MORFOSINTAXIS INGLESA I.
CURSO 2007-2008
Unit 1. Part 2.
Linguistic forms and syntactic functions
I. Syntactic elements and structure of the clause.
1. Unit of syntactic analysis:
• Sentence
• Clause
• Group
• Word
• Morpheme
MORPHEME.
a) free
b) bound
WORD.
Definition.
A word can typically occur as a minimal free form.
They can also be substituted by another word, but not anything else than a word.
In addition to be free-standing, they also have a mobility which parts of words do
not have.
Three different kinds of word:
• Words as unit of meaning, or items of vocabulary.
•Words as defined by spelling.
• Words as representative of family variants
WORD CLASSES.
All words belong to a category. These categories are known as word classes.
Open class words (Content, lexical words): nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
In general they provide the main referential (lexical) meaning of a sentence.
Closed class words (function, grammatical words): pronouns, determiners,
auxiliaries, prepositions and conjunction. They tend to have a structuring function in
sentences.
Notional, morphological and syntactic criteria for establishing word classes.
GROUPS and their syntactic elements
Nominal Group (determiner)+(modifier)+HEAD+(qualifier) d m h q
Adjectival Group (modifier)+ HEAD+ (qualifier) m h q
Adverbial Group (modifier)+ HEAD+ (qualifier) m h q
Prepositional Group (modifer)+ HEAD+ completive m h k
Verbal Group (operator)+(auxiliary)+VERB o x v
CLAUSES
Independent. It is complete in itself
