meaning of grammar
1. The science which treats of the principles of language; the study of forms of speech, and their relations to one another; the art concerned with the right use aud application of the rules of a language, in speaking or writing.
2. The art of speaking or writing with correctness or according to established usage; speech considered with regard to the rules of a grammar.
3. A treatise on the principles of language; a book containing the principles and rules for correctness in speaking or writing.
4. treatise on the elements or principles of any science; as, a grammar of geography.
5. To discourse according to the rules of grammar; to use grammar.
6. grammar A formal definition of the syntactic structure of a language see syntax, normally given in terms of production rules which specify the order of constituents and their sub-constituents in a sentence a well-formed string in the language. Each rule has a left-hand side symbol naming a syntactic category e. g. "noun-phrase" for a natural language grammar and a right-hand side which is a sequence of zero or more symbols. Each symbol may be either a terminal symbol or a non-terminal symbol. A terminal symbol corresponds to one "lexeme" - a part of the sentence with no internal syntactic structure e. g. an identifier or an operator in a computer language. A non-terminal symbol is the left-hand side of some rule. One rule is normally designated as the top-level rule which gives the structure for a whole sentence. A grammar can be used either to parse a sentence see parser or to generate one. Parsing assigns a terminal syntactic category to each input token and a non-terminal category to each appropriate group of tokens, up to the level of the whole sentence. Parsing is usually preceded by lexical analysis. Generation starts from the top-level rule and chooses one alternative production wherever there is a choice. See also BNF, yacc, attribute grammar, grammar analysis. grammar analysis A program written in ABC for answering such questions as "what are the start symbols of all rules", "what symbols can follow this symbol", "which rules are left recursive", and so on. Includes a grammar of ISO Pascal. Version 1 by Steven Pemberton
7. studies of the formation of basic linguistic units
Related Words
grammar | grammar school | grammarian | grammarianism | grammarless |
