Grammar

• Nouns are words that represent people, places, things, or ideas.
• Adjectives modify nouns by describing their qualities or characteristics.
• Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs to indicate how an action is performed or the degree to which it occurs.
• The nominative case in a grammar marks the subject of a verb.
• A sentence must have both a subject and a verb to be complete.
• The object is what receives the action performed by the subject.
• Prepositions indicate relationships between words.
• Pronouns take the place of nouns to avoid repetition.
• Introduction to words

  1. Lexical words, function words, and inserts

  2. The structure of words: morphology

  3. Multi-word units: idioms, collocations, and lexical bundles
• Lexical word classes

  • The structure and function of lexical words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
  • Comparing lexical word classes in use
  • Borderline cases in classifying words
• Function word classes

  • The structure and function of function words: determiners, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, adverbial particles, coordinators, and subordinators
  • Special classes of words
• In grammar, we first need to identify the types of grammatical units, such as words and phrases, before describing the internal structure of these units, and how they combine to form larger units
• Grammatical units are meaningful elements which combine with each other in a structural pattern
• Grammar is the system which organizes and controls form-meaning relationships
• Types of grammatical units

  • Sentence
  • Clauses
  • Phrases
  • Words
  • Morphemes
• Morphemes are parts of words, i.e. stems, prefixes, and suffixes
• Morphology


  The part of grammar dealing with morphemes
• Syntax


  The part of grammar dealing with words, phrases, clauses, and sentences
• Grammatical units can be combined to form longer written texts or spoken interaction, known as discourse
• Language can be analyzed in terms of its phonemes and graphemes, the smallest units of speech and writing
• Sentences are primarily of interest in the study of written language
• Grammatical units are described in terms of their structure, syntactic role, meaning, and the way they are used in discourse
• Units can be described in terms of their internal structure: e.g words in terms of bases and affixes, phrases in terms of heads and modifiers, and clauses in terms of clause elements
• Units can be described in terms of their syntactic role
• Units can be described in terms of meaning
• Units can be further described in terms of how they behave in discourse
• Pronouns like it and they are often used to refer back to things mentioned earlier in the same discourse
• Such pronouns are more common in speech than in written texts
• Words are generally considered to be the basic elements of language
• Words are relatively fixed in their internal form, but they are independent in their role in larger units
• Insertions between words

  Insertions can usually be made between words but not within words
• Orthographic words are the words that we are familiar with in written language, where they are separated by spaces
• Grammatical words fall into one grammatical word class (or 'part of speech') or another
• Lexemes are a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and the same word class
• Each occurrence of a word in a written or spoken text is a separate token
• In contrast to word tokens, word types are the different vocabulary items that occur in a text
• Words can be grouped into three families: lexical words, function words, and inserts
• Lexical words


  • Nouns
  • Lexical verbs
  • Adjectives
  • Adverbs
• Lexical words are the main carriers of information in a text or speech act
• Lexical words are the most numerous and their number is growing all the time