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"Never use no double negatives." "No sentence fragments." "Parentheses are (almost always) unnecessary." "The passive voice should never be employed." "You should not use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice." "And don't begin a sentence with a connective." "Using discourse markers in academic writing basically sounds terrible, you know."
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 ...
In analyzing the errors English-speaking children make (such as the over-application of morphological rules to create words like mouses and bringed), Pinker concludes that irregular forms are not remembered in terms of the supposed rules that produce them (such as a rule that would produce sleep/slept, weep/wept, keep/kept, etc.), but instead ...
Syntax is the set of rules governing how words combine into phrases and clauses. It deals with the formation of sentences, including rules governing or describing how sentences are formed. [22] In traditional usage, syntax is sometimes called grammar, but the word grammar is also used more broadly to refer to various aspects of language and its ...
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety.The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formulate rules that define well-formed, grammatical sentences.
This generates sentences such as "the cat eats the bat", "a bat eats the cat". One can generate all of the valid expressions in the language generated by this grammar at a Prolog interpreter by typing sentence(X,[]). Similarly, one can test whether a sentence is valid in the language by typing something like sentence([the,bat,eats,the,bat],[]).
Teachers and textbook writers often invent rules which their students and readers repeat and perpetuate. These rules are usually statements about English usage which the authors imagine to be, as a rule, true. But statements of this kind are extremely difficult to formulate both simply and accurately.
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) says of complex prepositions, In the first place, there is a good deal of inconsistency in the traditional account, as reflected in the practice of dictionaries, as to which combinations are analysed as complex prepositions and which as sequences of adverb + preposition.