What is grammar?

Dog Maria go. - What? - Go dog … Maria. - I don’t get it. - Dog. - Out? You want to take the dog out? Tree. - Tr..ee? - Flower - Flow-er - Maria is teaching words to Lingo, but it’s still hard to understand what Lingo is saying. The words don’t go together. Something is missing.

Look here. To speak a language, you need two things. Firstly, you need the vocabulary of the language, and secondly, you need to know how the words can be combined. This is called the language’s grammar. You can think of language as a piece of furniture, that you buy in a flat box and put together yourself.

Just having the parts is not enough. You also need the instructions that describe how the parts are to be combined. And in what order. Only then can you get a piece of furniture that works. The same goes for language.

Without the grammar, we don’t know how the words can be combined into expressions and sentences. Grammar is what gives context. Like this. If you’ve learned a language as a child, you probably know the grammar without even being aware of it. You simply hear that it’s wrong if someone says: *an table - You can’t say that.

That’s true. It should be this: - a table - But if someone asks you why, you might not know. It just...is. You could call this unconscious knowledge. Just like you can walk, or ride a bike, but don’t really know how you are keeping the balance.

You just…do it. If you learned the language later in life, or you’re learning it now, it may be harder to know when something is right or wrong in the new language. You have to practise using the grammar and learn the rules. Most words in a language are words for things or activities, and description words. Like, for example - Ball throw - and - green - These are words with a lot of meaning: content words.

A content word can also be the name of a person, like - Maria - This is called a proper name. Other words instead show how words go together grammatically. These are called function words. They can be words to replace a name. The word I is such a word.

They can also be articles, like a or an. Or words that indicate a direction, like to. Let’s add some content words. - I to a - But… we still don’t understand this sentence. There must be more to it. The arrangement of the words, the word order, is also a very important part of grammar.

Let’s move it around. - Maria throw a green ball to I - The sentence begins to make sense. But there’s more. Words can also change form to show the role they are playing in the sentence. This is called inflection. When inflected, words change in various ways, partly ...

or completely. To throw and is throwing use the same content word. But the second one is inflected to show that it is happening now. - Maria is throwing a green ball to me. - Now we have a sentence that we can understand. It is Maria who is throwing the ball. The ball is green.

She is throwing it now. And she is throwing it to me. Without grammar, we won’t get a full sentence. It just becomes a string of words. With grammar, we understand the context.

And the context becomes understandable using function words, word order, and inflection. - Hm… read book. I am… read a book. - Well done, Lingo. You’re starting to learn grammar. - A book...is reading me. - No, actually... oh.