What is grammar and how does it work?
In this module you will learn:
- What grammar is
- How we form words and put them together to make sentences with different meanings and uses
- How grammar fits into the bigger picture of English language learning and teaching
What is grammar?
Grammar is a system of rules which tells us how we form words, how these words are formed into sentences, and what the meaning and use of these words
and sentences are when we have done this.
It tells us, for example, that the sentence “Cows eat grass” works, but “Grass cow have eating” doesn't. It tells us why we might choose to say "I work" and not "I am working", or vice versa, and it tells us where exactly to add the word "red" in the sentence "I have a red car".
If you like, you can imagine grammar as the scaffolding that holds the other elements of a language together. Take away the scaffolding and everything collapses into a messy heap of words and sounds. We can speak, write, read and listen to these words and sounds, but they won't make a great deal of sense unless we say them in the right way and at the right time.
In our definition above we underlined three words:
- form
- meaning
- use
If we want to communicate with an item of grammar - for example if we want to say the sentence "I am working" - we need to know its form, its meaning and its use. Firstly we need to know the rules that tell us how to build the individual words, in what order to put them and why. This is the form of the sentence. Secondly, we need to know what meaning a sentence built in this way gives us (as opposed to the meaning of the sentence "I work", for example). And finally we need to know in which situations we can and can't use this sentence.
We're going to have a closer look now at what we mean by form, meaning and use. We'll start with form, looking first at how we form words.
Forming words
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man | play | happy |
- ma
- m
- pla
- pl
- p
- happ
- hap
- ha
- h
- manhood
- manly
- mankind
- unmanly
- plays
- played
- playing
- playful
- playfully
- playfulness
- player
- happily
- happiness
- unhappy
- unhappily
- -hood
- -ly
- -kind
- un-
- -s
- -ed
- -ing
- -ful
- -ness
- -er
The hyphen tells us whether the morpheme comes before or after the root word. If we add one of these morphemes before the root word we call it a prefix; if we add it after, we call it a suffix.
- play - played
- work - worked
- jump - jumped
- kind - unkind
- legal - illegal
- satisfied - dissatisfied
Forming sentences
The set of rules that tells us how to put words together to make sentences is called syntax. As with morphology, these rules make things easier for us by giving us some consistency.
The cat ate.
The big, brown cat ate his lunch noisily.
- We've added two adjectives (big and brown) to describe the cat. Our system of rules tells us that adjectives normally go before the subject, but after the determiner ( the).
- We've added an object to say what the cat ate (his lunch)
- We've added an adverb to describe how he ate it (noisily).
Why did the big brown cat eat his lunch noisily?
- We need to add a question word (why) and the word did at the beginning of the question
- We need to change the word ate to eat
Meaning and use
Let's have a look now at the other two things from our list at the beginning of this lesson - meaning and use.
Meaning
Why is meaning important? Well, all these different forms that we can construct, all the different sequences of morphemes we can put together to make words and the sequences of words we can put together to make sentences, are of little use unless we know the meaning that these different sequences give us. Here's an example to show you what we mean by this:
I play
I am playing
What Raquel hasn't been taught though is the meaning of the two structures. Although she's happy with the meaning of the individual words "I" and "play", she doesn't know the difference in meaning between the two sentences which she's correctly formed. She therefore has the following conversations:
Bob: Hi Raquel, what are you doing tomorrow?”
Raquel: Oh, I go to the cinema”.
Bob: Hi Raquel, do you like tennis?
Raquel: Oh yes, I'm liking tennis very much”.
So, how we construct a particular grammar item, its form, goes hand in hand with its meaning. There is not always a one-to-one relationship between form and meaning though. One form can have several different meanings, and we can sometimes express one meaning with different forms. Here are some examples:
John: What are you doing now?
Kate: I'm playing tennis.
John: What are you doing tomorrow?
Kate: I'm playing tennis.
Kate uses the same form in each of her answers, but with a different meaning in each case. In her first answer she is using the form to talk about something that is happening now, and in the second answer she uses it to talk about a future event.
John: What are you doing tomorrow?
Kate: I'm going to have coffee with my sister.
John: What are you doing tomorrow?
Kate: I'm having coffee with my sister.
This time Kate uses two different forms to give the same meaning.
Use
Form and meaning of a grammar item don't give us quite everything we need. We also need to know when and why we use the grammar item - in other words we need to know what language is appropriate to use in a particular context. Appropriacy (what is the"right" language to use in a certain context) depends on whom we're speaking with, what our relationship is with them, and why we're talking to them. This in turn determines the level of formality (called register) that we choose. Let's imagine that Raquel has learnt both the form and meaning of this sentence:
Come here!
She starts a new job and on her first day has a question for her boss. She stands up and says loudly: "Come here". Even though she's correctly formed the sentence and has understood its meaning, she hasn't yet understood the contexts in which it can and can't be used.
Let's have a closer look at this. Have a look at these sentences:
Shut the door, would you?
Can you shut the door, please?
Excuse me, would you mind shutting the door?
Normally, the closer the social relationship between the speaker and listener, the lower the register (level of formality) can be. So in this example you can probably see that the first sentence is more appropriate to say to a close friend or family member. The last one would probably be better with your boss or a complete stranger.
Sometimes, the reason for talking to someone, or the context of the conversation, overrides the closeness of the relationship we have with them. Have a look at this example:
Dad, lend us 5 quid, would you?
Dad, do you think it would be possible to lend me £1000?
In the first sentence, the register is still informal because the reason for communicating is an "easy" one. In the second sentence though, even though the person is still a close family member, the register is much more formal because the reason for communicating is much more "difficult" or "serious".
This brings us back to the idea of using different forms to express the same meaning - as you can see from the example above these form and meaning combinations are closely linked to use (appropriacy and register).
In this course we'll be looking primarily at form and meaning. We'll see some references to "use" (in what contexts it's appropriate to use language). Whether or not we refer directly to "use" though, it's always important to keep it in mind.
Grammar and rules
Grammar and the bigger picture
Before we move on to module 2 to look at all the different forms and meanings that make up English grammar, we're going to take a step back so that we can put grammar into some kind of context and see how it fits into the bigger picture of communicating in a language.
What else is there in a language apart from grammar?
- Grammar
- Vocabulary
- Phonology
- Discourse
We use these four language systems to speak, listen, read and write in English. We call these ways of communicating the four language skills:
- Speaking
- Listening
- Reading
- Writing
Recap
Here's a summary of the main points from this lesson.
- Grammar is a system of rules which tells us how we form words, how these words are formed into sentences, and what the meaning and use of these words and sentences are.
- Morphology is the set of rules that tells us how to make words.
- A morpheme is the smallest combination of letters that has any kind of meaning. Lexical
morphemes
(or root words) are also words in their own right. We add grammatical morphemes to the beginning and end of root words to
make a range of different types of word. Grammatical morphemes might be prefixes or suffixes.
Lexical morphemes: man, play
Prefixes: un-, dis-
Suffixes: -ly, -ness - Syntax rules tell us how to put words together to make sentences with different meanings.
- We need to know when and in which contexts it is appropriate to use a grammar item. This in turn determines the register (level of formality) we choose. Normally, the closer the social relationship between the speaker and listener, the more informal the register can be.
- Grammar is not enough to be able to communicate. We also need knowledge of other language systems (vocabulary, phonology, discourse) and to practise these using the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
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