Grammar

A standard language (or standard variety, standard dialect, standardized dialect or simply standard) is any language variety that has undergone substantial codification in its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features and that stands out among related varieties in a community as the one with the highest status or prestige. Often, it is the prestige language variety of a whole country.

In linguistics, the process of a variety becoming organized into a standard, for instance by being widely expounded in grammar books or other reference works, and also the process of making people's language usage conform to that standard, is called standardization. Typically, the varieties that undergo standardization are those associated with centres of commerce and government, used frequently by educated people and in news broadcasting, and taught widely in schools and to non-native learners of the language. Within a language community, standardization usually begins with a particular variety being selected (often towards a goal of further linguistic uniformity), accepted by influential people, socially and culturally spread, established in opposition to competitor varieties, maintained, increasingly used in diverse contexts, and assigned a high social status as a result of the variety being linked to the most successful people. As a sociological effect of these processes, most users of a standard dialect—and many users of other dialects of the same language—come to believe that the standard is inherently superior to, or consider it the linguistic baseline against which to judge, the other dialects. However, such beliefs are firmly rooted in social perceptions rather than any objective evaluation. Any varieties that do not carry high social status in a community (and thus may be defined in opposition to standard dialects) are called nonstandard or vernacular dialects.

The Alexandrine grammarians were philologists and textual scholars who flourished in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, when that city was the center of Hellenistic culture. Despite the name, the work of the Alexandrine grammarians was never confined to grammar, and in fact did not include it, since grammar in the modern sense did not exist until the first century BCE. In Hellenistic and later times, grammarian refers primarily to scholars concerned with the restoration, proper reading, explanation and interpretation of the classical texts, including literary criticism. However unlike Atticism, their goal was not to reform the Greek in their day.

The Alexandrine grammarians undertook the critical revision of the works of classical Greek literature, particularly those of Homer, and their studies were profoundly influential, marking the beginning of the Western grammatical tradition. From the beginning, a typical custom, and methodological bias of this tradition was to focus their commentary and analysis on de-contextualized sentences.

The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a language works (or should work) in the abstract. For instance, Fowler characterized usage as "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used" and as the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words." In everyday usage, language is used differently, depending on the situation and individual. Individual language users can shape language structures and language usage based on their community.

In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader; usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style.

In linguistics, codification is the social process of a language's natural variation being reduced and features becoming more fixed or subject to prescriptive rules. Codification is a precursor to standardization: the development of a standard variety of a language.

Codifying a language can vary from case to case and depends on the stage of standardization that might have already occurred naturally. It typically means to develop a writing system, set up normative rules for grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and usage of vocabulary as well as publish grammar books, dictionaries and similar guidelines. In cases where several variants exist for a specific aspect, e.g. different ways of spelling a word, decisions on which variant is going to be the standard one have to be made.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes formerly known as Ebonics, is the variety of English natively spoken by most working and middle-class African Americans, particularly in urban communities. This variety is also spoken amongst some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the vernacular (non-standard) accent. AAVE is widespread throughout the United States, but it is not the native dialect of all African Americans, nor are all of its speakers African American.

Like most varieties of African-American English, African-American Vernacular English shares a large portion of its grammar and phonology with the regional dialects of the Southern United States, and especially older Southern American English, due to the historical enslavement of African Americans primarily in that region.

In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.

In linguistics, markedness can apply to, among others, phonological, grammatical, and semantic oppositions, defining them in terms of marked and unmarked oppositions, such as honest (unmarked) vs. dishonest (marked). Marking may be purely semantic, or may be realized as extra morphology. The term derives from the marking of a grammatical role with a suffix or another element, and has been extended to situations where there is no morphological distinction.

Liberal arts education (from Latin liberalis 'free' and ars 'art or principled practice') is a traditional academic course in Western higher education, which traditionally covers the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Liberal arts takes the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. Liberal arts education can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree course or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical, as well as religiously based courses.

The term liberal arts for an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, but has changed its meaning considerably, mostly expanding it. The seven subjects in the ancient and medieval meaning came to be divided into the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. Liberal arts colleges and schools often have names such as arts and social sciences, arts and sciences and humanities. Liberal arts degrees from today's universities and colleges traditionally include the following disciplines: Anthropology, English, Literature, Fine arts, Foreign languages, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Music, Journalism, Economics, Law, Communications, Architecture, Creative arts, Art, and History. Degrees in Liberal studies are often confused with those in a liberal arts discipline. Liberal studies refers to degrees with a broad curriculum, across multiple liberal arts disciplines and/or sciences and technologies.

Pendent is an adjective that describes the condition of hanging, either literally, or figuratively, as in undecided or incomplete. The word is to be distinguished from the spelling "pendant", which is the noun.

• In botany and anatomy the term applies to hanging forms of organs such as leaves, branches, limbs and the like, that otherwise might be rigid or erect.
• In sigillography, a pendent seal is one that hangs loose from its associated document by cords, ribbons, or a parchment tag or tail: it is thus distinguished from an applied seal, which is applied directly to the face of the paper or parchment on which the document is written.
• In various senses, such as legal matters, pendent can mean "pending" or conditional on future developments.
• In grammar a pendent sentence is incomplete in some formal sense, for example lacking a finite verb.

Something pendent may be viewed as any member of a support system (e.g. a section of a dome or, organically, a parent/guardian in a nuclear family). A pendent component of a structure or system requires one or more of the same as itself to be functional. For example, one playing card in a house of cards requires another against it in order to maintain stability. Likewise the segments of certain types of dome rely upon each other for support, as do the individual blocks or timber frames which make up a dome whether segmented or not. The whole dome may in turn be supported by pendentives (which in turn support each other). In the construction of arches and domes, the pendent condition commonly leads to special requirements for timber centring or similar expedients during construction: when the structure is completed it becomes self-supporting and the temporary structure can be removed.

Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantics interface.