Terms used in Lectures (3)
Structure of English
Terms
relating to morphology and grammatical categories:
Word:
Bound
morpheme: a morpheme which cannot stand on its own,
but only occurs bound to another morpheme, e.g. plural -z, -ish,
etc. A
free morpheme such as bird can stand on its own.
Root:
A form which cannot be broken down into smaller
parts, but forms the basis for building up other words. Cat is
a root which can be used to build words such as cats and catty. A root is by definition a single morpheme.
Stem:
Any form which is used as the basis for building
a larger word. A stem may be a root,
such as cat, but it may be more
complex: work is a stem which is a
root, but worker is a stem which does
not consist only of a root. We
can add the plural morpheme to this stem to produce workers.
Affix:
Bound morphemes which are attached to stems,
e.g. the plural suffix or a prefix such as re-
(redo).
Lexical
morpheme: These have a reference to a concept which
exists outside of language, such as tree
and jog.
Grammatical morphemes such
as the plural morpheme have meaning only inside the grammar.
Inflection:
The way in which a lexeme changes its form according to its use in a sentence;
e.g. nouns inflect for plural. Bird
and birds are inflectional forms of
the lexeme bird. The study of inflectional morphemes is inflectional morphology.
Derivational
morphology: Morphology which creates new
lexemes. Catty is related to cat
by derivational morphology, while cats is related to cat
by inflectional morphology.
Grammatical
category: A category that we must assume in order
to explain the behaviour of different types of words and their interaction with
other words. E.g. we must assume a
category of number for nouns in
order to explain why they appear in a slightly different form according to
whether we are referring to one or more than one thing. The term grammatical
feature is often used to refer to a property which distinguishes the
different inflectional forms.
Agreement:
Two or more forms agree when they are inflected
for the same grammatical feature; e.g. verbs must agree with a third person
singular subject in English as in John walks (*walk) to work.
Subject: One
of the ‘grammatical relations’, which are purely grammatical roles which have
different characteristics in different languages. In English, this is the noun which occurs
directly before the verb, e.g. John in the above sentence. The subject is ordinarily the ‘doer’ or agent
of the action, but not always. More when
we get to grammatical relations.
Object: Another
important grammatical relation. In
English, it is a ‘bare’ noun or noun phrase usually directly after the verb
(where ‘bare’ means ‘not preceded by a preposition’), e.g. the dogs in he
sees the dogs.
Number:
A grammatical category which refers to how many
entities are being referred to by a noun.
In English, number has only two values: singular and plural.
Person:
A grammatical category which makes reference to
whether a participant in a sentence is the speaker or a group which includes
the speaker (first person), the hearer or a group which includes the hearer (second person) and all others (third person).
Gender:
A grammatical category which makes reference to
which ‘type’ (genus) the noun is,
where the ‘type’ is determined by such things as sex, animacy,
etc. Gender is not strictly speaking a
grammatical category of English because we use natural gender, not grammatical
gender; i.e. we choose a different lexeme (he, she, it)
according to semantics rather than grammar.
Case:
A grammatical category which makes reference to
the role of a participant in a sentence.
Case is very limited in English.
We have subject or nominative case in I, object or accusative case in me, and genitive case in my.
Finite
verb: Traditionally, a form of the verb which agrees with the subject. For English, where there is very little
agreement, it is more useful to think of a finite verb as one which conveys
tense. A form of the verb which does not
convey person or number is non-finite;
for English, these are the tenseless forms.
Infinitive:
A non-finite form of the verb which is not a
participle; in English, infinitives have no ending at all and are usually
introduced by to. To eat
is an infinitive.
Participle:
A verbal form which can also be used as an adjective. In English, the present participle is
identical to the gerund. Eating is a participle in I was eating. This -ing form is called the present participle. There is
another participle which ends in -ed
for weak verbs and often in -en for strong verbs (e.g. I
have spoken). in
English; this is usually called the past
participle.
Suppletion:
The use of forms which cannot be related by
regular phonological or morphological rules as different forms of the same
lexeme; e.g. present go but past went.
Not all irregular forms are suppletive; e.g. tooth vs. teeth is not an
example of suppletion. But good vs. better is because there are two different roots involved.
Clause: A
verb and the things which ‘go with’ it.
So John said that Mary had left contains two clauses. Said is the verb in the first
clause, and left is the (main) verb in the second clause. Each clause has its own tense and aspect.
Passive: A
sentence like the dog was killed by the truck is said to be in the passive
voice because the grammatical subject is not the ‘doer’ or agent of the
sentence.
Active: The
active (voice) equivalent of the above sentence is a truck killed the dog.