meaning - Do capitalization and punctuation fall under the category of grammar?


I've just read something that implied that capitalization falls under the category of grammar. After looking at the definition ("the whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general..etc"), I think he may be right, but...


I feel like I've only ever heard "grammar" used to refer to someone using words correctly in terms of the... meanings of the words(?)


I think some examples might help me more here.


I've always thought something like



"I didn't saw him."



would be a grammatical mistake but that



"i didn't see him"



would not fall under the category of grammar. I know it's capitalization, and I think it might also be considered punctuation. But I've always assumed that something like that would not technically be a grammar mistake. I thought punctuation was completely separate from grammar, except perhaps in scenarios where a punctuation mark would changes the meaning of the words, like with "were" and "we're".


Can anyone clear this up? Are capitalization and punctuation both part of grammar?



Answer



Capitalization and punctuation (and spelling, paragraphing, and indentation, among many other things), are not part of language at all. Certainly they're not part of grammar.


Instead, they're part of Writing -- literacy, reading, printing, wordprocessing, txting -- all of which is technological, not natural.


Language (including grammar, which is formation and arrangement of words into constituents) evolved as spoken language, for a million years or so. Humans co-evolved with spoken languages, and every normal human learns at least one spoken language long before their formal literacy training (i.e, school) starts. If it ever starts -- most humans are, and always have been, illiterate.


So the answer is: No, neither capitalization nor punctuation are part of grammar.


If English were capitalized and punctuated like German (which has quite different rules from English), it would still just be written English, and no grammatical rules would be involved. No real English grammatical rule refers to punctuation (though there are plenty of zombie rules that do).


There is another, childish, sense of grammar that leads to this question, though.


This sense of grammar is very common and means 'stuff you were sposta learn in grammar school'. Or, as is most often the case, at least in the USA, 'stuff you didn't learn in grammar school'. Since English grammar is not taught in Anglophone elementary schools, this applies to all topics of grammar and literacy, which have been mixed up for at least a century.


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