Grammar has historically been an important component of language and literacy education. It has been understood and defined in various ways, depending on the different linguistic perspectives throughout history. This chapter discusses two main historical perspectives on grammar: traditional grammar and functional grammar. Both implicitly and explicitly underpin the Australian Curriculum: English. The metalanguage and concepts used in the Curriculum and the National Literacy Learning Progression are a combination of traditional and functional grammar terms. Many traditional grammar terms (e.g. nouns, verbs, subject-verb-object) are used alongside functional grammar terms (e.g. participants, processes, circumstances, noun groups, verb groups) to describe sentence-level components, but functional grammar terms are mostly used to describe text-level components. Therefore, it is crucial for pre-service and in-service teachers to be equipped with explicit knowledge of these two grammar traditions to be able to teach in contemporary English classrooms.

Aristotle here considers the effect of diction, or word choice, on rhetorical argument. Metaphors, epithets, special dialects, the use of the voice to convey passion or emotion, and the necessary parts of any speech are all considered here.

This chapter deals with lexical and grammatical categories in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). First, it discusses a range of functionally motivated, non-endocentric syntactic categories, such as the nucleus (NUC), containing the predicate, referential phrases (RPs) and modifying phrases (MPs). Although these units are typically realized by verbs, nouns and adjectives/adverbs, respectively, this is not always so, and many languages allow for non-verbal predicates, non-adjectival modifying phrases, etc., while other languages show little to no evidence for categories such as noun, verb or adjective. This is captured in RRG by assuming that NUC, RP and MP are not universally linked to particular lexical categories. The chapter also discusses grammatical categories which are referred to in RRG as operators, and which ground the clause, core or nucleus (TAM markers, evidentials, etc.), as well as categories which are primarily concerned with questions of reference, such as number, definiteness, deixis, etc., which ground the RP.

Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

This chapter introduces parts of speech (PoS) and their functions in Chinese. The PoS that are introduced include the major categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The unique category of classifiers (measure words) and the minor categories of numbers, pronouns, modal verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles are also discussed.

This article compares the presence of some functional categories which are at play in English or in French to their absence in Mandarin. It shows that rather than being ‘absent’ these categories are inactive, due to the analyticity of the language. For instance, Mandarin ‘lacks’ (i) subject–verb agreement, (ii) plural markers on nouns, (iii) a complementizer as a head of a clause in subject or in object position, and (iv) verb gapping.