Grammatiken

Grammatiken are sets of rules that describe how words combine to form meaningful sentences. In linguistics, a grammar describes the structure of a language, covering aspects such as morphology (word formation), syntax (sentence structure), phonology (sound system), and semantics (meaning). Grammars can be descriptive, modeling actual language use, or prescriptive, prescribing rules for what is considered correct. They may be explicit, written down as grammars, or implicit, reflected in usage and conventions.

In natural languages, grammars regulate how categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives interact, how agreement and word order work, and how questions, negation, and tenses are formed. Grammatical variation across languages gives rise to diverse phenomena such as case systems, gender, aspect, and mood.

In formal linguistics and computer science, a grammar is a set of production rules for generating strings. Formal grammars are classified by the Chomsky hierarchy into several types: regular grammars (described by finite automata and suitable for simple patterns), context-free grammars (used for most programming languages and many linguistic analyses, described by pushdown automata), context-sensitive grammars, and unrestricted grammars (the most powerful, described by Turing machines). These models underpin parsing, compilation, and various natural language processing tasks.

Grammars thus play a central role in language description, education, and computation. They provide a framework for analyzing language structure, informing theories of language learning, and building tools that recognize, analyze, or generate language.