ADU GK.

English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY
1.1 The concept of Morphology
As morphology is (along with syntax) the second concern of this module, it would be necessary to
start this chapter by answering the following questions.

(1) What is Morphology all about?

Although different scholars define the concept of morphology from different perspectives, all
agree that morphology studies the internal structure of word level linguistic items. Therefore,
morphology is a branch of linguistics which studies word formation, including the ways new words
are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how
they’re used in sentences. As native speakers of their language speakers have intuitive knowledge
of how to form new words, and every day they recognize and understand new words that they’ve
never heard before. The following definitions can better explain the notion of definition.

Definition One: “Morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming
words.” Nida (1949)

Morphemes are the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or-parts of words. For
example, (re-, de-, un-, -ish, -ly, -ceive, -mand, tie, boy, and like) in the combinations (receive,
demand, untie, boyish, likely) respectively. The morpheme arrangements which are treated under
the morphology of a language include all combinations that form words or parts of words, and
combinations of words into phrases and sentences are treated under the syntax.

Definition Two: “Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words.” Haspelmath (2002)
Words have internal structure in two very different senses. On the one hand, they are made up of
sequences of sounds (or gestures in sign language), i.e. they have internal phonological structure.
Thus, the English word ‘nuts’ consists of the four sounds (or, as we will say, phonological
segments) [nᴧts]. In general, phonological segments such as [n] or [t] cannot be assigned a specific
meaning - they have a purely contrastive value (so that, for instance, nuts can be distinguished
from cuts, guts, shuts, from nets, notes, nights, and so on).

But often formal variations in the shapes of words correlate systematically with semantic changes.
For instance, the words nuts, nights, necks, backs, taps (and so on) share not only a phonological
segment (the final [s]), but also a semantic component: they all refer to a multiplicity of entities
from the same class. And, if the final [s] is lacking (nut, night, neck, back, tap), reference is made
consistently to only one such entity. By contrast, the words blitz, box, lapse do not refer to a

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

multiplicity of entities, and there are no semantically related words *blit, *bok, *lap? We will call
words like nuts '(morphologically) complex words'.

In a morphological analysis, we would say that the final [s] of nuts expresses plural meaning when
it occurs at the end of a noun. But the final [s] in lapse does not have any meaning, and lapse does
not have morphological structure. Thus, morphological structure exists if there are groups of words
that show identical partial resemblances in both form and meaning.

Definition Three: “Morphology is the study of systematic co-variation in the form and meaning of
words.”

It is important that this form-meaning co-variation occurs systematically in groups of words. When there
are just two words with partial form-meaning resemblances, these may be merely accidental. Thus, one
would not say that the word hear is morphologically structured and related to ear. Conceivably, h could
mean 'use', so h-ear would be 'use one's ear', i.e. 'hear'. But this is the only pair of words of this kind (there
is no *heye 'use one's eye', *helbow 'use one's elbow', etc.), and everyone agrees that the resemblances
are accidental in this case.

Definition Four: “Morphology is the study of the combination of morphemes to yield words.”

Morphological analysis typically consists of the identification of parts of words, or, more technically,
constituents of words. We can say that the word ‘nuts’ consists of two constituents: the element nut and
the element s. In accordance with a widespread typographical convention, we will often separate word
constituents by a hyphen: nuts. It is often suggested that morphological analysis primarily consists in
breaking up words into their parts and establishing the rules that govern the co-occurrence of these parts.
The smallest meaningful constituents of words that can be identified are called morphemes. In nuts, both
the suffix –s and the stem nut represent a morpheme. Other examples of words consisting of two
morphemes would be break-ing, hope-less, re-write, cheeseboard; words consisting of three morphemes
are re-writ-ing, hope-less-ness, ear-plugs; and so on.

(2) Why do we study morphology?

As learners of language, we need to study morphology for different reasons. We study morphology from
the perspectives both the functions of morphology and means of forming new words. One reason for
having morphology is to form new lexemes from old ones. We will refer to this as lexeme formation.
(Many linguists use the term word formation in this specific sense, but this usage can be confusing, as all
of morphology is sometimes referred to in a larger sense as ‘word formation’.) Lexeme formation can do
one of three things. It can change the part of speech (or category) of a word, for example, turning verbs
into nouns or adjectives, or nouns into adjectives, as you can see in the examples in (3):
(3) Category-changing lexeme formation
V→ N: amuse → amusement
V → A: impress → impressive
N → A: monster → monstrous
Some rules of lexeme formation do not change category, but they do add substantial new meaning as
indicated in (4):

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

(4) Meaning-changing lexeme formation

A → A ‘negative A’ happy → unhappy
N → N ‘place where N lives’ orphan → orphanage
V → V ‘repeat action’ wash → rewash
And some rules of lexeme formation both change category and add substantial new meaning:
(5) Both category and meaning-changing lexeme formation
V → A ‘able to be Ved’ wash → washable
N → V ‘remove N from’ louse → delouse
Why have rules of lexeme formation? Imagine what it would be like to have to invent a wholly new word
to express every single new concept. For example, if you wanted to talk about the process or result of
amusing someone, you couldn’t use amusement, but would have to have a term like zorch instead. And if
you wanted to talk about the process or result of resenting someone, you couldn’t use resentment, but
would have to have something like plitz instead. And so on. As you can see, rules of lexeme formation
allow for a measure of economy in our mental lexicons: we can recycle parts, as it were, to come up with
new words. It is probably safe to say that all languages have some ways of forming new lexemes, although,
as we’ll see as this book progresses, those ways might be quite different from the means we use in English.

On the other hand, we sometimes use morphology even when we don’t need new lexemes. For example,
we saw that each lexeme can have a number of word forms. The lexeme WALK has forms like walk, walks,
walked, walking that can be used in different grammatical contexts. When we change the form of a word
so that it fits in a particular grammatical context, we are concerned with what linguists call inflection.
Inflectional word formation is word formation that expresses grammatical distinctions like number
(singular vs. plural); tense (present vs. past); person (first, second, or third); and case (subject, object,
possessive), among others. It does not result in the creation of new lexemes, but merely changes the
grammatical form of lexemes to fit into different grammatical contexts.

