ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Relational grammar

Relational grammar is like playing with words and sentences. Just like how you like to put together your toy blocks to make a toy, we can play with words to make sentences in the right way.

This helps us understand how people use language to talk to each other, and how we can understand what they mean even if they use different words than we are used to.

When we play with words, we can change the order of words in a sentence to say the same thing in a different way. For example, "I ate a sandwich" and "A sandwich was eaten by me" mean the same thing.

Relational grammar also helps us understand how words that are related to each other fit together to make a sentence. For instance, we know that "The big dog chased the cat" is correct because the adjective "big" goes with the noun "dog" and the verb "chased" goes with the noun "cat".

Overall, relational grammar helps us have fun with language by allowing us to play with words and understand how they fit together in different ways.
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