Grammar
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Nothing is more usual than for philosophers encroaching on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern." -- David Hume |
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)
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In linguistics, the grammar (from Ancient Greek γραμματική grammatikḗ) of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domains such as phonology, morphology, and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are currently two different approaches to the study of grammar, traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
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As compared to film grammar
There are analogies to be drawn between film grammar and language grammar. A word for example, the second smalled linguistic unit, can be compared to a shot.
History
Belonging to the trivium of the seven liberal arts, grammar was taught as a core discipline throughout the Middle Ages, following the influence of authors from Late Antiquity, such as Priscian. Treatment of vernaculars began gradually during the High Middle Ages During the 16th-century Italian Renaissance, the Questione della lingua was the discussion on the status and ideal form of the Italian language, initiated by Dante's de vulgari eloquentia (Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua Venice 1525).
Etymology
The word grammar derives from Greek γραμματικὴ τέχνη (grammatikē technē), which means "art of letters", from γράμμα (gramma), "letter", itself from γράφειν (graphein), "to draw, to write".
See also
- Philosophers encroaching on the province of grammarians
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- Grammar of the Decameron (1969) by Tzvetan Todorov
