Along with phonetics, grammar is one of the fundamental fields of linguistics.
Phonetics is the basis for phomenics.
Grammar is a precursor to the fields of morphology and lexicology

Grammar, phonetics, and their related fields all come together in the study of typology; a field of linguistics which compares and contrasts languages.

Some grammars can be mathematically, they tend to be purely syntactic (based on structuring rules rather than the meaning and feel of words) and are called formal grammars. Indeed, I am also writing a book about formal language theory which studies such grammars, however this is much more mathematical in nature. This book discusses primarily the concepts of grammars of natural languages.











Lexical categories introduces possible idealized 'types' of words that may exist within a language. We will study lexical categories generally, however when studying a specific language, we more often than not need to create and name parts of speech from scratch 'within' the language. For example, Japanese has 3 different lexical categories that act semantically like adjectives, but completely differ syntactically and morphologically. 

The main goal of lexical categories is to inspire some basic ways in how some words can be fundamentally different.


Lexical category (part of speech)
- Lexical categories differ accross languages, but here are some common names
- noun
- verb
- adjective
- adverb
- pronoun
- interjection
- preposition
- conjunction
- numeral
- particle
- article






























Grammatical category
- Grammatical categories 

Grammatical categories are va. Some inflections in a language may be based on multiple grammatical categories, a weaker variant or stronger variant of it etc. Again using Japanese as an example, EXAMPLE HERE.

Like lexical categories, these are just metalinguistic objects to inspire the way we look at grammatical constructs in a language.
That said grammatical categories are still powerful ways to study languages; they are also various grammatical categories dealing with the same idea from different points of view, with one point of view perhaps being better suited to the language in question. We will see examples of all of this.



subject-object paradigm

agent-patient paradigm

transitivity
reflexivity
valency
gender
animacy
honorifics
number
person
modality
tense
aspect
mood
voice
clusivity


inflection
- declension (of non-verbs)
- conjugation (of verbs)


Grammatical case
ablative
dative
accusative
instrumentive
genitive
vocative
locative
nominative