Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study of Grammar
Step one in books on this topic is pretty much always to identify exactly what the writer is even talking about in the first place, as “grammar” has meant somewhat different things at different times. In what Disterheft refers to as the “traditional” sense, grammar is “specifically the rules that govern sentence structure (syntax) and the forms of words that appear in any given construction (morphology)” (3). However, in this book, she (like most present-day linguists) uses the word “grammar” more liberally to mean “the system of rules that every speaker formulates through the process of first language acquisition” (3), and therefore the book deals with phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon.
