English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
A1.2 Defining grammar
A1 Approaches to grammar
Section A. Introduction
This book involves several of the options listed above. It aims to show how to study grammar and it also involves, inevitably, some theory. Principally, however, it is about the first part of distinction a) above: one particular part of language. But what part is that? Let’s attempt a definition.
The first attempt below tries to define grammar in terms of its component parts:
1) Grammar = morphology (how words are made up) + syntax (how sentences are made up)
This does not help much, of course, since morphology and syntax are more abstract concepts than grammar; if you know what they mean then you are likely to already know what grammar means. And this approach to definition does not give the whole story. It is not very helpful to know that a bike is composed of two wheels, a frame, a saddle, handlebars, etc. We need also to ask what grammar ’does’ - what its purpose is.
Let’s try an illustration. Imagine that you are going to a foreign country and you want to learn the language. Unfortunately, there are no speakers of that language around and no courses for learners; the only resource available is a bilingual dictionary. Diligently, day by day, you work your way through it, and at the end of a year you feel you know it by heart. Confidently you travel to the country where this language is spoken. How successful at communicating do you think you will be?
Well, you can probably communicate basic ideas using single words, but most of your hard-won vocabulary is useless; how could you ever use a word like ’scorn’ on its own? You are probably even able to put two words together e.g. ’drink water’, but this could mean many things, and there is no consistent distinction between this and ’water drink’. (This in fact is what very young children are able to do.) This is before we consider whether your pronunciation is intelligible and whether you can understand what people say back to you. Despite your vast knowledge of vocabulary, there is something very important missing: grammar.
So we might attempt a second definition as follows:
2) Grammar is what turns words into language.
For me this is insightful, but it is slightly problematic; for most linguists there is a level of grammar below the word (just as for some, there is a level above the sentence, the normal limit of grammar). But the basic idea is sound, so let’s try to develop it. There are a number of factors we need to consider:
□ language is essentially a means of meaningful communication
□ grammar is the means by which linguistic forms (words, parts of words, the relationships between words, and so on) express that meaning
□ grammar is composed of rules that operate systematically
□ grammar operates in both directions: from meaning to form (production) and form to meaning (comprehension)
So here is a third definition:
3) Grammar is the system of rules that enables users of a language to relate linguistic form to meaning.