Grammar

Grammar, structures of a language and of its constituents; also, the science concerned with the study of those structures. The grammarian concentrates on syntax, the ways that words are put together to form sentences; accidence, or morphology, the ways that words are inflected (altered) to convey different senses, such as past or present tense or singular and plural; and phonology, the ways that sounds are used to convey meaning. Since sentences of widely different outward form may have the same meaning, many grammarians hold that there is a deep structure of language that can be resolved into a few basic elements whose combinations can be used to produce an infinite number of sentences. As a consequence, grammatical studies are probing at the very roots of the human psyche.

See also: Language.