Interestingly, languages have wildly differing amounts of inflection. English has relatively little inflection.
We create different forms of nouns according to number (wombat, wombats); we mark the possessive
form of a noun with -’s or -s’ (the wombat’s eyes). We have different forms of verbs for present and past
and for present and past participles (sing, sang, singing, sung), and we use a suffix -s to mark the third
person singular of a verb (she sings).

1.2 The Concept of Lexemes and Word Forms

In non-technical every-day talk, we speak about ‘words’ without ever thinking that this could be a
problematic notion. In this section we will see that, perhaps contra our first intuitive feeling, the ‘word’
as a linguistic unit deserves some attention, because it is not as straightforward as one might expect. If
you had to define what a word is, you might first think of the word as a unit in the writing system, the so-
called orthographic word. You could say, for example, that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters
which is preceded by a blank space and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark. At first
sight, this looks like a good definition that can be easily applied, as we can see in the sentence in example
(1):

(1) Linguistics is a fascinating subject.

We count 5 orthographic words: there are five uninterrupted strings of letters, all of which are preceded
by a blank space, four of which are also followed by a blank space, one of which is followed by a period.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

This count is also in accordance with our intuitive feeling of what a word is. Even without this somewhat
formal and technical definition, you might want to argue, you could have told that the sentence in (1)
contains five words. However, things are not always as straightforward. Consider the following example
(2), and try to determine how many words there are:

(2) Benjamin’s girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building.

Your result depends on a number of assumptions. If you consider apostrophes to be punctuation marks,
Benjamin's constitutes two (orthographic) words. If not, Benjamin's is one word. If you consider a hyphen
a punctuation mark, high-rise is two (orthographic) words, otherwise it's one (orthographic) word. The
last two strings, apartment building, are easy to classify, they are two (orthographic) words, whereas
girlfriend must be considered one (orthographic) word. However, there are two basic problems with our
orthographic analysis. The first one is that orthography is often variable. Thus, girlfriend is also attested
with the spellings, and even (fish brackets are used to indicate spellings, i.e. letters). Such variable spellings
are rather common (cf. word-formation, word formation, and word formation, all of them attested), and
even where the spelling is conventionalized, similar words are often spelled differently, as evidenced with
grapefruit vs. passion fruit. For our problem of defining what a word is, such cases are rather annoying.
The notion of what a word is, should, after all, not depend on the fancies of individual writers or the
arbitrariness of the English spelling system. The second problem with the orthographically defined word
is that it may not always coincide with our intuitions. Thus, most of us would probably agree that girlfriend
is a word (i.e. one word) which consists of two words (girl and friend), a so-called compound. If compounds
are one word, they should be spelled without a blank space separating the elements that together make
up the compound. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The compound apartment building, for example,
has a blank space between apartment and building. To summarize our discussion of purely orthographic
criteria of word hood, we must say that these criteria are not entirely reliable. Furthermore, a purely
orthographic notion of word would have the disadvantage of implying that illiterate speakers would have
no idea about what a word might be. This is plainly false.

What, might you ask, is responsible for our intuitions about what a word is, if not the orthography? It has
been argued that the word could be defined in four other ways: in terms of sound structure (i.e.
phonologically), in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of
sentence structure (i.e. syntactically). We will discuss each in turn. You might have thought that the blank
spaces in writing reflect pauses in the spoken language, and that perhaps one could define the word as a
unit in speech surrounded by pauses. However, if you carefully listen to naturally occurring speech you
will realize that speakers do not make pauses before or after each word.

Perhaps we could say that words can be surrounded by potential pauses in speech. This criterion works
much better, but it runs into problems because speakers can and do make pauses not only between words
but also between syllables, for example for emphasis. But there is another way of how the sound structure
can tell us something about the nature of the word as a linguistic unit. Think of stress. In many languages
(including English) the word is the unit that is crucial for the occurrence and distribution of stress. Spoken
in isolation, every word can have only one main stress, as indicated by the acute accents (´) in the data
presented in (3) below (note that we speak of linguistic ‘data’ when we refer to language examples to be
analyzed).

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

(3) cárpenter téxtbook

wáter análysis
féderal sýllable
móther understánd

The main stressed syllable is the syllable which is the most prominent one in a word. Prominence of a
syllable is a function of loudness, pitch and duration, with stressed syllables being pronounced louder,
with higher pitch, or with longer duration than the neighboring syllable(s). Longer words often have
additional, weaker stresses, so called secondary stresses, which we ignore here for simplicity’s sake. The
words in (4) now show that the phonologically defined word is not always identical with the
orthographically defined word.

(4) Bénjamin's gírlfriend

apártment building

While apártment building is two orthographic words, it is only one word in terms of stress behavior. The
same would hold for other compounds like trável agency, weather forecast, spáce shuttle, etc. We see
that in these examples the phonological definition of ‘word‘ comes closer to our intuition of what a word
should be. We have to take into consideration, however, that not all words carry stress. For example,
function words like articles or auxiliaries are usually unstressed (a cár, the dóg, Máry has a dóg) or even
severely reduced (Jane’s in the garden, I’ll be there). Hence, the stress criterion is not readily applicable
to function words and to words that hang on to other words, so-called clitics (e.g. ‘ve, ‘s, ‘ll). Let us now
consider the integrity criterion, which says that the word is an indivisible unit into which no intervening
material may be inserted. If some modificational element is added to a word, it must be done at the edges,
but never inside the word. For example, plural endings such as -s in girls, negative elements such as un-
in uncommon or endings that create verbs out of adjectives (such as -ize in colonialize) never occur inside
the word they modify, but are added either before or after the word. Hence, the impossibility of
formations such as *gi-s-rl, *com-unmon, *col-ize-onial (note that the asterisk indicates impossible words,
i.e. words that are not formed in accordance with the morphological rules of the language in question).

