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LEZIONE FEDERICI
Lesson n°
Words and word classes (CHAPTER 2 LONGMAN GRAMMAR) In grammar we need to identify the types of grammatical unit before describing the entire structure of the unit. They combine to form larger units: It means that every grammatical unit is meaningful and is made up of elements which combine with each other in a structural pattern= so grammar is the system which organizes and controls these form-meaning relationships. We talk about grammatical units according to the size of the unit itself:
- sentence
- clause
- Phrase
- Word
- Morpheme
GRAMMATICAL UNITS CAN BE COMBINED TO FORM LONGER WRITTEN TEXT
OR SPOKEN INTERACTIONS THAT WE DEFINE AS DISCOURSE.
Grammatical unit are described in terms of different 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… “in July Susie won those tickets”
- (^) 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: e.g. pronouns). “Isn’t Cindy coming?”
LEXICAL WORDS:
- The main carries 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, grown in time: they are an open class (open to changes)
- (^) 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 ( the completion of the task)
- (^) 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: THEY CAN BE CATEGORIZED INTO:
- (^) Prepositions
- (^) Coordinations
- (^) Auxiliary verbs
- (^) Pronouns They usually indicate meaning relationships and help us to interprete units containing lexical words and show how the units are related to each other; they belong to closed classes off course and they occur frequently.
INSERTS:
- (^) They are found mainly in spoken language;
- (^) They don’t form an integral part of a syntactic structure, but tend to be inserted freely in a text
- (^) They often marked off by a break in intonation in a speech, or by a punctuation mark in writing (“well,…”)
- (^) They generally carry emotional and discourse meanings (oh, ah, wow, yeah, no ,okay)
- (^) They are Generally simple in form, but with an atypical pronunciation (hm, uh-huh, ugh, etc…)
- (^) Peripheral to grammar
CLOSED CLASSES AND OPEN CLASSES
CLOSED CLASSES: contains a limited number of members, and new members cannot easily added ( coordinations, pronouns etc…) OPEN CLASSES: indefinitely large, and can be readily extended by users of the language ( nouns, adjectives thanks to prefixes, suffixes etc…)
MORPHOLOGY: we mean the structure of the 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 ( called a stem) or they can have a more complex structure created by a process of inflection, derivation or compounding.
COMPOUNDING: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 determinate from the individual parts Compounds are not a hard-and-fast category
Then we have 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 (e.g.“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
They are: nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs To decide what class a word belongs to, it iOS useful to apply tests of three kinds: If we think morphological aspect: 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 meanings does a word convey?
NOUNS:
We have common nouns and proper nouns E.g. book= common Sara= proper Morphological characteristics: Nouns have inflection suffixes for plural number and genitive case (many nouns are uncountable and cannot have a plural form) Sara’s book. Nouns have quite often more than one morpheme( compound nouns, nouns with derivation suffixes etc)
Syntactic characteristics: Semantic characteristics
ADJECTIVES
MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS:
SYNTACTIC CHARACTERISTICS:
SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS:
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 e.g. heavier
FUNCTION WORDS ARE:
Different classes:
- (^) Determiners
- (^) Pronouns
- (^) Auxiliary verbs
- (^) Prepositions
- (^) Adverbial particles
- (^) Coordinators
- (^) Subordinations
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 Others exercises
- (^) Demonstrative determiners indicate that the referents are “near to” or “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 determinatives, usually imply a missing noun head (yours, mine)
- (^) 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
