grammarize

English

Etymology

grammar +‎ -ize

Verb

grammarize (third-person singular simple present grammarizes, present participle grammarizing, simple past and past participle grammarized)

1. To create a grammar for (a language); to describe the grammar of.
   • 1958, Paul Roberts, Understanding English, page 133:

     The grammar that the early grammarians knew was Latin grammar, and when they decided to grammarize English, they simply transposed the Latin structure and the Latin terminology and called it English grammar.

   • 1964, Paul Roberts, English syntax: a programed introduction to transformational grammar, page 410:

     But if he is himself a speaker of the language he proposes to grammarize, he doesn't generally need the corpus to tell him what are sentences of the language and what are not.

   • 1982, Sino-American Relations - Volumes 8-9, page 34:

     But all their efforts to "grammarize" Chinese have proved fruitless. The reason is not that Chinese itself has no grammar but that a language should be idiomatic rather than grammatical, or rather, idiomatic regardless of grammar.

   • 2005, Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance, A Handbook of Eweland: The Ewe of Togo and Benin, page 228:

     Mina remains, however, a spoken dialectical variant despite a recent attempt by an American Baptist missionary organization to orthographize and grammarize via a translation of the Christian New Testament.

2. (more generally) To codify; to analyze and describe.
   • 1884, Pioneer Collections - Volume 6, page 312:

     To quote the old expression, "he gave the court and jury the raw material and let them 'grammarize' it to suit themselves."

   • 1976, Hilton Landry, New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets, page 126:

     Moreover, seen in retrospect from the first line of quatrain 3, it would seem that "But reckening time" embodies a catch in the voice as if the poet had been unable to "grammarize" his fears properly, thereby involving him in a syntactic anacoluthon.

   • 1996, Dieter Meindl, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque, page 185:

     To turn experience into speech—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all.

   • 1996, Alexander Durig, Autism and the Crisis of Meaning, page 90:

     People with Autism would be better off if we would grammarize our daily lives for them—that is, reduce our daily lives to a series of deductive grammars of action that they could then memorize.

3. (transitive) To correct the grammar of (a body of speech or text)
   • 1902, The American Tailor and Cutter - Volume 24, page 182:

     "What is the good of being a jim-dandy shape and a way-up cutter," he sadly thought one Sunday night, after he had been in bed for more than two hours vainly trying to go to sleep," if a fellow tangles his languidge all up, tumbles his words over one another, and can't grammarize what he says. I'm hungry for education."

   • 1906, Typographical Journal - Volume 28, page 471:

     During the “good old days” compositors (down this way, at least) had to edit “manifold”—grammarize it, supply dates, figure out sub-heads, etc.

   • 1940, Gardeners Chronicle & New Horticulturist, page 33:

     There is another side to this question; some editors rearrange articles and grammarize them so that the individual touch and idea is almost lost and this brings to a publication the same phrasing throughout its pages.