INTRODUCTION

People are interested in language and in understanding how we think language works for lots of different reasons. Becoming more knowledgeable about language often means having to learn something about grammatical analysis whether it is to teach children language skills, to work with those who have some kind of language difficulty or impairment, to teach a foreign language, or to master a command of a given language for a particular agenda such as speech writing or media communication. Understanding how language works means understanding how grammar works.

Grammar may seem like a very mysterious thing to many people. To use language, and even to use it well, we don’t really need to have an explicit understanding of it. However, if we want to work with language we need a way to talk about it and we need a way to identify the bits and pieces that it involves so that we can work with it more masterfully and more professionally.