However, there are some cases in which word integrity is violated. For example, the plural of sonin-law is
not *son-in-laws but sons-in-law. Under the assumption that son-in-law is one word (i.e. some kind of
compound), the plural ending is inserted inside the word and not at the end. Apart from certain
compounds, we can find other words that violate the integrity criterion for words. For example, in
creations like abso-bloody-lutely, the element bloody is inserted inside the word, and not, as we would
expect, at one of the edges. In fact, it is impossible to add bloody before or after absolutely in order to
achieve the same effect. Absolutely bloody would mean something completely different, and *bloody
absolutely seems utterly strange and, above all, uninterpretable. We can conclude that there are certain,
though marginal counterexamples to the integrity criterion, but surely these cases should be regarded as
the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule.

The semantic definition of word states that a word expresses a unified semantic concept. Although this
may be true for most words (even for son-in-law, which is ill-behaved with regard to the integrity
criterion), it is not sufficient in order to differentiate between words and non-words. The simple reason is
that not every unified semantic concept corresponds to one word in a given language. Consider, for

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

example, the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall. Certainly a unified concept, but we would not
consider the smell of fresh rain in a forest in the fall a word. In fact, English simply has no single word for
this concept. A similar problem arises with phrases like the woman who lives next door. This phrase refers
to a particular person and should therefore be considered as something expressing a unified concept. This
concept is however expressed by more than one word. We learn from this example that although a word
may always express a unified concept, not every unified concept is expressed by one word. Hence the
criterion is not very helpful in distinguishing between words and larger units that are not words. An
additional problem arises from the notion of ‘unified semantic concept’ itself, which seems to be rather
vague.

For example, does the complicated word conventionalization really express a unified concept? If we
paraphrase it as ‘the act or result of making something conventional’, it is not entirely clear whether this
should still be regarded as a ‘unified concept’. Before taking the semantic definition of word seriously, it
would be necessary to define exactly what ‘unified concept’ means. This leaves us with the syntactically-
oriented criterion of word hood. Words are usually considered to be syntactic atoms, i.e. the smallest
elements in a sentence.

Words belong to certain syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.), which are called
parts of speech, word classes or syntactic categories. The position in which a given word may occur in a
sentence is determined by the syntactic rules of a language. These rules make reference to words and the
class they belong to. For example, the is said to belong to the class called articles, and there are rules
which determine where in a sentence such words, i.e. articles, may occur (usually before nouns and their
modifiers, as in the big house). We can therefore test whether something is a word by checking whether
it belongs to such a word class. If the item in question, for example, follows the rules for nouns, it should
be a noun, hence a word. Or consider the fact that only words (and groups of words), but no smaller units
can be moved to a different position in the sentence. For example, in ‘yes/no’ questions, the auxiliary verb
does not occur in its usual position but is moved to the beginning of the sentence. Thus syntactic criteria
can help to determine the word hood of a given entity.

To summarize our discussion of the possible definition of word we can say that, in spite of the intuitive
appeal of the notion of ‘word’, it is sometimes not easy to decide whether a given string of sounds (or
letters) should be regarded as a word or not. In the treatment above, we have concentrated on the
discussion of such problematic cases. In most cases, however, the stress criterion, the integrity criterion
and the syntactic criteria lead to sufficiently clear results.

The properties of words are summarized below Properties of words

 Words are entities having a part of speech specification
 words are syntactic atoms
 words (usually) have one main stress
 words (usually) are indivisible units (no intervening material possible)

1.3 The structure of a lexeme and paradigms

To begin with, what we mean by word will depend very much on whether we are talking about actual
occurrences of any items that might qualify or whether we are intent on grouping or classifying items in
some way or other. To illustrate this, let us begin by looking at the chorus from the Beatles' song She Loves
You: Singleton (2000)
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah;

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah;

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
How many words are there in these three lines? If we take actual occurrences of any items - word tokens
- as the basis of our count, we shall come up with 6 words in the first line, six in the second, and seven in
the third that is 19 overall. On the other hand, if we base our count on word types - items with different
identities - the overall figure for the entire extract will be just four (she, loves', you and yeah). Similarly,
the phrase going, going, gone will be considered a threeword expression on a count of tokens but will be
considered to contain only two words (going and gone) on a count of types.
In another sense of word, the sequence going, going, gone may be thought of as containing just one word
- the verb go, represented by two of its forms (going and gone). This approach to the notion of the word
- seeing it as a 'family' of related forms or as an abstract unit which is realized by one or other of these
forms as the linguistic environment demands - calls to mind the concept of the phoneme and its
allophones (see above). This linkage with the phoneme idea is expressed terminologically: the notion of
the word as a family of forms or as an abstract unit is captured in the term lexeme, while a lexeme's
concrete representatives or realizations are referred to as word forms. When we want to refer to a given
lexeme in, for instance, a dictionary-entry, we typically do so using just one of its various forms, and the
choice of this form, known as the citation form, is determined by convention, which varies from culture
to culture and language to language.
In present-day linguistics, the term ‘morphology’ refers to the study of the internal structure of words,
and of the systematic form–meaning correspondences between words. Consider the following sets of
English words:
a. buy b. buyer
eat eater
paint painter
sell seller
send sender
In these sets of words we observe a systematic form–meaning correspondence. The words in (b) differ
from the words in (a) in that they have an additional part -er, and a corresponding meaning difference:
each word in (b) has the meaning ‘‘one who Vs’’, where V stands for the meaning of the corresponding
verb in (a). This is the basis for assigning a word such as buyer an internal morphological constituency:
buy-er. The form differences between these two sets of words concern two properties: the words in (b)
have the additional sound sequence [ər] (or [e] in standard British pronunciation) compared to the words
in (a), and they are nouns, whereas the words in (a) are verbs. The form differences thus have a
phonological and a syntactic dimension.

