Grammaticals

Grammaticals, a term used in some linguistic descriptions, refer to the grammatical components of a language—elements that encode relationships, roles, and functions rather than concrete lexical content. In this sense, grammaticals include morphological markers, function words, and the structural rules that govern how phrases and sentences are formed. They are contrasted with lexical items, which primarily carry semantic content.

Morphological grammaticals are bound morphemes and inflectional endings, such as the English -s for third-person singular and -ed for past tense. Function words, including determiners like the, a, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, are also counted among grammaticals because they express grammatical relations between words. Syntactic grammaticals refer to word-order constraints and agreement patterns that a language prescribes, such as subject-verb agreement or the placement of adjectives relative to the nouns they modify.

In linguistic analysis, grammaticals are essential for predicting sentence structure and for conveying grammatical meaning beyond lexical content. They are studied in morphology, syntax, and their interaction, and they feature in corpus studies, parsing algorithms, and language-teaching materials.

Terminology varies by tradition. Some scholars treat 'grammatical' as an adjective and avoid the plural 'grammaticals' for itemized lists of grammatical forms, preferring terms such as 'grammatical markers' or 'grammatical forms.' The concept, however, aligns with the idea of the grammatical layer of language—the system of markers and rules that organize words into meaningful structure.