Is Grammar An Exact Science? [closed]

I think that linguistics, the study of language, is a very scientific field, but the difficulty is in its massive breadth of data. Rather than being like classical mechanics it is more akin to the chaos of meteorology. Yes we can model the weather, but there's just too much data to produce specific narrow predictions with certainty.

Every speaker has a unique grammar of their language, which is called their idiolect. The idiolects of everyone who is part of the same speech community will be pretty similar, but there will be differences too. Adult speakers know tens of thousands of words, most with a large number of distinct senses, each sense with more and less prototypical uses, and the possibility to use varying kinds of idiomatic and metaphorical meanings. Your idiolect also controls how constituent parts are combined into sentences and larger structures. And that's just one person's idiolect! To write a grammar of the English language today you need to deal with the speech of billions of people, dozens of millions of speech communities, and the constant force of language change.

So often linguistics is fairly statistical. Sometimes a language will appear to have hard rules, other times they'll be much softer. For example, I don't think there's any disagreement about when to use him vs himself, and it's something that ESL learners seem to pick up pretty quickly too. But if you ask whether it's most natural to say "My mother and I went to the market." or "My mother and me went to the market." you'll get no consensus at all. This doesn't mean that language can't be studied scientifically, just that sometimes we have to admit we can't get a solid enough grasp on the data. But if you keep your scope of inquiry tight, or study minority languages, then the task is easier, and decent grammars can be written in only a few years.

If you're looking for a single unified approach, you might want to choose a different discipline.

Richard Nordquist: Grammar & Composition Expert, at
About.com About Education Grammar & Composition English Grammar

gives an overview titled

10 Types of Grammar: Different Ways of Analyzing the Structures and Functions of Language

He starts with

So you think you know grammar? All well and good, but which type of grammar do you know?

Quirk and Svartvik, in Investigating Linguistic Acceptability (1966), proposed a five-point scale for the degree of acceptability of individual grammatical constructions. But not everyone accepts this approach :-)