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- Diagramming sentences, a skill introduced in 1877, is now largely forgotten but was once widely used in American schools to improve students' English.

- Linguistic expressions can be described at two levels:

    * As sequences of sounds that can be represented in the phonetic alphabet and described in terms of their features.

    * As a sequence of morphemes, which allows us to characterize all the words and phrases of a language in terms of their phonology and morphology. For example, the phrase "the lucky boys" can be broken down into functional, lexical, derivational, and inflectional morphemes.

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- English has strict rules for combining words into phrases. For example, in the phrase "the lucky boys", the article "the" must precede the adjective "lucky", which in turn must precede the noun "boys".

- Sequences that do not follow these rules, such as "*boys the lucky" and "*lucky boys the", are considered ungrammatical in English.

- The process of describing the structure of phrases and sentences to account for all grammatical sequences and rule out ungrammatical ones is one way of defining the grammar of a language.

- This approach to studying grammar, which recognizes that different languages (like English, Swahili, Tagalog, or Turkish) have different ways of forming grammatical phrases and sentences, has a long tradition.

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- The terms "article," "adjective," and "noun" used to label grammatical categories in English come from traditional grammar, which originated from the description of languages like Latin and Greek.

- The phrase "grammar school" was originally used for institutions where Latin was taught.

- The grammatical description of Latin and Greek, languages of philosophy, religion, and scholarship, was considered the best model for other grammars.

- We have inherited terms from this model that are used in describing basic grammatical components, known as the "parts of speech," and how they connect to each other in terms of "agreement."

- The parts of speech include:

    * **Nouns**: Words used to refer to people, objects, creatures, places, qualities, phenomena, and abstract ideas.

    * **Articles**: Words (a, an, the) used with nouns to form noun phrases classifying those "things" or identifying them as already known.

    * **Adjectives**: Words used, typically with nouns, to provide more information about the things referred to.

    * **Verbs**: Words used to refer to various kinds of actions and states involving people and things in events.

    * **Adverbs**: Words used, typically with verbs, to provide more information about actions, states, and events. Some adverbs are also used with adjectives to modify information about things.

    * **Prepositions**: Words used with nouns in phrases providing information about time, place, and other connections involving actions and things.

    * **Pronouns**: Words used in place of noun phrases, typically referring to people and things already known.

    * **Conjunctions**: Words used to make connections and indicate relationships between events.

Agreement:

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- Traditional grammatical analysis includes categories like "number," "person," "tense," "voice," and "gender." These categories help describe language structure in terms of agreement.

- Agreement in a sentence is based on the category of number (singular or plural), person (first, second, or third), and tense (present or past). For example, in the sentence "Cathy loves her dog," the verb "loves" agrees with the noun "Cathy" in terms of person (third person singular) and tense (present).

- The sentence is in the active voice, describing what Cathy does. An alternative would be the passive voice, as in "Cathy is loved by her dog."

- Gender helps describe the agreement between "Cathy" and "her" in the sentence. In English, this is described in terms of natural gender, derived from a biological distinction between male and female.

- Grammatical gender, found in languages like Spanish and German, is based on the type of noun (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and is not tied to sex. Nouns are classified according to their gender class, and articles and adjectives have different forms to agree with the nouns' gender.

- Traditional grammar analysis often presented tables for the analysis of English verbs, constructed by analogy with tables in Latin grammar. This approach did not always consider the appropriateness of analytic categories for a particular language.

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- The prescriptive approach to grammar, which originated in 18th-century England, sets out rules for the "proper" use of English, often based on the structure of Latin sentences.

- Some prescriptive rules include not splitting infinitives, not ending a sentence with a preposition, and not beginning a sentence with "and."

- Traditional teachers would correct sentences to adhere to these rules, such as changing "Who did you go with?" to "With whom did you go?" and "Mary runs faster than me" to "Mary runs faster than I."

- While understanding this "linguistic etiquette" can be valuable, it's worth considering whether these rules must always be followed in English.

- For example, the rule against splitting infinitives (e.g., "To boldly go") doesn't apply in Latin, where infinitives are single words that can't be split.

- If English speakers and writers regularly produce forms that don't adhere to these rules, we might simply note that English structures differ from those in Latin, rather than considering the English forms as "bad."

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- The descriptive approach to grammar, which emerged in the late 19th century, involves describing the regular structures of a language as it is used, rather than how it should be used according to traditional grammar.

- Structural analysis, a type of descriptive approach, investigates the distribution of forms in a language using "test-frames," or sentences with empty slots. This method helps identify grammatical categories, such as "noun" and "noun phrase."

- Constituent analysis, another descriptive approach, shows how small constituents (components) form larger constituents. This method involves determining how words form phrases and can be represented in a diagram to show the distribution of constituents at different levels.

- This type of analysis shows that pronouns and proper nouns or names, though single words, can be used as noun phrases and fill the same constituent space as longer phrases.

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- In English, the terms "subject" and "object" are used to describe the different functions of noun phrases in a sentence.

- The subject is usually the first noun phrase before the verb and often represents the person or thing that performs the action of the verb. The subject noun phrase determines the form of the verb as singular or plural.

- The object is typically the noun phrase after the verb and more often represents the person or thing that undergoes the action. The object noun phrase does not influence the verb.

- English makes a clear distinction between pronouns used as subjects (I, he, she, we, they) and those used as objects (me, him, her, us, them).

- An adjunct, often a prepositional phrase at the end of a sentence, typically provides additional information such as where, when, or how the subject performed the action on the object.

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- The basic linear order of constituents in English is Noun Phrase–Verb–Noun Phrase (NP V NP), or Subject–Verb–Object (SVO).

- This word order is not the only possible or even the most common among languages. The most common pattern is Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), as in Japanese.

- In verb-initial languages like Scottish Gaelic and Malagasy, the sentence begins with the verb, and the adjective is placed after the noun.

- The use of word order patterns to classify languages into different "types" is part of a broader area of study known as language typology.

- Studying grammar and understanding different word order patterns can help second language learners understand the structural organization of the language they are learning.

- The linear order observed in grammatical structures is based on a set of underlying structures that are more abstract and organized in a more hierarchical way.