Gramatica

Gramatica, often written with diacritics as gramática (Spanish and Portuguese), gramatică (Romanian), or grammatica (Italian and Latin scripts), denotes the field of linguistics that studies the structure of languages. A grammar describes how words are formed (morphology), how they combine into phrases and sentences (syntax), how sounds relate to letters (phonology and orthography), and how meaning is conveyed (semantics). It may also address punctuation, word classes, agreement, tense and mood, and discourse organization.

Grammatical descriptions range from prescriptive traditions, which prescribe how people should speak or write, to descriptive grammars, which document actual language use. The distinction is central to linguistics: descriptive grammar aims to model linguistic competence, while prescriptive grammar enforces norms. Historially, grammars were among the first systematic writings about languages and were foundational in education. Modern grammars encompass traditional grammar, generative grammar, functional or constraint-based grammars, and computational grammars used in natural language processing.

Knowledge of grammar assists language learning, translation, corpus analysis, and software development for language technologies. Grammatical theories are continually refined as new data and methods emerge, including cross-linguistic studies and formal modeling. In practice, grammar provides the framework for describing how speakers produce and understand sentences, how meanings are constructed, and how languages vary and change over time. See also: linguistics, syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, natural language processing.