grammatics

Grammatics is the field concerned with the systematic description and analysis of the structure of a language, including its rules for forming words, phrases, and sentences, as well as punctuation and orthography. It can be used as a synonym for grammar, or as the scholarly discipline within linguistics that investigates how grammatical systems are organized and used.

The field covers morphology (word formation, inflection), syntax (sentence structure), phonology/phonetics (sound systems that influence form and pronunciation), semantics and pragmatics (meaning, usage). Orthography and punctuation are often included as part of grammatics, especially when describing written language.

Descriptive grammatics describes how language is actually used, based on data from corpora and native speaker judgments. Prescriptive grammatics prescribes rules for correctness and style. Historical grammatics traces the development of grammatical theory.

Methods and theories include traditional grammar, structuralism, generative grammar, functional and cognitive approaches, and corpus linguistics. Tools used in grammatics include grammars, parsers, and annotation schemes.

Applications of grammatics appear in education, language documentation, computational linguistics, natural language processing, spell-checkers, and grammar checking. The field interacts with related disciplines such as linguistics, education, and computer science to describe, teach, and model how languages organize and convey meaning.