Grammar and meaning

Grammar and meaning
In the last section the point was made that 'grammar is partly the study of what forms are possible'. But that does not explain why the following sounds odd:
This is 2680239. Weare at home right now. Please leave a message after the beep.
The sentence We are at home right now is possible. That is, it is grammatically well-formed. But it doesn't make sense in this context.The form the speaker has chosen doesn't convey the exact meaning the speaker requires. We now need to consider another feature of grammar, and that is, its meaning-making potential.
Grammarcommunicates meanings — meanings of a very precise kind. Vocabulary, of course, also communicates meanings. Take this example: a ticket inspector on a train says:
Tickets!
Here there is little or no grammar- in the sense of either morphology or syntax. The meaning is conveyed simply at the lexical, or word level, tickets. Situational factors - such as the passengers' expectation that the inspector willwant to check their tickets - mean that the language doesn’t have to work very hard to make the meaning clear. The language of early childhood is like this: it is essentially individual words strungtogether, but because it is centred in the here-and-now, it is generally not difficult to interpret:
Carry!
All gone milk!
Mummy book.
Where daddy?

Adult language, too, is often pared down,operating on a lexical level (i.e. without much grammar):
A: Coffee
B: Please
A: Milk?
B: Just a drop.
We can formulate a rule of thumb: the more context, the less grammar. Tickets! is a goodexample of this. But imagine a situation when a person (Milly) is phoning anodier person (Molly) to ask a third person (Mandy) to forward some pre-booked airline tickets. In this case, Tickets! would beinadequate. Instead, we would expect something like:
Can you ask Mandy to send me the tickets that I booked last week?
This is where grammar comes in. Grammar is a process for making a speaker's or...