Types and parts of grammar grammar - study techniques

Types of grammar

The main approaches to the study of grammar are as follows:

• Prescriptive or normative grammar. As its name indicates, it starts from an ideal and a sense of what is correct in the language, to suggest to its speakers the appropriate or recommendable way to formulate and organize their sentences.

• Descriptive grammar. Unlike the previous one, it does not judge as "correct" or "incorrect" the way in which different speakers use the language, but aims to understand the actual use of the rules of the language within a given community or communities.

• Traditional grammar. This is the historical body of documents and ideas inherited from previous civilizations about what grammar is.

• Functional grammar. Aims to be a general grammar of natural language, that is, a set of basic rules applicable to different languages with different grammars.

• Formal grammars. This is the name given to abstract grammars, which can apply their logic to non-verbal languages, such as computer programming languages.

Parts of grammar

Grammar comprises four clearly differentiated branches or parts, which deal with different aspects of language. these are:

• Phonetics. This deals with the ordering of the sounds that make up words, as well as their changes in realization depending on their specific position or grammatical context.

• Morphology. That which deals with the way words are constructed, that is, the way in which we put together their roots or main fragments, endowed with lexical meaning, with other fragments that modulate, change or determine the final meaning of what is said.

• Syntax. That which deals with the internal organization of the sentence, according to a sequential logic established in the laws of grammar and the logic of language.
• Semantics. That which deals with the meaning of words and their role within the set of dynamics and patterns that constitute a language.