Grammar: Quick Facts

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Structural description of the sentence “The man will hit the ball,” assigned by the rules of a simple phrase-structure grammar.

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Topics

word order discourse analysis parsing prescriptive grammar Part of speech universal grammar Syntax Prague school Morphology Generative grammar writing speech prosody Comparative linguistics Historical linguistics Meaning Synchronic linguistics Sociolinguistics Dialect Slang

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Key People

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Joseph Roumanille

French poet

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Sībawayh

Arab grammarian

Lomonosov, Mikhail

Mikhail Lomonosov

Russian author and scientist

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Lorenzo Valla

Italian humanist

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Ienăchiƫă Văcărescu

Romanian author

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Lindley Murray

American grammarian

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Elijah Bokher Levita

Italian grammarian

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Bernard de Chartres

French philosopher

Otto Jespersen

Otto Jespersen

Danish linguist

Bello, detail of an oil painting by Raymond-Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin, c. 1845; in the Biblioteca Nacional, Caracas

Andrés Bello

poet and scholar

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Julius Caesar Scaliger

French scholar

St. José de Anchieta

St. José de Anchieta

Portuguese author and scholar

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David Kimhi

European scholar

August Schleicher

August Schleicher

German linguist

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George Of Trebizond

Byzantine humanist

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Ahmed Cevdet Paşa

Turkish statesman, historian, and author

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Profiat Duran

Spanish philosopher

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Ibn Janāḥ

Spanish-Jewish grammarian

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Antoine Meillet

French linguist

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Pietro Bembo

Italian cardinal and writer

Child tracing letters of the alphabet

English 101

Students raising their hands in a classroom

Grammar Quiz

Hand with pencil writing on page. (handwriting; write)

Word Nerd Quiz