Grammaire

Grammaire, in linguistics, is the system of rules and patterns by which a language organizes its sounds, words, and sentences. It describes how elements such as phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic units combine and relate to convey meaning. The study of grammaire typically includes several subfields: phonology (sound systems), morphology (word formation and inflection), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and orthography (spelling and punctuation).

Grammatical analysis can be descriptive, recording how language is actually used, or prescriptive, prescribing rules for correctness or style. Descriptive grammar documents patterns, variability, and exceptions without judging them, while prescriptive grammar sets norms, often for education, standardization, or style guides.

Grammars serve many purposes: they support language learning, enable clearer writing, and underlie computational processing in natural language processing and language technology. They can be found as reference grammars describing a language, pedagogical grammars for learners, or descriptive grammars for linguistic analysis. Modern grammars increasingly rely on data from corpora and on theoretical frameworks such as generative syntax or functional-typological approaches.

In the French-speaking world, grammaire is the standard term for the grammar of the language, and it is taught in schools through rules of agreement, tense, pronouns, and syntax. The concept, however, is universal and applies to all natural languages.