Traditional grammar

Among the earliest studies of grammar are descriptions of Sanskrit, called . The Indian grammarian Pāṇini wrote the , a descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, sometime between the 4th and the 2nd century BCE. This work, along with some grammars of Sanskrit produced around the same time, is often considered the beginning of linguistics as a descriptive science, The formal study of grammar became popular in Europe during the Renaissance. Descriptive grammars were rarely used in Classical Greece or in Latin through the Medieval period. During the Renaissance, Latin and Classical Greek were broadly studied along with the literature and philosophy written in those languages. With the invention of the printing press and the use of Vulgate Latin as a lingua franca throughout Europe, the study of grammar became part of language teaching and learning. The descriptions produced by classical grammarians (teachers of philology and rhetoric) provided a model for traditional grammars in Europe. According to linguist William Harris, "Just as the Renaissance confirmed Greco-Roman tastes in poetry, rhetoric and architecture, it established ancient Grammar, especially that which the Roman school-grammarians had developed by the 4th [century CE], as an inviolate system of logical expression." Mastering grammar rules like those derived from the study of Latin has at times been a specific goal of English-language education. This approach to teaching has, however, long competed with approaches that downplay the importance of grammar instruction. Similarly in foreign or second language teaching, the grammar-translation method based on traditional Latin teaching, in which the grammar of the language being learned is described in the student's native language, has competed with approaches such as the direct method or the communicative approach, in which grammar instruction is minimized. ==Parts of speech==

The parts of speech are an important element of traditional grammars, since patterns of inflection and rules of syntax each depend on a word's part of speech. These groupings are based on categories of function and meaning in Latin and other Indo-European languages. Some traditional grammars include other parts of speech, such as articles or determiners, though some grammars treat other groupings of words as subcategories of the major parts of speech. The traditional definitions of parts of speech refer to the role that a word plays in a sentence, its meaning, or both. Contemporary linguists argue that classification based on a mixture of morphosyntactic function and semantic meaning is insufficient for systematic analysis of grammar. Such definitions are not sufficient on their own to assign a word an unambiguous part of speech. Nonetheless, similar definitions have been used in most traditional grammars. ==Accidence==

Accidence, also known as inflection, is the change of a word's form depending on its grammatical function. The change may involve the addition of affixes or else changes in the sounds of the word, known as vowel gradation or ablaut. Some words feature irregular inflection, not taking an affix or following a regular pattern of sound change. Verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives may be inflected for person, number, and gender. The inflection of verbs is also known as conjugation. A verb has person and number, which must agree with the subject of the sentence. Verbs may also be inflected for tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Verb tense indicates the time that the sentence describes. A verb also has mood, indicating whether the sentence describes reality or expresses a command, a hypothesis, a hope, etc. A verb inflected for tense and mood is called finite; non-finite verb forms are infinitives or participles. ==Syntax==

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. In traditional grammar syntax, a sentence is analyzed as having two parts, a subject and a predicate. The subject is the thing being talked about. In English and similar languages, the subject usually occurs at the beginning of the sentence, but this is not always the case. The predicate comprises the rest of the sentence, all of the parts of the sentence that are not the subject. An adverbial consists of either a single adverb, an adverbial phrase, or an adverbial clause that modifies either the verb or the sentence as a whole. Some traditional grammars consider adpositional phrases a type of adverb, but many grammars treat these as separate. Adverbials may modify time, place, or manner. Negation is also frequently indicated with adverbials, including adverbs such as English not. ==See also==