The meaning difference is quite clear: the nouns in (b) subsume the meaning of the corresponding verbs,
and have some extra meaning due to the presence of -er. Since the nouns are formally and semantically
more complex than the corresponding verbs, we will say that the nouns have been derived from the verbs.
That is, there is a direction in the relationship between these two sets of words. The word buyer is a
complex word since it can be decomposed into the constituents buy and -er. The word buy, on the other
hand, is a simplex word, because it cannot be decomposed any further into smaller meaningful units, only
into sound segments. The notion ‘systematic’ in the definition of morphology given above is important.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

For instance, we might observe a form difference and a corresponding meaning difference between the
English noun ear and the verb ‘hear’. However, this pattern is not systematic: there are no similar word
pairs, and we cannot form new English verbs by adding h- to a noun. There is no possible verb to heye
with the meaning ‘‘to see’’ derived from the noun eye. Therefore, such pairs of words are of no relevance
to morphology.

The two sets of words given above form paradigms. The term ‘paradigm’ is used here in a general sense
to denote a set of linguistic elements with a common property. All words in (a) are verbs, and thus form
a paradigm. The same applies to the words in (b) which are all nouns ending in -er. In our definition of
morphology as given above we see two different perspectives.

When we speak about morphology as the study of the systematic form–meaning correspondences
between the words of a language, we take a paradigmatic perspective, since we take properties of classes
of words as the starting point of morphological analysis. When morphology is defined as the study of the
internal constituent structure of words, we take a syntagmatic perspective.

We distinguish these two different perspectives on language because language units exhibit syntagmatic
and paradigmatic relationships. They have a syntagmatic relationship when they are combined into a
larger linguistic unit. For instance, the words ‘the’ and ‘book’ have a syntagmatic relationship in the phrase
the book. In contrast, the determiners ‘a’ and ‘the’ are paradigmatically related: they belong to the set of
determiners of English, and can both occur at the beginning of a noun phrase, but never together: ‘*the
a book’. Hence, they belong to the paradigm of determiners of English.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER -TWO

THE CONCEPT OF MORPHEME

2.1 Morpheme / Morph / Allomorph
One of the first tasks which confront the linguist in examining a new language with a view to discovering
and describing its structure is the identification of the minimal meaningful units of which the language is
composed. These minimal units are called "morphemes, and in many instances they are readily
recognized. Boundness of morphemes is also created through allomorphy. Allomorphy is the
phenomenon that a morpheme may have more than one shape, corresponds with more than one morph.
A morph is a particular phonological form of a morpheme. Allomorphy is found in both affixes and root
morphemes. For example, in the English words boyish, maddening, condense, receive, and up, we have
little difficulty in identifying the various component units» boy, -ish, mad, -en, -ing, con-, -dense, re-, -
ceive, and up.

With practically no complications have thus "broken down" these longer expressions (i.e. words) into their
constituent parts. The process by which this is accomplished appears at first to be almost instinctive, but
if we consider closely what we have done, we recognize that we compared words, or at least drew upon
our knowledge of such comparisons. In order to identify the morphemes we must have certain partially
similar forms in which we can recognize recurring partials. What we need for comparison would be
provided by the following series boy, girlish, mad, fatten, fattening, constrain, density, return, deceive,
start up. These forms contain each of the morphemes in a different situation. By this means we compare
and isolate, and it is only by such comparison with other forms that we can discover morphemes.

Morphological structure exists if a group of words shows partial form-meaning resemblances. In most
cases, the relation between form and meaning is quite straightforward: parts of word-forms bear different
meanings. Consider the examples in (1).

The words in (1) are easily segmented, i.e. broken up into individually meaningful parts: read + s, read +
er, kind + ness, un + happy, and so on. These parts are called morphemes. Words may of course consist
of more than two morphemes, e.g. un-happi-ness, read-abil-ity, un-friend-ly, un-friend-li-ness.
Morphemes can be defined as the smallest meaningful constituents of a linguistic expression. When we
have a sentence such as Camilla met an unfriendly chameleon, we can divide it into meaningful parts in
various ways, e.g. Camilla/ met an unfriendly chameleon, or Camilla/met/an/unfriendly/ chameleon, or
Camilla/ met/ an/ un/ friend/ ly/ chameleon. But further division is not possible. When we try to divide
chameleon further (e.g. cha/ meleon), we do not obtain parts that can be said to be meaningful, either
because they are not found in any other words (as seems to be the case with meleon), or because the

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other words in which they occur do not share any aspect of meaning with chameleon (cf. charisma,
Canadian, caboodle, capacity, in which it would be theoretically possible to identify a word part cha/ca-).
Thus, chameleon cannot be segmented into several morphemes, it is mono-morphemic. Morphemes are
the ultimate elements of morphological analysis; they are, so to speak, morphological atoms.

Morphemes can have various kinds of meanings. Some meanings are very concrete and can be described
easily (e.g. the meanings of the morphemes wash, logic, chameleon, un-), but other meanings are abstract
and more difficult to describe. For instance, the morpheme -al in logic-al can perhaps be said to mean
'relating to' (cf. logic-al, mathematic-al, physic-al, natur-al), -able in read-able can be said to mean 'capable
of undergoing a process', and the meaning of -ity is 'quality' (e.g. readability is 'the quality of being
readable'). Some meanings are so abstract that they can hardly be called meanings. For example, the Latin
morpheme -m in insula-m serves to mark the direct object, but it is difficult to say what its meaning is.

