Grammatical

Grammatical is an adjective relating to grammar, the system of rules that govern the structure of a language. It can describe features such as syntax, morphology, punctuation, or usage that conform to a language’s norms, or the study of those rules as a subject.

In linguistics, grammaticality refers to whether a string of words is well formed according to a particular grammar. A sentence can be grammatical in form but semantically odd, and different dialects or sociolects may treat different constructions as grammatical. Grammaticality judgments—asks of whether a sentence sounds right to native speakers—are commonly used to map the rules of a language. A classic illustration is the sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously: it is grammatical in syntax but meaningless in content.

Etymology traces grammatical to Latin grammaticus and Greek grammatikos, from gramm- “letter, line of writing.” The term has long been used to describe both the prescriptions of language norms and the descriptive analysis of language structure.

Usage notes emphasize that “grammatical” can reflect prescriptive standards, as in “That sentence is grammatical in formal English,” or descriptive norms, as in “The sentence is grammatical for speakers of that dialect.” Consequently, what is grammatical can vary by language variety, register, and theoretical framework. In most contexts, it denotes conformity to the rules that govern a language’s syntax, morphology, and punctuation.