Grammar Words Examples

[Jkobe Peoples]

What is word class? Also known as parts of speech, word classes are the categories of words that determine how words are used in grammar. For example, nouns represent people, places, things, and concepts, while verbs represent actions. Nouns are used as the subject of sentences, and verbs are used as the predicate.

Word classes are divided into two main groups: form and function. Form word classes, also known as lexical words, are the most common types of words that make up the important parts of a sentence. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Function word classes, also known as structure words, assist the form word classes in a sentence. They include auxiliaries, prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and interjections.

Proper nouns are a type of noun that represents something specific. For example, the noun person is a common noun used generally for anyone, but the proper noun Richard Attenborough represents a specific person. Proper nouns almost always use capitals for their first letter, like names.

Verbs represent actions and are the only word class that is absolutely necessary to make a complete sentence. You can conjugate verbs in different verb tenses to explain when an action takes place (past, present, or future) or combine them with auxiliaries for more advanced tenses like the present perfect tense or past continuous tense.

Conjunctions like the word and are words that connect other words. Coordinating conjunctions link words, phrases, or clauses of the same kind, such as a series of nouns or two independent clauses. Subordinating conjunctions are only used to connect a dependent clause to an independent clause.

There are two types of word classes: form and function. Form word classes include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Function word classes include auxiliaries, prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and interjections.

You have to decide whether your lexical analyzer is going to return a token (terminal) for the spaces. You also have to decide how it (the lexical analyzer) is going to define words, or whether your grammar is going to do that (in which case, what is the lexical analyzer going to return as terminals?).

In this chapter, we discuss how linguistic meaning is encapsulated in different levels of patterning of linguistic form, looking in turn at words, sounds and sentences. We will do this by looking at language data that illustrate the particular points about linguistic meanings that we wish to highlight. Much of the data will be taken from English, because this is the language that we share: we are writing this book in English and you are reading it in English. Do keep in mind, however, that English is one particular language among thousands of other languages around the world, and that this book deals with how to analyse language in general, not particular languages. This means two things.

The fact that we do understand what robot-like sentences mean, despite their stilted delivery, reveals one very important feature of human speech. This is that speech is a stream of ordered units, as already discussed in Chapter 1. Human speakers, and robots that attempt to replicate their speech, must order the units that make up their utterances in a particular way, so that the utterances so formed make sense. That is, linguistic units must occur in particular positions along the stream of speech, surrounded by other units. This observation helps us clarify one concept that is central to linguistic analysis, the concept of distribution.

The context of a particular linguistic unit is given by the linguistic units of the same type that surround that unit. For example, the context of a particular word is given by the words that precede and follow it. The same holds for morphemes (see section 5.4.2 below for morphemes) or sounds. Analysis of context in these terms is a natural consequence of the fact that speech occurs along the dimension of time: sounds follow sounds, words follow words. The distribution of a particular linguistic unit is then the set of contexts in which that unit is found to occur. By the same token, you can also work out your own distribution, if you list all the places in which you are likely to be found.

The distribution of linguistic units may be represented by a distributional frame. Given a form like, say, XYZ, the context of the unit Y is given by a distributional frame with the general form:

This representations is similar to a more familiar one like, say, a + b = c, where each letter stands for a number. In both cases, the letters represent a variable that can be replaced by something else, according to conventions that all users of these representations have agreed upon. The conventions in distributional frames are:

For example, given the phrase the brown cat, we say that the distribution of the unit (word) brown is given by the distributional frame the _ cat, where the blank indicates the occurrence of brown. Likewise, the distribution of the in the same phrase is given by the frame _ brown. Or, given the word cat, pronounced [kt], we say that the distribution of the unit (sound) [] is given by the distributional frame [k] _ [t] (see Chapter 3 for conventions on the representation of speech sounds).

There are two chief levels of word patterning that interest morphologists. One deals with patterns of words to form phrases or sentences, based on our observation that different words behave differently when chained together with other words. The characteristic behaviour of particular groups of words allows us to classify words into different word classes. The other level of morphological analysis deals with patterns within the words themselves, that is, with the internal grammatical structure of words.

Lexical words represent a specific referent in the world of our experiences. They refer to objects and substances that we can see, sensations that we can feel, qualities and events that we can observe. Lexical words therefore form the largest group of words in languages. The word classes to which they belong are open classes, in that the overwhelming majority of new words that become part of a language are of this type. In the linguistics literature, the terms lexical words, content words and open-class words are sometimes used interchangeably. These terms reflect the fact that whenever a new interesting thing is created, invented or found, we immediately create, invent or find a new lexical word to go with it, so that we can talk about it. When the authors of this book were growing up, there was no email, SMS or blogs, and so there were no words for these things either. There were, however, telegrams, telex and vinyl LPs, and the words for them were part of daily life at the time. New words that restock the vocabulary of languages, and old words that fade away for lack of linguistic demand are all lexical words. We can say that languages keep themselves alive and working through the comings and goings of their lexical words.

Third, proper nouns pattern equally marginally with other words that can precede nouns, like determiners and adjectives (see below): expressions like That Japan is my favourite one or This is a green Matthew are, to say the least, unusual. Given these provisos, we follow here the traditional classification of proper nouns as nouns.

If a word can pattern in these two ways, then it is an adjective: brown is one example. Typical adjectives do indeed pattern in these two alternative ways, although a few do not. Some adjectives can be used only before nouns. For example, you can say the current president, where current is an adjective, but you cannot say *the president is current. Conversely, other adjectives pattern only after be-like verbs: you can say dinner is ready, but not *a ready dinner.

The facts are that attempting to identify adverbs on formal or distributional grounds is not straightforward, in that they may vary widely in shape as well as in patterning within phrases and sentences. The most common criteria used in the definition of adverbs are of two kinds. One, a referential criterion, states that the meaning of adverbs can modify the meaning of different words or phrases, including other adverbs. That is, their meaning attributes some quality to the meaning of another word. For example:

In (5.3), very modifies the adjective pretty by intensifying its meaning. In (5.4), the word fast modifies the verb speaks by specifying the way in which the speaking takes place, and very in turn modifies fast. Both very and fast are therefore adverbs.

The second criterion is distributional, and states that adverbs are generally mobile words. This means that they may occur in different positions within an utterance without loss of grammaticality. For example:

The mobility of sadly identifies it as an adverb. Note that mobility is further demarcated by pauses, in speech, and by commas, in print. Note also that this criterion would fail to identify very as an adverb.

We said above that lexical word classes express content in terms of concepts of various kinds. In contrast, grammatical words represent distributional relationships between lexical words. Grammatical words belong in closed classes, in that new words of a language rarely are of this type. Across languages, the number of words in grammatical word classes is therefore much smaller than in lexical word classes. In the literature, other terms that designate grammatical words are closed-class words and function words.

Determiners can precede both N and Adj: this cow and this large cow are both well-formed in English, where this is a determiner. A frame for Det might then be, where the brackets indicate an optional word:

Other pronouns are also used in relation to the participants in an exchange. Possessive pronouns (e.g. his, hers, mine, theirs, yours) indicate whether something belongs to or is a characteristic of those participants. Demonstrative pronouns (e.g. this, those) show the distance between the speaker and the referent that is being talked about. Take, for example, the sentence:

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