Words and word

classes
Grammatical Unit
 Grammatical units are meaningful
elements which combine with each other
in a structural pattern → grammar is the
system which organizes and controls these
form-meaning relationships.
 Graded according to size of unit:
 Sentence
 Clause
 Phrase
 Word
 Morpheme
 Sentence: consists of one or more clauses
“If I wash up all this stuff somebody else can
dry it”
 Clause: consists of one or more phrases
“Somebody else can dry it”
 Phrase: consists of one or more words
“somebody else”, “can dry”, “it”
 Word: consists of one or more morphemes
“somebody”
 Morphemes: parts of words, i.e. stems, prefixes
and suffixes
Some-body
 SYNTAX

THE WAY IN WHICH WORDS COMBINE TO

FORM LARGER UNITS OF MEANING
e.g. phrases, clauses, sentences

Example: word order in a noun phrase or in

statements and questions
e.g. She is a beautiful girl
NOT She is a girl beautiful
 Grammatical units are described in terms of four
factors:

 Structure: in terms of their internal structure

(words in terms of bases and affixes, phrases in
terms of heads and modifiers, clauses in terms
of clause elements);
 Syntactic role: subject, object, etc.;
 Meaning: expression of information (place,
time, manner, etc.);
 Use or discourse function: the way they are
used in discourse. How they behave in
discourse (their use in different registers, their
frequency, factors which influence their use in
speech or in written texts: ex. pronouns).
Words
 The basic elements of language
 The items defined in dictionaries
 Relatively fixed in their internal form – you cannot
interrupt them by inserting another word or
morphemes inside them

 Token: each occurrence of a word in a written or

spoken text
 Word types: the different vocabulary items that
occur in a text
Ex. The birds and the deer and who knows what
else.
(ten tokens and 8 word types)
 Families of words
 Lexical words
 Function words
 Inserts

 Newspaper writing has the highest density of

lexical words, while conversation has the lowest
 Conversation has more use of inserts than the
other registers
Lexical words
 The main carriers of information in a text or speech act
 They can be subdivided into the following word classes
(or parts of speech):
 Nouns
 Lexical verbs
 Adjectives
 Adverbs
 The most numerous word family, growing in time: they
are an open class
 They often have a complex internal structure and can
be composed of several parts (un + friend + li + ness)
 They can be heads (main words) of phrases
 They are generally the words stressed most in speech
 They are generally the words that remain if a sentence
is compressed in a newspaper headline
Function words
 Prepositions
 Coordinators
 Auxiliary verbs
 Pronouns

 They usually indicate meaning relationships and

shows how the units are related to each other
 They belong to closed classes
 They tend to occur frequently
Inserts
 Found mainly in spoken language
 Do not form an integral part of a syntactic
structure, but tend to be inserted freely in
a text
 Often marked off by a break in intonation
in speech, or by a punctuation mark in
writing (‘Well, ...”)
 Generally carry emotional and discoursal
meanings (oh, ah, wow; yeah, no, okay)
 Generally simple in form, but with an
atypical pronunciation (hm, uh-huh, ugh,
etc.)
 Peripheral to grammar
 Closed classes and open
classes
 Closed class: contains a limited number of
members, and new members cannot easily
added (coordinators, pronouns, etc.)
 Open class: indefinitely large, and can be
readily extended by users of the language
(nouns, adjectives thanks to prefixes, suffixes,
etc.)
 Not always clear-cut difference
Morphology:
the structure of words

 The different word classes have different

morphology – that is, different rules for
how to form them

 Lexical words can consist of a single

morpheme (a stem) or they can have a
more complex structure created by a
process of inflection, derivation or
compounding
 Inflection