And English -s in reads is required when the subject is a third person singular NP, but again it is unclear
whether it can be said to have meaning. In such cases, linguists are more comfortable saying that these
morphemes have certain grammatical functions. But, since the ultimate purpose of grammatical
constructions is to express meaning, we will continue to say that morphemes bear meaning, even when
that meaning is very abstract and can be identified only in the larger grammatical context. One of the
most common complications is that morphemes may have different shapes under different
circumstances. Affixes very often have different allomorphs. For instance, the plural morpheme in English
is sometimes pronounced [s] (as in cats [kæts]), sometimes [z] (as in dogs [dɒgz]), and sometimes [-əz] (as
in faces [feɪsəz]). For such cases, linguists use the term allomorph (or morpheme alternant). But not only
affixes, also roots and stems may have different allomorphs (or, as linguists often say, 'exhibit
allomorphy'). For instance, English verbs such as sleep, keep, deal, feel, mean, whose root has the long
vowel [i:] in the present-tense forms, show a root allomorph with short [e] in the past-tense forms (slept,
kept, dealt, felt, meant).

The crucial defining property is that they have the same meaning and occur in different environments in
complementary distribution. Most of the allomorphs are phonological allomorphs. Linguists often
describe them with a special set of phonological (or morpho-phonological) rules, which are originally
phonetically motivated and only secondarily affect morphology. Besides phonological allomorphs,
languages may also exhibit allomorphs that are not at all similar in pronunciation. These are called
suppletive allomorphs here. An example is the suffix of the English past participle, which is -ed with some
verbs (actually, most verbs, e.g. pave/paved, cry/cried, call/called, stop/stopped, pat/patted), but -en with
others (e.g. give/given, take/taken, shake/shaken, hide/hidden, break/broken). (Note that -ed itself
exhibits three different phonological allomorphs, [d], [t], [ad], similar to the plural suffix -s, but we will
disregard this complication here.) The items -ed and -en are not similar phonologically, and no amount of
(morpho) phonological analysis will make them similar, so they are regarded as suppletive.

Like phonological allomorphy, suppletive allomorphy may affect root or stem morphemes as well as affix
morphemes. For instance, the English verb go has the suppletive stem wen in the past tense (wen-t), and
the English adjective good has the suppletive stem bett in the comparative degree (better). It is not always
easy to decide whether an alternation is phonological or suppletive. For instance, what about English buy/
bought, catch/ caught, teach/ taught? The root allomorphs of these verbs ([baɪ]/ [bɔ:], [kæt/]/ [kɔ:], [ti:tʃ]/
[tɔ:]) are not as radically different as go/ wen-t, but they are not similar enough to be described by
phonological rules either. In such cases, linguists often speak of weak suppletion, as opposed to strong
suppletion in cases like go/ went, good/ better.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

When describing the allomorphy patterns of a language, another important dimension is the conditioning
of the allomorphy, i.e. the conditions under which different allomorphs are selected. Perhaps the most
important factor is phonological conditioning. Very often the phonological context determines the choice
of allomorphs. For instance, the English plural allomorphs [-z], [-s] and [-əz] are strictly phonologically
conditioned: [-əz] appears after a sibilant (i.e. [s], [z], [ʃ] or [ʒ], e.g. faces, mazes, bush-es, badges), [-s]
appears after a voiceless non-sibilant obstruent (e.g. cats, books, lips, cliffs) and [-z] appears elsewhere
(e.g. bags, bells, keys).

Another possibility is morphological conditioning, where the morphological context determines the choice
of allomorphs. And, finally, we find lexical conditioning, where the choice of affix allomorphs is dependent
on other properties of the base, for instance semantic properties or where the choice of allomorphs
cannot be derived from any general rule and must be learned individually for each case. This is the case
for the English past participle suffix -en: speakers must simply learn which verbs take this suffix and not
the more common suffix -ed. Phonological allomorphs are always phonologically conditioned (almost by
definition), but suppletive allomorphs may be phonologically, morphologically or lexically conditioned.

2.2 Free and Bound Morphemes

Kroeger (2005: 12) defines morphemes as “the smallest individually meaningful elements in the
utterances of a language.” There are two crucial aspects of this definition. First, a morpheme is
meaningful. A morpheme normally involves a consistent association of phonological form with some
aspect of meaning. However, this association of form with meaning can be somewhat flexible. We will see
various ways in which the phonological shape of a morpheme may be altered to some extent in particular
environments, and there are some morphemes whose meaning may depend partly on context.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

Second, morphemes are the smallest meaningful elements. “Smallest” here does not refer to physical
duration (time of articulation) or phonological weight. A morpheme may consist of a single phoneme or
long strings of phonemes. The real point is that a single morpheme may not contain any smaller element
(or substring) which is itself a meaningful element. For example, the word ‘unhappy’ is not a single
morpheme because it contains two substrings which are each “individually meaningful”: un– means ‘not’
and happy means ‘happy’. Thus, rather than saying that a morpheme is the smallest meaningful element,
we might say that a morpheme is the minimal meaningful element, in the sense that it cannot be
subdivided into smaller meaningful elements. The words catalogue, catastrophe, and caterpillar are all
single morphemes in modern English. Even though they all contain the sequence cat– (/kæt–/), they do
not contain the English morpheme cat, because their meaning has nothing to do with cats. For the same
reason, the word caterpillar does not contain the morpheme pillar. A recurrent element of form does not
automatically indicate the presence of a common morpheme, unless the recurring phonological material
correlates with some common element of meaning.

We found some morphemes (including happy and small) which can occur as independent words in their
own right. Others (including un- and -er) only appear as part of a larger word, and never as a complete
word on their own. Morphemes of the first type (those that may occur as complete words) are said to be
Free Morphemes, while morphemes of the second type (those that may not) are said to be Bound
Morphemes.

Therefore, trust, believe, spare, and palate are all examples of free morphemes, because they can occur
alone as complete English words. The morphemes dis–, un–, -able, -ing, -ly, etc. are all bound, because
they only occur as part of a larger word. The word chairman is an interesting example, because it contains
two free morphemes. Consider the words trusted, trusting, trusty, distrust, mistrust, and trustworthy.
Intuitively it is obvious that all these words are “related” to each other in some way, and that this
relationship is based on the fact that they all contain the morpheme trust. Trust is in some sense the
“core” or “nucleus” of each of these words; it provides the basic element of meaning which all of the
words have in common. The other morphemes in these words are in some sense “added on” to this core.

