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Chapter 2-Morphology and Parts of Speech

This document discusses morphology and parts of speech from a traditional grammatical perspective. It explains that morphology focuses on inflection, where words change form to indicate grammatical functions like case, number, and tense. Words are classified into parts of speech based mainly on their inflectional properties. For example, verbs are words that have singular and plural forms. The document also distinguishes between inflected words that change form and uninflected words that do not in the Spanish language.

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50 views1 page

Chapter 2-Morphology and Parts of Speech

This document discusses morphology and parts of speech from a traditional grammatical perspective. It explains that morphology focuses on inflection, where words change form to indicate grammatical functions like case, number, and tense. Words are classified into parts of speech based mainly on their inflectional properties. For example, verbs are words that have singular and plural forms. The document also distinguishes between inflected words that change form and uninflected words that do not in the Spanish language.

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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Chapter 2- Morphology and parts of speech Introduction: In traditional grammatical descriptions following the Latin model, inflectional morphology

is the starting point, the core of grammar. This focus was a natural consequence of the nature of Latin, which exhibits considerable inflectional complexity; inflection encodes grammatical functions, and there are relatively few restrictions on word order (for example, a noun is marked as the subject by a nominative case ending rather than its position before the verb in the sentence), giving the impression that very little needs to be said about syntax. Neither Spanish nor English has a rich an inflectional system as Latin; nevertheless, both languages have some inflection, and we retain the Latin organization here. Traditionally, words are assigned to different classes, called parts of speech (partes de la oracion) largely on the basis of their inflection [1] under the heading of "morphology" ("morfologia"). That is to say, what part of speech a word is may be established at least in part by its formal properties, what different forms the word has. For example, in many languages, verbs can be defined as words which have a singular form and a plural form. In a very traditional framework, less emphasis is given to the functional properties of words: the different syntactic functions performed by words or different classes. Functionally, a noun can be described as a word which can be the head or main word of a noun phrase, a noun phrase being a word or group of words serving as a subject, direct object, object of a preposition, etc. Some parts of speech are also described in notional term, which is to say, in terms of what they mean or what kinds of things they refer to. The traditional definition of a noun as "a word which names a person, place, or thing" is a notional definition. Inflected and uninflected words In Spanish, the principal division is between words which are variable in form, or which can be inflected, and those which are not: Palabras Variables: Palabras Variables: nio, nia, nios, nias en, por, con, y, o, pero, bueno, buena, buenos, buenas si, aunque... amar, amo, amas, amaba, amara,... lejos, lejsimo(s)

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