 Inflectional suffixes to signal important

meanings and roles, such as plural, past tense,
etc.
 Word classes marked by inflection
 nouns (plural, genitive)
 verbs (tense, number, aspect)
 adjectives and adverbs (comparative and
superlative)
 Prepositions, conjunctions and determiners are
invariable and have only one form
 Derivation
 Usually involves adding an affix, a morpheme
attached at the beginning or to the end of a
word (prefix or suffix)
 ≠ from inflection because inflection does not
change the identity of a word (it remains the
same lexeme), while derivation creates new
words
 It changes the meaning or word class of a
word, and often both, and in effect it creates a
new base form for the word
 Words can be built up using a number of
different affixes
 Inflections follow derivational suffixes
 Compounding
 Also leads to more complex words
 They contain more than one stem
 Noun + noun: chairman, boyfriend
 Verb + noun: cookbook, guesswork
 Adjective + noun: bluebird, flatfish
 Noun + adjective: headlong, watertight
 A compound is genuinely a compound and simply a
sequence of two words when:
 The world will be spelt as a single word, without spaces
between the two words
 It will be pronounced with the main stress on the first
element
 It will have a meaning which cannot be determined from
the individual parts
 Compounds are not a hard-and-fast category
 Multi-word units,
collocations, lexical
 bundles
Sequences of words that behave as
combination:
 Multi-word unit: a sequence of orthographic
words which functions like a single
grammatical unit (on top of)
 Idiom: a multi-word unit with a meaning that
cannot be predicted from the meanings of its
constituent words (fall in love)
 Collocation: the relationship between two or
more independent words which commonly co-
occur (broad and wide + nouns)
 Lexical bundles: a sequence of words which
co-occur very frequently (I don’t think... Would
you mind...)
Survey of lexical words
 Four main classes of lexical words: nouns,
lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
 Nouns and verbs are the most common types of
words
 Nouns and adjectives are more frequent in the
expository or ‘information-giving’ registers: news
and academic writing
 Verbs and adverbs are more frequent in the other
registers: conversation and fiction writing
 The classification of lexical words is not always
clear-cut, and some words have borderline status
between the two classes (ex. words ending in -ing
can be nouns, verbs, and adjectives)
 To decide what class a word
belongs to, it is useful to apply
tests of three kinds:
 Morphological: what forms does a
word have (e.g in terms of stems and
affixes)?
 Syntactic: what syntactic roles does
a word play in phrases or other
higher units?
 Semantic: what type(s) of meaning
does a word convey?
Nouns
 Common nouns vs. proper nouns
 Morphological characteristics:
 Nouns have inflectional suffixes for
plural number and for genitive case
(Many nouns are uncountable and
cannot have a plural form: gold,
information, etc.)
 Nouns quite often contain more than
one morpheme (compound nouns,
nouns with derivational suffixes)
 Syntactic characteristics (what
syntactic roles does a word play in phrases
or other higher units?):
 Nouns can occur as the head of a noun
phrase
 A new book about the cold war
 Common nouns can be modified by
many kinds of words before and after
them, while proper nouns rarely have
any modifiers
 Semantic characteristics
(what type(s) of meaning does
a word convey?):
 Nouns commonly refer to
concrete entities e.g. book,
friend, iron or denote abstract
entities e.g. freedom, wish,
friendship.
Lexical verbs

 Distinct from auxiliary verbs like can and

will (function words)
 Primary verbs: be, have, do are both
lexical verbs and auxiliaries
 Morphological characteristics:
 Different forms signalling tense
(present and past), aspect (perfect,
progressive), and voice (active and
passive)
 Often have more than one
morpheme (multi-word verbs and
derived verbs)
Ex. bring up, rely on, look forward to,
hyphenate, itemize, soften.
 Syntactic characteristics:
 Lexical verbs most frequently occur on
their own, as the central part of the
clause
 He [writes] page after page about
tiny details
 They also occur in the final or main verb
position of verb phrases
 Semantic characteristics:
 LV denote actions, processes, and states
of affairs that happen or exist in time
 They also define the role of human and
non-human participants in such actions,
processes, or states

Ex. [You] [ate] [Chinese food].

Adjectives

 Morphological characteristics:
 Many adjectives can take the inflectional
suffixes -er (comparative) and -est (superlative)
dark - darker - darkest
 They can be complex in morphology (compound
adjectives; derived adjectives:
-able, -ful, -ial)

 derived adjectives: acceptable, forgetful,

influential
 compound adjectives: color-blind, home-made, ice-
cold.
 Syntactic characteristics:
 Adjectives can occur as the head of
an adjective phrase (eager to help,
very dark, guilty of a crime)
 Adjective and adjective phrases are
most commonly used as modifiers
preceding the head of a noun phrase, or
as predicatives following the verb in
clauses
 modifier: Tomorrow could be [a sunny
day].
 predicative: It's nice and warm in here.
It's sunny.
Semantic
characteristics:
 They describe the qualities
of people, things, and
abstractions
 Many adjectives are
gradable: they can
compared and modified for
a degree or level of the
quality
Adverbs
 A varied word class

