Words And Word Classes Flashcards
What’s the order of the hierarchy of units?
Sentence, clause, phrase, word, morpheme
What are the four factors grammatical units are described by?
Their structure, syntactic role, meaning, and the way they are used in discourse
What’s the internal structure of words?
Bases and affixes
What’s the internal structure of phrase?
Heads and modifiers
What’s the internal structure of clauses?
Clause and element
Which are some of the roles that a word can take syntactically?
Subject, object, adverbial
What is a word?
The smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word in isolation has pragmatic and semantic meaning.
Three major families of words
Lexical, function, inserts or interjections
Lexical words
Main carriers of meaning in a text
What does it mean that lexical words are open classes of words?
That their membership is indefinite and unlimited as they admit new members.
Four main classes lexical words
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
Function words
They indicate meaning relationships and help us to interprete units containing lexical word. They show how the units are related to each other.
What does it mean that function words belong to closed classes?
It means that they have a very limited and fixed membership as new members cannot be easily added.
Which word classes are lexical words?
Prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, auxiliary, verbs, and pronouns.
Interjections
Marked off by intonation, pauses, or by punctation. They carry emotional and interactional meaning. Frequent in spoken texts.
