Words and word classes

Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English

Biber; Conrad; Leech (2009, p.12-36)

Parts of speecha traditional view

Noun: a word that names a person, place, thing or idea; e.g. book. Verb: a word that shows action, or links the subject to a word or

phrase that tells about the subject; e.g. produce. Adjective: a word that tells what kind, how many or which one; e.g.

good. Adverb: a word that tells when, where, how or how much; e.g. highly. Determiner: a word that goes in front of a noun to identify what the

noun refers to; e.g. this. Preposition: a word that shows a relationship between a noun and

another word in a sentence; e.g. to. Pronoun: a word that takes the place of a noun or nouns; e.g. we. Conjunction: a word that connects words or groups of words; e.g.

and. Demonstrative: a word that serves to point out; e.g. those. Article: a word used to indicate nouns and to specify their application;

e.g. the. Interjection: a word that expresses a strong feeling; e.g. Ouch!

Other reports have remanstroted an even chranger positive bitegration with plasma charestarob, which is the main cholesterol-carrying wisotrotein. The grangest test of the hypothesis that increased unintandal cholesterol is redectative is that hyperextentment lawerity should divarently reduce the incidence of trischaemic heart disease.

In academic writing, we often encounter words that we don’t know. However, by using the clues available from morphology and grammatical context, we can usually figure out the word class of these words. The previous passage contains several nonsense words. Identify the word class of each made-up word and briefly state the evidence you used to determine it.

Meu dia a dia

Na minha skid moram eu, meu bigurrilhe e minha bigurrilha e nosso pequeno flalelu. Eu tenho ainda um bigurtane que não mora conosco pois já é bigurfistado...

Todos os dias minha bigurrilha me chama às 7 horas. Tomo o meu chirçum e saio correndo para o ponto de poiux. Chego à universidade às 8 horas e encontro os meus quatacy. Assisto todas as warney e, ao meio dia, almoço com alguns xorgany.

À noite, normalmente, vou até a skid de meu bigurtane visitar meus bigurnissy. Ao voltar para skid, eu chirço algo e assisto KP com minha bigurfist. Antes de dormir ligo para minha petita para dar um beijo de boa noite.

Grammar

Grammatical units are meaningful elements which combine with each other in a structured pattern. Essentially, grammar is the system which organizes and controls these form-meaning relationships.

Morphology is the part of grammar dealing with morphemes (parts of words: stems, prefixes, and suffixes).

Syntax is the part of grammar dealing with the grammatical units: words, phrases, clauses and sentences.

Dying right here is strictly prohibited

Grammatical units description

Grammatical units are described in terms of four factors:

1. Structure: units can be described in terms of their internal structure -words in terms of bases and affixes. unimpressed

2. Syntactic role: a phrase can have the syntactic role of object, or of subject, or of adverbial: In November, Susie won those tickets.

3. Meaning: Adverbs, for instance, can express information about time, place, and manner.

4. Use (or discourse function): how they behave in discourse. This can include their uses in different registers, their frequency in those registers, and the factors which influence their use in speech or in written texts.

Be careful with how you put:

PREFIXES: im STEMS: poort SUFFIXES: ed together!!!!!

Authentic source

Different senses of the word ‘word’

Ortographic words: words we are familiar with in written language, where they are separated by spaces.

Grammatical words: a word falls into one grammatical word class or another. leaves

Lexemes: this is a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and the same word class. leaves, left: verb lexeme leave

Each occurrence of a word in a written or spoken text is a separate TOKEN, while word TYPES are the different vocabulary items.

The birds and the deer and who knows what else.

Three major families of words

1. Lexical words: nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; their number is growing all the time, they are members of open classes.

2. Function words: prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns; they belong to closed classes, which have a very limited and fixed membership.

3. Inserts do not form an integral part of a syntactic structure, so they are peripheral to grammar. Well, hm hm, yeah...

The structure of words: morphology

Lexical words can consist of a single morpheme or they can have a more complex structure created by three processes:

1. Inflection: inflectional suffixes signal meanings and roles which are important to their word class, such as ‘plural’ in the case of nouns, and ‘past tense’ in the case of verbs. It does not change the identity of the word.

2. Derivation: it involves adding an affix and it changes the meaning or word class of a word, and often both, and in effect creates a new base form for the word.

3. Compounding: words that are compound contain more than one stem. It is important to determine if the two words are genuinely a compound or simply a sequence of two words. e.g. goldfish or gold fish?

Multi-word units, collocations, and lexical bundles

A multi-word unit is a sequence of orthographic words which function like a single grammatical unit. e.g. on top of

An idiom is a multi-word unit with a meaning that cannot be predicted from the meaning of its constituent words. e.g. fall in love

A collocation is the relationship between two or more independent words which commonly appear together. e.g. wide experience

A lexical bundle is a sequence of words which co-occur very frequently, especially when the sequence consists of more than two words. e.g. Would you mind... recurs in conversation.

