Text-grammar / discourse analysis

The development of modern linguistics has lead to recognition of the 3rd part of grammar,
namely text grammar/ discourse analysis. Text was defined as a unit larger than sentence and
the research was oriented towards discovering and classifying types of text structures
(composition forms, or macrostructure). Later linguists turned to the analysis of the text
macrostructure, a large-scale statement of the text’s content (meaning). In terms of six-level
grammatical structure basic units of the text grammar are superphrasal unities (sentence-groups)
and texts.

The term discourse analysis was introduced as the name for ‘a method of analysis of
connected speech’ and for ‘correlating ‘culture and language’ (Harris 1952). The second part
of the definition is very important, because it delineates discourse analysis from text
grammar.

Basic units of discourse analysis are discourses, that is texts in social context.
Discourses are not only texts but everything that is connected with them: the participants
involved, their age, occupation, gender, race, education; the purpose of text production; social,
cultural, and personal meanings; interpretation of those meanings; actions performed by people
and so on.

According to this view the term ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ do not refer to different domains.
They are aspects of the same phenomenon, i.e. communication. The terms reflect the
difference in focus. Text is the basic means of this communication. Discourse is the process of
this communication, with a special emphasis on its functional (social) plane. It is a more
embracing term: if comprises both text and social context. However the linguistic unit under
analysis remain the same: it is the text. Thus in addition to text grammar we assign discourse
analysis to the third part of grammar.
Morphology - the part of grammar which deals with word-forms (morphemes and
words). 1) that branch of linguistics which concerns itself with the structure of words
as dependent on the meaning of constituent morphemes and 2) the system of
morphological oppositions in a given language including their grammatical categories
as unities of form and content.
Syntax - the part of grammar, which deals with combinations of words into word-groups
and sentences
Text grammar - the part of grammar, which deals with the text macrostructure
Discourse analysis – is introduced as the name for ‘a method of analysis of connected
speech’ and for ‘correlating ‘culture and language’ (Harris 1952). It delineates
discourse analysis from text grammar.
Discourse - texts in social context.
Accidence - deals mainly with the inflectional or inflected word-forms
Morphonology - means the study of those elements of language which are used to
extend or limit the meaning of a word, or to define its relation to other parts of a
sentence.
Semanteme - a minimal distinctive unit of meaning.
Central morpheme / root morpheme - is a lexical nuclears, the semantic centre of
the word, it has a concrete lexical meaning.
Peripheral / affixational - According to their m-ng & their role, morphemes are: Root
(roots); Affixational (affixes). According to the opposition, affixes are: Prefixes,
which proceed the root; Suffixes, which follow the root; Infixes, placed within the
root. Infixes are very rare in the Eng lang: e.g. to stand. According to their function &
m-ng, affixes are: Grammatical (suffixes); Derivational (suffixes & prefixes).
Morpheme - is an abstract unit of meaning.
Morph - is a formal unit with a physical shape.
Allomorphs - are forms that are related to each other but slightly different, depending
on the surrounding environment.
Zero morpheme – a meaningful absence of a morpheme.
Bound morphs – when the cannot stand alone, for example, re- and -ed.
Grammatical morphs - have grammatical meaning and simply represent grammatical
categories such as person, tense, number, case, etc.
Lexical morphs - is morphs which have lexical meaning and can be used in the
creation of new words, e.g. head, line, paint, -ist, -er, etc
Affix - is all the morphs that have been added to it whether before or after it
Prefix – occurs at the beginning of words.
Suffix - occurs at the end of words.
infix
Inflection - is a major category of morphology. It has no lexical meaning or function.
Its meaning is purely structural. Thus, there is no difference in the way of lexical
 meaning between locate and located, or between house and houses. But there is
difference in grammatical meaning between these words (present-past, singular-
plural).
Derivation – is the process of adding bound morphs to create new words of the same
or different word classes
Compounding (composition) – is group three shows examples of words, which are
made by combining two free roots.
Analytical type of inflections / syntactic type of inflections - means of word-change
in Modern English

Noun morphemes:

• Suffix s/es (with three allomorphs) used to form the plural of almost all nouns (cats, dogs,
horses), suffixes -en/-ren used for the same purposes (oxen, children, brethren);
• Suffix -'s (with three allomorphs) used to form the genitive case of nouns (mother's, Pat s,
George's).
Verb morphemes:

•Suffix -s/es for the 3rd person singular Present Indefinite (with three allomorphs), e.g.
works, wins, watches;

• Suffix -d/ed for the Past Tense of certain (regular) verbs (with three allomorphs), e.g.
worked, wondered, wanted.
Past participle morpheme:

• Suffix -d/ed with certain (regular) verbs (with three allomorphs), e.g. lived, laughed, landed;
• Suffix -n/en with certain verbs, e.g. shown, known, written.
Present participle morpheme:

Suffix -ing, e.g. working, watching winning.

Adjective & adverb morphemes:

Suffixes -er and -est used to form the degrees of comparison, e.g. smarter, the smartest.
Vowel change/sound alteration type - is a systematic sound change in the
pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language. Examples are as follows: mouse -
mice, write - wrote - written, take - took - taken, etc.
Discontinuous morpheme - is a composite inflectional morpheme consisting of two
disconnected parts: a stem of the auxiliary word and an inflection of the basic word,
e.g. has taken {have = + -en}.
Suppletive formation - means building a form of the word from an altogether
different stem. For example: I-me, be-am-is-are-was-were, go-went, good-better, bad-
worse.