WHAT IS GRAMMAR?

Presenter: In the past, learning a language was often talked about in terms of learning
grammar rules and new words. We've discussed vocabulary in the previous section,
so now let's move on from vocabulary to grammar. And let's talk about how the two
are closely linked.

Interviewer: So, you were saying that it is not always easy to distinguish between
vocabulary and grammar. Am I correct? Can you expand on that?

Richard Spiby: Well, yes. Let me see if I can clarify that with an example. So, for
example, prepositions often cause problems for our learners. Do we count them as
vocabulary or grammar? Well, if we have a sentence like 'the documents are in the
box on the shelf' the words 'in' and 'on' have a specific meaning. But if I combine them
with other words to form a phrasal verb like 'give in' or the prepositional phrase 'on
fire'... you see, things change completely.

And that's why we often say that prepositions are somewhere in between. A bit of both,
really. Because they cross this boundary between 'content words' and 'function words'.

A crucial point is that before we write a grammar test we should think about what we
mean by ‘grammar’. And traditionally there has been a clear division in language
teaching between grammar and vocabulary (or lexis you may have heard people refer
to it). So, sometimes we talk about the functional words in the language as the
grammar, and the lexical verbs as the vocabulary. And nowadays… Nowadays many
of us see them a bit more closely linked than that.

It’s been said that vocabulary does most of the work in carrying the meaning in a
sentence. And that the grammar manages those words to refine the meaning and to
show the relationships between the lexical words.

The functional words change in certain very predictable patterns for example, when
‘go’ changes to ‘went’, we know that this happened in the past, or in another example
when ‘cat’ changes to ‘cats’ we understand there is more than one cat. These
predictable patterns of how words change are what we call grammar.