was of arranging the three elements represents a distinctive grammatical pattern that would be an essential component of its language's grammar.

Every language has ways of putting words together that constitute a verbal lowest common denominator for that language. In societies with written languages, there are also ways of using language that are considered superior, educated or high class.

Descriptive grammar records the way people at both ends of the language spectrum combine words to make sentences. However, it does not say which is preferable. That is the role of prescriptive grammar.

Prescriptive grammar

When most of try to answer "what is grammar?" we talk about prescriptive grammar, the kind of grammar most of us associate with English class.

Prescriptive grammar is an attempt to tell people how they ought to form words and how they ought to form sentences. Prescriptive grammar is very critical of anyone who doesn't measure up to the standard, as your schooldays' encounters with Ms. Inky Fingers may have taught you.

Native speakers of a language can make themselves understood without knowing the rules of prescriptive grammar. However, people who want to advance socially and economically in a society usually have to master at least the rudiments of their language's prescriptive grammar.

Semicolons are not part of grammar

Our description of what is grammar must be limited just to words and their arrangement. Punctuation is not part of grammar. People can put sentences together orally without using any punctuation at all.

However, aside from the punctuation at the end of a sentence, English punctuation is determined primarily by rules of grammar.

Usage is not part of grammar either

Usage is the term used to refer to the way a particular speech community uses certain words or phrases. Usage, unlike grammar, is not about entire sentences.

Some English usage has been accorded the authority of rules by virtue of having been used by educated people for a long period of time. Other usage is popular for a matter of months and then falls out of use.

Unlike grammar, which is systematic, usage is unsystematic and idiosyncratic. Its quirkiness makes learning "correct" usage difficult apart from lengthy immersion in a culture.

Grammar as science

Instead of approaching grammar the same way Ms. Inky Fingers taught it to Grandma back in 1946, consider teaching grammar as a scientific study.

Linguists study topics that many students who loathe the literary and artistic side of ELA find fascinating, such as:

• Sociolinguistics, the study of how social status and language use are related.

• Historical linguistics, the study of how language changes.

• Language acquisition, how people learn language as children and/or as adults.

• Pragmatics, how meaning is transmitted through verbal and nonverbal means.

I was excited when I heard a PBS news story about Lera Boroditsky who tested Shakespeare's hypothesis that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." I'll bet your students, too, would find that research more interesting than rules for the subjunctive mood. It would certainly add a different dimension to their understanding of what is grammar.