2.3 Affixes
So far, we have identified that the word ‘trust’ is the core from which different word forms like trusted,
trusting, trusty, distrust, mistrust, and trustworthy are formed. In addition to this we said that such core
morphological items as Roots. As we can see from this example, different morphemes are added to cores
from behind or front. Other morphemes, which are added on to a root and modify its meaning in a
consistent way, are referred to as affixes. So the related words above all contain the same root (trust) but
different affixes (mis-, -ing, -y, dis- etc.). It is not always easy to distinguish between roots and affixes, but
there are three criteria (or “rules of thumb”) that can help:

A) An affix is always bound, but a root is often free. If a particular morpheme occurs in isolation as a
word, it must be a root.

B) A root normally carries lexical meaning, i.e. the kind of meaning you would look up in a dictionary
or the “basic” meaning of the word (e.g. trust, man, chin). An affix, on the other hand, frequently carries
only grammatical meaning, such as ‘plural,’ ‘third person,’ ‘past tense,’ etc.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

C) An affix is always part of a closed class, meaning that there is only a limited (and typically small)
number of other morphemes that could be found in the same position in the word. Roots, on the other
hand, normally belong to an open class, meaning that there is a very large number of other morphemes
of the same type.
Moreover, new roots can be borrowed or invented quite freely, whereas new affixes enter the language
only rarely. Affixes which precede the root and possibly other prefixes are called a prefix, while those
which follow the root and possibly other suffixes are called a suffix. We write affixes with a hyphen
showing the relative position of the root. In English, the past tense marker –d, the plural marker –s, the
adjectivizer –able, the noun marker –ish and -hood (for example) are suffixes. Whereas morphemes like
un-, dis-, in-, pre- and re- are prefixes. For more detailed understanding of the English prefixes, let us
analyze theme into six categories based on their meaning. These meaning categories are not exhaustive
but they do encompass large English prefixes.

 Negation un- unfair, unwise, unforgettable, unassuming, unexpected

non- nonconformist, nonsmoker, nonpolitical, nonparticipant
Likewise, morphemes like ‘-ish, -able, -s, -d, -ment, -hood, -ize, -al, -ic, -ttee, -ate, -ly, -hold, -er, -est, -
ism, -ship, -ward, -ness, -wise, -ity’ are common suffixes in English. We will see them in the next topic
haw they drive word classes.
2.4 Inflection and derivation
A farther distinction could be made on (bound) morphemes in to inflectional morphemes and derivational
morphemes based on their grammatical and/ or semantic effect on the pre-existing stem. Before we
discuss about the inflectional and derivational morphemes, let us see the following diagram.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

Suffixes like –ment, and –ize which change the part of speech of words are called derivational suffixes.
Suffixes like –ed, and –s which do not change the part of speech oh words are called inflectional suffixes.
The distinction between derivational and inflectional affixes is given below.
Derivational Affixes Vs. Inflectional Affixes
Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new lexemes, but
rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical contexts. As we’ll see in
detail below, grammatical meaning can include information about number (singular vs. plural), person
(first, second, third), tense (past, present, future), and other distinctions as well. As languages may have
derivational affixes that form new lexemes, they may have inflectional affixes that make those lexemes
suited for one grammatical context or another; similarly, languages may have rules of reduplication for
either derivational purposes or inflectional purposes. In other words, we might say that form (the type of
rule or process) is independent of function (derivation or inflection).
In English (and normally in other languages too) possession markers, participle markers, plural markers
and comparatives are inflectional affixes because they do not drive (change) the preexisting class of the
stems as in the following example.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

We have been discussing about inflectional prefixes and suffixes of English so far. In addition to inflectional
affixes, there are also derivational affixes that we are going to deal with in the next lines. By definition,
derivational affixes are those which can change the pre-existing class of the word. The direction /˂/
indicates the derivation which means ‘is derived from’.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

2.5 Roots / Stems / Bases /

The analysis of the distinction and/ or interaction between words and affixes is to make the distinction
among word roots, bases and stems visible. It seems that, from simple definitions, the terms root, base
and stem variant names of the concept ‘word’. However, as we shall discuss in the following lines, they
are important distinct aspects of morphology. A root, or root word, is a word that does not have a prefix
(in front of the word) or a suffix (at the end of a word). The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word,
and of a word family (root is then called base word), which carries the most significant aspects of semantic
content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents.

Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of root morphemes. However,
sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word minus its inflectional endings, but with its
lexical endings in place. For example, ‘chatters’ has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical
root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems, and a root in the stricter sense may be thought of as a
monomorphemic stem. The traditional definition allows roots to be either free morphemes or bound
morphemes. Root morphemes are essential for affixation and compounds. However, in polysynthetic
languages with very high levels of inflectional morphology, the term "root" is generally synonymous with
"free morpheme". Many such languages have a very restricted number of morphemes that can stand
alone as a word:

The root of a word is a unit of meaning (morpheme) and, as such, it is an abstraction, though it can usually
be represented in writing as a word would be. For example, it can be said that the root of the English verb
form running is run, or the root of the Spanish superlative adjective amplísimo is ampl-, since those words
are clearly derived from the root forms by simple suffixes that do not alter the roots in any way. In
particular, English has very little inflection, and hence a tendency to have words that are identical to their
roots. But more complicated inflection, as well as other processes, can obscure the root; for example, the
root of mice is mouse (still a valid word), and the root of interrupt is, arguably, rupt, which is not a word
in English and only appears in derivational forms (such as disrupt, corrupt, rupture, etc.). The root rupt is
written as if it were a word, but it's not.

