Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, emantics, and semantics.

Quotes

• GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to.
  • Jeremy Butterfield in: Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 142.

• Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.
  • William Cobbett in: A Grammar of the English Language: The 1818 New York First Edition Wih Passages Added in 1819, 1820, and 1823, Rodopi, 1983, p. 34.

• Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
  • Gilles Deleuze in: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari EPZ Thousand Plateaus, A&C Black, 1-September 2004, p. 112.

• Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam.
  • I am the Roman emperor, and above grammar.
  • Emperor Sigismund I, in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1893), p. 78