English grammar
English grammar is the system of patterns governing how English words are formed, combined into phrases and sentences, and used to express meaning.
Parts of speech: Categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives that describe words’ grammatical roles. These categories distinguish the roles words play in English sentences.
Subject–verb agreement: The grammatical matching of a verb with its subject in features such as number and person. It makes verb forms respond to the grammatical features of English subjects.
Prescriptive grammar: An approach that recommends how people should use language according to stated rules or standards. It prescribes preferred English usage, unlike descriptions of patterns people actually use.
Tense–aspect–mood: A set of grammatical categories expressing time, event structure, and a speaker’s attitude or stance. English verb constructions combine these categories to locate and characterize events.
Language change: The gradual transformation of a language’s sounds, words, meanings, and grammatical patterns over time. English grammatical patterns shift across generations, making rules historically contingent.
Morphology: The study of how words are structured and formed from smaller meaningful units. English grammar includes word formation as well as sentence structure.
Word order: The arrangement of words in a sentence, which can signal grammatical relations and meaning. English relies strongly on word order to distinguish subjects from objects.
Descriptive linguistics: The systematic study of language as it is used, without treating one variety as inherently correct. It documents English grammar in use rather than enforcing a preferred standard.
Grammatical voice: A grammatical system that presents a clause’s participants in different roles, especially active or passive. Voice changes how English sentences foreground agents and affected participants.
Grammaticalization: The process by which lexical items or constructions develop grammatical functions over time. It helps explain how English grammatical markers and constructions arise.