This distinction between the word as a unit of speech and the root as a unit of meaning is even more
important in the case of languages where roots have many different forms when used in actual words, as
is the case in Semitic languages. In these, roots are formed by consonants alone, and different words

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(belonging to different parts of speech) are derived from the same root by inserting vowels. For example,
in Hebrew, the root gdl represents the idea of largeness, and from it we have gadol and gdola (masculine
and feminine forms of the adjective "big"), gadal "he grew", higdil "he magnified" and magdelet
"magnifier", along with many other words such as godel "size" and migdal "tower".

A stem, on the other hand, may consist of a single root, of two roots forming a compound stem, or of a
root (or stem) and one or more derivational affixes forming a derived stem, according to R. M. W. Dixon
(2010). The three main morphological processes are compounding, affixation, and conversion.
Compounding involves adding two stems together, as in . . . window-sill--or blackbird, daydream, and so
on. . . . For the most part, affixes attach to free stems, i.e., stems that can stand alone as a word. Examples
are to be found, however, where an affix is added to a bound stem--compare perishable, where perish is
free, with durable, where dur is bound, or unkind, where kind is free, with unbeknown, where beknown
is bound. . . . As Rodney D. Huddleston (1988) states it, conversion is where a stem is derived without any
change in form from one belonging to a different class. For example, the verb bottle (I must bottle some
plums) is derived by conversion from the noun bottle, while the noun catch (That was a fine catch) is
converted from the verb.

The Difference Between a Base and a Stem is that Base is the core of a word, that part of the word which
is essential for looking up its meaning in the dictionary; stem is either the base by itself or the base plus
another morpheme to which other morphemes can be added. [For example,] vary is both a base and a
stem; when an affix is attached the base/ stem is called a stem only. Other affixes can now be attached."
Bernard O. Dwyer, (2000) When we look the difference between a Root and a Stem, the terms root and
stem are sometimes used interchangeably. However, there is a subtle difference between them: a root is
a morpheme that expresses the basic meaning of a word and cannot be further divided into smaller
morphemes. Yet a root does not necessarily constitute a fully understandable word in and of itself.
Another morpheme may be required. For example, the form struct in English is a root because it cannot
be divided into smaller meaningful parts, yet neither can it be used in discourse without a prefix or a suffix
being added to it (construct, structural, destruction, etc.)

A stem may consist of just a root. However, it may also be analyzed into a root plus derivational
morphemes. Like a root, a stem may or may not be a fully understandable word. For example, in English,
the forms reduce and deduce are stems because they act like any other regular verb-- they can take the
past-tense suffix. However, they are not roots, because they can be analyzed into two parts, -duce, plus a
derivational prefix re- or de-. So some roots are stems and some stems are roots, but roots and stems are
not the same thing. There are roots that are not stems (-duce) and there are stems that are not roots
(reduce). In fact, this rather subtle distinction is not extremely important conceptually, and some theories
do away with it entirely. The theory of word structure explains the effect easily. Irregular plurals, because
they are quirky, have to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated
by a rule. Because of this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem
to another existing stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental
dictionary; they are complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are
needed. They are put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to
the compounding rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary.

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CHAPTER - THREE

WORDS AND THEIR INTERNAL STRUCTURES

3.1 Parts of Speech / Word Classes
A part of speech refers to a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) which have similar
grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar
behavior in terms of syntax - they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences - and
sometimes in terms of morphology, in that they undergo inflection for similar properties. Commonly listed
English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection,
and sometimes article or determiner.

A part of speech – particularly in more modern classifications, which often make more precise distinctions
than the traditional scheme does – may also be called a word class, lexical class, or lexical category,
although the term lexical category refers in some contexts to a particular type of syntactic category, and
may thus exclude parts of speech that are considered to be functional, such as pronouns. The term form
class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions. Word classes may be classified as open
or closed: open classes (like nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while closed
classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all.

Almost all languages have the word classes, noun and verb, but beyond these there are significant
variations in different languages. For example, Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives where
English has one; Chinese, Korean and Japanese have a class of nominal classifiers; many languages lack a
distinction between adjectives and adverbs, or between adjectives and verbs. This variation in the number
of categories and their identifying properties means that analysis needs to be done for each individual
language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria.

Works of English grammar generally follow the pattern of the European tradition except that participles
are now usually regarded as forms of verbs rather than as a separate part of speech. English words have
been classified into eight or nine parts of speech and this scheme, or slight expansions of it, is still followed
in most dictionaries: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection and
article or (more recently) determiner. Some modern classifications include further classes defined in
addition to these. For discussion see the sections below.

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1. Noun

A noun is a word that functions as the name of some specific thing or set of things, such as living
creatures, objects, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas. Linguistically, a noun is a
member of a large, open part of speech whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a
clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined
in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules
for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns are those words which can occur with
articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase.

Nouns have sometimes been defined in terms of the grammatical categories to which they are subject
(classed by gender, inflected for case and number). Such definitions tend to be languagespecific, since
nouns do not have the same categories in all languages.

Nouns are frequently defined, particularly in informal contexts, in terms of their semantic properties
(their meanings). Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance,
quality, quantity, etc. However this type of definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as
being uninformative. There have been offered several examples of English-language nouns which do not
have any reference: drought, enjoyment, finesse, behalf (as found in on behalf of), dint (in dint of), and
sake (for the sake of).

Linguists often prefer to define nouns (and other lexical categories) in terms of their formal properties.
These include morphological information, such as what prefixes or suffixes they take, and also their syntax
– how they combine with other words and expressions of particular types. Such definitions may
nonetheless still be language-specific, since syntax as well as morphology varies between languages. For
example, in English it might be noted that nouns are words that can co-occur with definite articles (as
stated at the start of this article), but this would not apply in Russian, which has no definite articles.

