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The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
Traditional grammar includes words like because, while, and unless in the class of subordinating conjunctions. But since at least Jespersen (see § History of the concept in English ) most modern grammarians distinguish these two categories based on whether they add meaning to the sentence or are purely functional.
See List of English words with disputed usage for words that are used in ways that are deprecated by some usage writers but are condoned by some dictionaries. There may be regional variations in grammar , orthography , and word-use , especially between different English-speaking countries.
A phonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending that marks "number" on a noun) is sometimes called an exponent. Grammatical relations define relationships between words and phrases with certain parts of speech, depending on their position in the syntactic tree.
For the second portion of the list, see List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z. Asterisked (*) meanings, though found chiefly in the specified region, also have some currency in the other region; other definitions may be recognised by the other as Briticisms or Americanisms respectively. Additional usage ...
The definition may be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit and perform the same function, e.g. "as well as", "provided that". A simple literary example of a conjunction is "the truth of nature, and the power of giving interest" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria). [3]
For example, the interjection word indicating agreement is characteristic of African-American English. [27] Two examples of variation over time can be seen in the Corpus of Historical American English, which shows that nay was among the most common interjections in 1820 but by the 2010s had become significantly less common. [28]