 Morphological characteristics:
 Many adverbs are formed from
adjectives by adding the suffix -ly, but
others not
 A few adverbs allow comparative and
superlative forms: sooner/soonest;
faster/fastest
Syntactic characteristics:

 Adverbs can occur as head of adverb

phrases (very noisily, more slowly than
I had expected)
 They are often used as modifiers of an
adjective or another adverb (really old,
very soon)
 Otherwise, they can act as adverbials
in the clause (again soon)
 Semantic characteristics:
 they most often express the degree of a
following adjective or adverb (totally wrong,
right now)
 As elements of clauses, adverbs and adverb
phrases have a wide range of meanings:
 They can modify an action, process, or state,
by expressing such notions as time, place,
and manner (I learned German quite
quickly);
 They can convey the speaker’s or writer’s
attitude towards the information in the rest of
the clause (Surely that child’s not mine);
 They can express a connection with what was
said earlier (It must be beautiful, though)
Exercise 5
Words belonging to multiple lexical word
classes
key
Function words
 Different classes:
 Determiners
 Pronouns
 Auxiliary verbs
 Prepositions
 Adverbial particles
 Coordinators
 Subordinators
Determiners
 They normally precede nouns, and are used
to help clarify the meaning of the noun
 The definite article the indicates that the
referent (i.e. whatever is referred to) is
assumed to be known by the speaker and the
person being spoken to (or addressee)
 The indefinite article a or an makes it clear
that the referent is one member of a class
 Demonstrative determiners indicate that the
referents are ‘near to’ o ‘away from’ the
speaker’s immediate context (this, that, etc.)
 Possessive determiners tell us who or what
the noun belongs to (my, your, her, etc.)
 Quantifiers specify how many or how much of
the noun there is (every, some, etc.)
 Determiner-like uses of wh-words and
numerals
Pronouns
 Pronouns fill the position of a noun or a
whole noun phrase
 Personal pronouns: refer to the speaker, the
addressee(s), and other entities (more frequent
than the other classes of pronouns) (I, you,
etc.)
 Demonstrative pronouns: refer to entities
which are ‘near to’ or ‘away from’ the
speaker’s context (this, that, etc.)
 Reflexive pronouns: refer back to a previous
noun phrase, usually the subject of the clause
(myself, herself, etc.)
 Reciprocal pronouns: like reflexive pronouns,
refer to a previous noun phrase, but indicate
that there is a mutual relationship (each other)
 Possessive pronouns: closely related to
possessive determiners, usually imply a
missing noun head (yours, mine, etc.)
 Indefinite pronouns: broad, indefinite
meaning
 Quantifier + general noun (everything,
someone, nobody, etc.)
 A quantifier alone (all, some, many, etc.)
 Relative pronouns: introduce a relative
clause (who, whom, which, that)
 Interrogative pronouns: ask questions
about unknown entities (what, who, which)

 Most relative and interrogative pronouns

belong to the class of wh-words
Auxiliary verbs
 They are added to a main verb to
help build verb phrases
 They precede the main or lexical
verb in a verb phrase
 Contracted forms (-’s, ’re, ’ve, ’d, ’ll)
 Primary auxiliaries (be, have, do)
 Have inflections
 Normally unstressed
 Can also act as main verbs
 Show how the main verb is to be
understood:
 have for the perfect aspect
 be for the progressive aspect and
for the passive voice
 do for negative statements and in
questions (do insertion)
 Modal auxiliaries (9: will, can, shall, may, must,
would, could, should, might)
 Express modality, such as possibility,
necessity, prediction, and volition
 Each modal is historically the past tense of the
modal directly above it (will-would, etc., except
must)
 Invariable function words, with no inflections
 Contracted forms (’ll, ’d, n’t)
 Occur as the first verb in a clause and are
followed by the base form of another verb,
usually the main verb
 Marginal modal form: be going to
Prepositions
 Linking words that introduce prepositional
phrases
 The prepositional complement following a
preposition is generally a noun phrase
 Short, invariable forms: about, after, around,
as, at, by, down, for, from, into, like, of, off, on,
round, since, than, to, towards, with, without
Ex. He'll go [with one of the kids].
 Prepositions can be linked to a preceding verb:
prepositional verbs
Ex. You can't, you can't rely on any of that
information.
 Complex prepositions
 Multi-word units that have a meaning
that cannot be derived from the
meaning of the parts
 Such as, as for, except for, apart from,
because of, according to, due to,
regardless of, instead of, out of, owing
to
 By means of, in spite of, on account
of, on top of, in addition to, with
regard to, as far as, as well as
Adverbial particles
 A small group of words with a core
meaning of motion: about, across, along,
around, aside, away, back, by, down, forth,
home, in, off, on, out, over, past, round,
through, under, up
 Closely linked to verbs
 They generally follow verbs, and are
closely bound to them in meaning
 Used to build phrasal verbs (come on,
break down, turn on) and extended
prepositional phrases (back to the
hotel)
Coordinators
 Two types of conjunctions: coordinators (coordinating
conjunctions) and subordinators (subordinating
conjunctions)
 Coordinators: used to indicate a relationship between two
units such as phrases or clauses
 They link elements which have the same syntactic role, and
are at the same level of the syntactic hierarchy
 And
 But
 Or
 Nor (used after negative clauses)
 Correlative coordinators
 Both ... And...
 Not (only)... but (also...)
 Either... or...
 Neither... nor...

