ENGLISH LANGUAGE - English Grammar

English grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses and sentences. Analysis of texts containing more than one sentence belongs to the realm of discourse rather than grammar.

The grammar of a language is approached in two ways: descriptive grammar is based on analysis of text corpora and describes grammatical structures thereof, whereas prescriptive grammar attempts to use the identified rules of a given language as a tool to govern the linguistic behaviour of speakers. This article predominantly concerns itself with descriptive grammar.

There are historical, social and regional variations of English. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some dialects of English. Standard English is the form of speech found in types of public discourse including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news reporting, including both formal and informal speech. There are certain differences in grammar between the standard forms of British English, American English and Australian English, although these are relatively inconspicuous compared with the lexical differences and differences in pronunciation.

Grammar is divided into morphology, which describes the formation of words, and syntax, which describes the construction of meaningful phrases, clauses, and sentences out of words.