React on the following statements.

Your ideas should be based on what you have learned in the past
about language language.

What is Grammar?

We use the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term grammar
refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker;s
competence. On the other hand, [it refers} to this competence itself.

N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English.

Descriptive Grammar.

 The sounds and sounds pattern, the units of meaning, such as words, and the rules to combine
them to form new sentences constitute the grammar of a language.
 There may be some differences among speakers’ knowledge, but there must be shared
knowledge , because it is this grammar that makes it possible to communicate through
language. To the extent that the linguist’s description is a true model of the speakers linguistic
capacity,it will be a successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. Such a
model is called a descriptive grammar.
 When do say that a sentence is grammatical? Conversely an ungrammatical.
 No grammar, therefore no language, is either superior to any other. Languages technologically
underdeveloped culture are not primitive or ill-formed in any way.

Prescriptive Grammar.

 Grammar such as Lowth wrote are quite different from the descriptive grammar as we have
been discussing. Their goal is nor to describe the rules people know, but to tell them what rules
they sdold know.
 Prescriptivists, for themost part, seem to have little knowledge of the history of the language
and less about the nature of language, the facy that all dialects are rule governed and that what
is grammatical in one language may be ungrammatical in another (equally prestigious )
language.

Teaching Grammars

 The grammar of a language is different from teaching grammar, which is used to learn another
language or dialect.

Language is Universals

 In a grammar there are parts which pertains to all languages; these components form what is
called the general grammar. In addition to these general (universal) parts, there are those
 which bilong only to one particular language; and these constitute the particular language the
particular grammars of each language.
Du Marsais, c, 1750.
 The way we are using the word grammar differs in another way from its most common
meaning. In our sense, the grammar includes everything speakers know about their language
—the sound system, called phonology: the system of meanings, called semantics the rues of
words formation, called morphology; and the rules of sentence formation called syntax. It
also , of course , includes the vocabulary of words—the dictionary or lexicon.
 Those laws that pertains to all human languages, representing the universal properties f
language, constitute a universal grammar.