Ex. [Mother] and [I] saw it. (CONV)

Ex. [I don't want to speak too soon], but [I think I have been
fairly consistent this season]. (NEWS)
Subordinators
 Linking words that introduce clauses known
as dependent clauses – clauses which
cannot stand alone without another clause,
called the main clause
 They show the connection of meaning
between the main clause and the subordinate
clause
 If (condition)
Ex. You can hold her [if you want].
 The dependent clause starting with the
subordinator is included in the main clause
(at the front or at the end of the main clause)
Ex. [A flash of fire appeared [as they watched.]]
 They fall into 3 major subclasses:
 The great majority of subordinators introduce
adverbial clauses, adding details of time,
place, reason, etc. to the main clause: after, as,
because, if, since, although, while, etc.
 3 subordinators introduce degree clauses: as,
than, that
 3 subordinators introduce complement
clauses (or nominal clauses): if, that, whether
(also called complementizers: they introduce
clauses following verbs, adjectives or nouns,
complementing or completing the meaning of
these key words in the main clause. For ex I'm
glad [that I've found you again])
Complex subordinators

 As long as, as soon as

 Given (that), on condition
(that), provided (that),
except (that), in that, in
order that, so (that), such
(that)
 As if, as though, even if,
even though
Special classes of words
 They have special qualities
Wh-Words
 Like subordinators, they introduce clauses, but
they don’t form an independent word class
(they are determiners, pronouns, and adverbs)
 They begin with wh-, except for how
 Usage:
 At the beginning of interrogative clauses or relative
clauses (main usage)
 At the beginning of complement clauses of adverbial
clauses)
 Introducing an interrogative clause:
 What do they want?
 When are you leaving?
 Which one do you want?
 Why should I care?
(interrogative pronouns, determiners, adverbs)
 Introducing a relative clause (relativizers):
 The kind of person who needs emotional space
 Graham Poole, whose grandfather started the place
in 1895
 A small place where everyone knows everyone else
(relative pronouns, determiners, adverbs)
 Introducing a complement clause
(complementizers)
 I don’t know what I would have done without her
 I give them whatever I have in my pocket
 Anna wonders where she stands in her father’s
affections
 Adverbial clause links
 They could not improve upon that, whatever
they might say
 However they vary, each information comprises
a distinctive set of rock layers
 The word whether is versatile: subordinator
and wh-word
Single-word classes
 Unique grammatically
 Existential there
 Often called anticipatory subject: heading a clause
expressing existence
 Not to be confused with the place adverb there
Ex. There's a mark on this chair.
 The negator not
 To make a clause negative
 Other negative uses (not all, not many, not very, etc.)
Ex. You can do this but [you can't do that].
 The infinitive maker to
 Not to be confused with the common preposition to
 Complementizer preceding the infinitive form of verbs
 Also expressing purpose in complex subordinators (in
order to, so as to)
Ex. What do you want to drink?
Numerals
 A small set of simple forms (one, two,
three...) and a large set of more complex
forms (three million eight hundred and fifty-
five thousands...)
 Most commonly used in the role of
determiners or heads in noun phrases
 Cardinals
 How many? – determiners with a following noun
 Heads of noun phrases
 Noun-like use (hundreds, etc.)
 Ordinals
 Which? – to place entities in order or in a series
 Determiners or head of noun phrases
 Also used to form fractions
Exercise 7. classify each function word as determiner,
pronoun, auxiliary verb, preposition, negator,
coordinator, subordinator, adverbial particle, or other
special classes.
Key
key