grammar
n.
study of the structure of a language
Grammar
Grammar
(v. i.)
To discourse according to the rules of grammar; to use grammar.
(n.)
treatise on the elements or principles of any science; as, a grammar of geography.
(n.)
The science which treats of the principles of language; the study of forms of speech, and their relations to one another; the art concerned with the right use aud application of the rules of a language, in speaking or writing.
(n.)
The art of speaking or writing with correctness or according to established usage; speech considered with regard to the rules of a grammar.
(n.)
A treatise on the principles of language; a book containing the principles and rules for correctness in speaking or writing.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), edited by Noah Porter.
About
grammar
A formal definition of the syntactic structure of a language (see
syntax), normally given in terms of
production rules which specify the order of constituents and their sub-constituents in a
sentence (a well-formed string in the language). Each rule has a left-hand side symbol naming a syntactic category (e.g. "noun-phrase" for a
natural language grammar) and a right-hand side which is a sequence of zero or more symbols. Each symbol may be either a
terminal symbol or a non-terminal symbol. A terminal symbol corresponds to one "
lexeme" - a part of the sentence with no internal syntactic structure (e.g. an identifier or an operator in a computer language). A non-terminal symbol is the left-hand side of some rule.
One rule is normally designated as the top-level rule which gives the structure for a whole sentence.
A grammar can be used either to parse a sentence (see
parser) or to generate one. Parsing assigns a terminal syntactic category to each input token and a non-terminal category to each appropriate group of tokens, up to the level of the whole sentence. Parsing is usually preceded by
lexical analysis. Generation starts from the top-level rule and chooses one alternative production wherever there is a choice.
See also
BNF,
yacc,
attribute grammar,
grammar analysis.
(c) Copyright 1993 by Denis Howe
Grammar
To dream that you are studying grammar, denotes you are soon to make a wise choice in momentous opportunities.
Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted, or "What's in a dream": a scientific and practical exposition; By Gustavus Hindman, 1910. For the open domain e-text see:
Guttenberg Project