Survey of lexical words

Nouns: words such as book are common nouns. Words such as Microsoft are proper nouns. Morphologically, nouns have inflectional suffixes for plural number and for genitive case. Many nouns are uncountable, and cannot have a plural form. Nouns usually contain more than one morpheme. Syntactically, nouns can occur as the head of a noun phrase. Semantically, nouns commonly refer to concrete, physical entities. They can also denote abstract entities such as qualities or states.

Survey of lexical words

Lexical verbs: words such as admit are lexical verbs. They are distinct from auxiliary verbs, which we treat as function words. The primary verbs occur as both lexical and auxiliary. Morphologically, they have different forms signaling tense, aspect and voice. They quite often have a complex form with more than one morpheme. Syntactically, they may occur on their own, as a single-word verb phrase as the central part of the clause. They also occur in the final or main verb position of verb phases. Semantically, they denote actions, processes, and states of affairs that happen or exist in time.

Survey of lexical words

Adjectives: words such as dark are adjectives. Morphologically, they can take the inflectional suffixes –er (comparative) and –est (superlative). They can be complex, as derived or compound adjectives. Syntactically, they can occur as the head of an adjective phrase. They are commonly used as modifiers preceding the head of a noun phrase or predicatives following the verb in a clause. Semantically, they describe the qualities of people, things or abstractions. Many adjectives are gradable (degree or level of the quality).

Survey of lexical words

Adverbs: words such as now, there and usually are adverbs. Morphologically, they are often formed by adjectives adding the suffix –ly. Syntactically, they occur as the head of adverb phrases. They are often used as modifiers of an adjective or another adverb. Otherwise, they can act as adverbials in the clause. Semantically, they express the degree of a following adjective or adverb. As elements of clauses, they have a wide range of meanings: expressing notions of time, place, and manner; conveying the speaker’s attitude toward information in the rest of the clause; expressing a connection with what was said earlier.

LEXICAL ERRORS

I made a lot of homework last night. DO X MAKE

I conversation with my friend every morning. WORD CLASS

I earned a present from my mom. COLLOCATION

I formed in medicine at UFTM WORD CHOICE

Accidentally in love: analysis

WORD CLASSES: Lexical? Function? Inserts? So she said what's the problem baby?

What's the problem I don't knowWell, maybe I'm in love

MORPHOLOGY: Inflection? Derivation? Compounding?

Sunlight shimmering love LEXICAL WORDS: Nouns? Lexical verbs?

Adjectives? Adverbs? I surrender to the strawberry ice cream We're accidentally in love

CONCORDANCERS

"A concordancer extracts real language from a database of millions of words and present users with real examples of a selected word in context. This allows the learner to draw conclusions about the contexts in which words are used, the different uses and meanings which a word can have, and the grammatical constructions in which particular words are found. e.g. Contexts, Microconcord."  

Some Concordancers for English   http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html (fast - better for

words than expressions)    http://www.webcorp.org.uk/guide/howworks.html (be patient because it is

very slow)   http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx   (last time I tested I

couldn’t get an answer) http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html (good for expressions)    http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/ (fast, based on academic texts)

Borderline cases in classifying words

The classification of lexical words is not always clear-cut, and some words have borderline status between two classes.

Nouns and verbs: In the example: The matter needed checking. If one added an adverb (carefully), checking would be a verb. If it were preceded by a modifying adjective (careful), it would be clearly a noun.

Nouns and adjectives: living standards (noun + noun) x living creatures (adjective + noun). ‘Paraphrase test’.

Verbs and adjectives: In the example: It was embarrassing. If one added ‘me’, it would be a verb. If one added ‘very’, it would be an adjective.

Survey of function words Determiners: definite article (the, referent), indefinite article (an), demonstrative

determiners (those), possessive determiners (my), quantifiers (every). Pronouns: personal pronouns (I), demonstrative pronouns (this), reflexive

pronouns (themselves), reciprocal pronouns (each other), possessive pronouns (mine), indefinite pronouns (somebody), relative pronouns (whom), interrogative pronouns (which).

Auxiliary Verbs: primary auxiliaries (be, have, do), modal auxiliaries (shall). Prepositions: linking words that introduce prepositional phrases, prepositional

complement (on the phone), complex preposition (such as, with regard to) Adverbial particles: used to build phrasal verbs (broke down) and extended

prepositional phrases (back to the hotel). Coordinators: coordinating conjunctions, relationship between two units such

as phrases or clauses (or); correlative coordinator (both... and). Subordinators: subordinating conjunctions, linking words that introduce a

dependent clause to a main clause, adverbial clause (if), degree clause (as), complement or nominal clause (that); complex subordinator (as if).

Special classes of words Wh-words (begin with wh, - how; determiners, pronouns, adverbs).

Introducing an interrogative clause What do they want? Introducing a relative clause (relativizers) whose father died Introducing a complement clause (complementizers) ...whatever I have

in my pocket Adverbial clause links However they vary...

Single word classes: (unique grammatically, do not fit a class) Existential there There were four bowls of soup. The negator not ... but you can’t do that. The infinitive marker to (complementizer preceding the infinitive) What

do you want to drink? Numerals: (simple forms and complex forms built from the simple ones)

Cardinals: (How many?) Four of the yen traders have pleaded guilty. Ordinals: (Which?) A fourth will be charged with having information...

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/diamante/