Grammar

Grammar is the study of the rules governing use of language. As such, it is part of the discipline of linguistics.

A "Grammar" (from a linguistic point of view) catalogs the various parts of speech in use by the language, including: verbs, nouns, pronouns, prepositions; it catalogs how actions are described, almost exclusively trough use of verbs) and how those verbs are conjugated within a sentence; it catalogs how a language codifies for both mode and tense; and it attempts to quantify other less precise aspects of written or oral communication like metaphors, enclitics, onomatopoeia, and others.

Some Grammar Concepts

Sentence Structure

When lingusits describe sentance structure in languages, they typically look at the relationship between the Subject, the Object and the Verb and classify the language by the order of those words. SVO refers to subject, verb, object. An English example of this is I buy the paper. In German this would be rendered Ich kaufe die Zeitung.

• Subject is the agent of the action (such as a person).
• Verb is the action being undertaken (the thing being done eg. buying).
• Object is the item, person or thing that has the action done to it (eg. the paper).

Other languages have different sentence structures. Besides SVO, the two most common are SOV (subject, object, verb), as used in Japanese, and VSO (verb, subject, object), as used in Biblical Hebrew.