The grammatical categories of words and their inflections
- Slides: 7
The grammatical categories of words and their inflections Kuiper and Allan Chapter 2. 1 1
Word and lexeme • Examine the following simple dictionary entry. • sept , n. Clan, esp. in Ireland. • Word and lexeme – A lexeme is a three part symbol: • • form (or a number of forms) syntactic category meaning Lexemes also have non linguistic properties, usage. 2
Grammatical/syntactic categories • determine where in a sentence a word can fit. • Two ways to identify the category – looking at the structure of phrases and sentences • done in chapter 7 – looking at the inflection of words • done next because it is part of looking at word structure 3
Inflection & stem • inflected forms of TRY – try, tries, tried, trying, as in the following sentences: The horse must try, The horse tries, The horse tried, The horse is trying. – Each is a grammatical word form. The grammatical endings which create these different grammatical word forms are termed inflections. • stem – is the form of the lexeme to which they are attached. 4
Morphological processes • The processes whereby words come to have internal structure such as a stem and inflection are morphological processes. • The categories for which words inflect are often called morphosyntactic categories. e. g. tense which accounts for the past tense inflection -ed in tri-ed is an example of a morphosyntactic category. • Properties such a present tense or past tense are therefore morphosyntactic properties. 5
Grammatical categories and inflection • Not all grammatical categories of words inflect. • When they do, the inflection tells you what the category of the word is. – i. e. If a word can take a plural inflection, then it is a noun. • The converse is not always the case. – ie. Not all nouns inflect for plural. – Some grammatical categories do not inflect at all. 6
Major grammatical categories • To begin with we will look only at four grammatical categories: – – noun adjective verb preposition • They make up the skeletal, telegraphic structure of sentences. – e. g. young boy sits in chair 7
