# Metapragmatic grammar A more fundamental understanding of the communication situation than the contract model and the efficient market model. Metapragmatic grammar reveals market as a protocol and that protocol is not a market: it is the grammar that links, not the market. Metapragmatic grammar redefines what a distributed system is: a whole defined by the changing relationship of its parts, which does partitioning by indexing, and does not have to choose between consistency and a fork. The function of a metapragmatic grammar is to navigate how individual transactions/speech events translate from a different space-time. The “meta” of the contextual pragmatic interactions here is (meta-pragmatic means “about pragmatic”) that any speech event has a segmentation of its pragmatic so that it can translate parameters of that indexical speech event into a system that allows one to translate across all events. The ECSA economic grammar uses certain parameters in all events to do this (to offer, match, net, clear i.e. make them liquid). Metapragmatic rules allow pragmatic speech events to become grammatical and interpretable by everybody that speaks the language. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://glossary.ecsa.io/metapragmatic-grammar.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.