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'''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 [[part of speech|parts of speech]] in use by the language, including: verbs, nouns, pronouns, prepositions; it catalogs how actions are described, almost exclusively through use of [[verb]]s, and how those verbs are conjugated within a sentence; it catalogs how a language codifies for both [[mood (grammar)|mode]] and [[tense]]; and it attempts to quantify other less precise aspects of written or oral communication like metaphors, [[clitic|enclitics]], onomatopoeia, and others.

==Some Grammar Concepts==
===Syntax===
{{merge with|Word order}}
Syntax is the study of the rules for forming grammatical sentences.<ref>[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/syntax Syntax]</ref>  When linguists describe sentence 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.  

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

'''SVO''' refers to '''subject''', '''verb''', '''object'''. An [[English]] example of this is '''I (s) buy (v) the book (obj)'''. In [[German]] this would be rendered '''Ich (s) kaufe(v) das Buch(o)'''. 

Besides SVO, the two most common are SOV (subject, object, verb), as used in [[Japanese language|Japanese]] (hon(s) wo katta (v)), and VSO (verb, subject, object), as used in Biblical [[Hebrew]].  Some languages have free word order because the subject and the object have different [[grammatical case|case]] endings.

===Gender===

'''Gender''' is an attribute of [[noun]]s, [[pronoun]]s, and [[adjective]]s in some [[language]]s.  Languages like French and Spanish use different articles (e.g., ''le'' and ''la'' in French, ''el'' and ''la'' in Spanish) to indicate that certain nouns are masculine or feminine. Remembering which words are masculine or feminine is a substantial feat for foreign learners. While words specific to male and female people are easy (''El Señor'' vs. ''La Señorita''), a word's grammatical gender may or may not indicate the sex of what the word describes. For example, ''le chateau'' or ''la maison''. In Spanish and some other languages, the ending of the noun often, but not invariably, corresponds to the gender.

Depending on the language, typical gender distinctions include masculine/feminine, masculine/feminine/neuter, masculine singular/feminine singular/neuter singular/genderless plural, and animate/inanimate.  Not all languages have grammatical gender; for example, some languages have a single pronoun corresponding to the English "he," "she," and "it." In [[Hebrew]], the word for "it" is the same as the word for "this", so "I like it" would literally translate as "I like this”. Depending on the language, gender and [[number (grammar)|number]] may or may not be encoded separately, i.e., represented by separate [[morpheme]]s.

==See also==
*[[Ablaut]]
*[[English grammar]]

==References==
<references/>
[[Category:Linguistics]]