In some languages, nouns are assigned to genders, such as masculine, feminine and neuter (or other
combinations). The gender of a noun (as well as its number and case, where applicable) will often entail
agreement in words that modify or are related to it. For example, in French, the singular form of the
definite article is le with masculine nouns and la with feminine; adjectives and certain verb forms also
change (with the addition of -e with feminine). Grammatical gender often correlates with the form of the
noun and the inflection pattern it follows; for example, in both Italian and Russian most nouns ending -a
are feminine. Gender can also correlate with the sex of the noun's referent, particularly in the case of
nouns denoting people (and sometimes animals). Nouns do not have gender in Modern English, although
many of them denote people or animals of a specific sex. Below we will see different types of nouns from
different perspectives.

 Proper nouns and common nouns

A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing unique entities (such as Earth, India, Jupiter, Harry,
or BMW), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, animal,
planet, person or car).

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

 Countable and uncountable nouns

Count nouns or countable nouns are common nouns that can take a plural, can combine with numerals
or counting quantifiers (e.g., one, two, several, every, most), and can take an indefinite article such as a
or an (in languages which have such articles). Examples of count nouns are chair, nose, and occasion.

Mass nouns or uncountable (or non-count) nouns differ from count nouns in precisely that respect: they
cannot take plurals or combine with number words or the above type of quantifiers. For example, it is
not possible to refer to a furniture or three furnitures. This is true even though the pieces of furniture
comprising furniture could be counted. Thus the distinction between mass and count nouns should not
be made in terms of what sorts of things the nouns refer to, but rather in terms of how the nouns present
these entities. Many nouns have both countable and uncountable uses; for example, beer is countable in
"give me three beers", but uncountable in "he likes beer".

 Collective nouns

Collective nouns are nouns that – even when they are inflected for the singular – refer to groups
consisting of more than one individual or entity. Examples include committee, government, and police.
In English these nouns may be followed by a singular or a plural verb and referred to by a singular or
plural pronoun, the singular being generally preferred when referring to the body as a unit and the plural
often being preferred, especially in British English, when emphasizing the individual members. Examples
of acceptable and unacceptable use given by Gowers in Plain Words include:

 Concrete nouns and abstract nouns

Concrete nouns refer to physical entities that can, in principle at least, be observed by at least one of the
senses (for instance, chair, apple, Janet or atom). Abstract nouns, on the other hand, refer to abstract
objects; that is, ideas or concepts (such as justice or hatred). While this distinction is sometimes exclusive,
some nouns have multiple senses, including both concrete and abstract ones; consider, for example, the
noun art, which usually refers to a concept (e.g., Art is an important element of human culture) but which
can refer to a specific artwork in certain contexts (e.g., I put my daughter's art up on the fridge).

Some abstract nouns developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots. These include
drawback, fraction, holdout, and uptake. Similarly, some nouns have both abstract and concrete senses,
with the latter having developed by figurative extension from the former. These include view, filter,
structure, and key.

In English, many abstract nouns are formed by adding noun-forming suffixes (-ness, -ity, -ion) to
adjectives or verbs. Examples are happiness (from the adjective happy), circulation (from the verb
circulate) and serenity (from the adjective serene).

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2. Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. It is a
particular case of a pro-form. Nouns and noun phrases can typically be replaced by pronouns, such as he,
it, which, and those, in order to avoid repetition or explicit identification, or for other reasons. For
example, in the sentence Janeth thought that he was weird, the word he is a pronoun standing in place
of the name of the person in question.

Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists
would not consider them to form a single class, in view of the variety of functions they perform. Subtypes
include personal pronouns, reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, possessive pronouns, demonstrative
pronouns, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and indefinite pronouns.

The use of pronouns often involves anaphora, where the meaning of the pronoun is dependent on an
antecedent. This applies especially to third-person personal pronouns, and to relative pronouns. For
example, in the sentence That poor man looks as if he needs a new coat, the antecedent of the pronoun
he is the noun phrase that poor man.

The adjective associated with pronoun is pronominal. A pronominal is also a word or phrase that acts as
a pronoun. For example, in That's not the one I wanted, the phrase the one (containing the prop-word
one) is a pronominal. The English word one can replace parts of noun phrases, and it sometimes stands
in for a noun. An example is given below:

John's car is newer than the one that Bill has.

But one can also stand in for bigger sub parts of a noun phrase. For example, in the following example,
one can stand in for new car. This new car is cheaper than that one. We can discuss pronouns dividing
into different types as follows;

A) Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns may be classified by person, number, gender and case. English has three persons (first,
second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural); in the third person singular there are also
distinct pronoun forms for male, female and neuter gender. Principal forms are shown in the table to the
right (see also English personal pronouns).

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

English personal pronouns have two cases, subject and object. Subject pronouns are used in subject
position (I like to eat chips, but she does not). Object pronouns are used for the object of a verb or
preposition (John likes me but not her).

B) Reflexive and reciprocal,

 Reflexive pronouns are used when a person or thing acts on itself, for example, John cut himself. In
English they all end in -self or -selves and must refer to a noun phrase elsewhere in the same clause.

 Reciprocal pronouns refer to a reciprocal relationship (each other, one another). They must refer to a
noun phrase in the same clause. An example in English is: They do not like each other. In some languages,
the same forms can be used as both reflexive and reciprocal pronouns.

C) Possessive
Possessive pronouns are used to indicate possession (in a broad sense). Some occur as independent noun
phrases: mine, yours, hers, ours, yours, theirs. An example is: Those clothes are mine. Others must
accompany a noun: my, your, her, our, your, their, as in: I lost my wallet. (His and its can fall into either
category, although its is nearly always found in the second.) Those of the second type have traditionally
been described as possessive adjectives, and in more modern terminology as possessive determiners.
The term "possessive pronoun" is sometimes restricted to the first type. Both types replace possessive
noun phrases. As an example, Their crusade to capture our attention could replace The advertisers'
crusade to capture our attention.

D) Demonstrative
Demonstrative pronouns (in English, this, that and their plurals these, those) often distinguish their
targets by pointing or some other indication of position; for example, I'll take these. They may also be
anaphoric, depending on an earlier expression for context, for example, A kid actor would try to be all
sweet, and who needs that?

E) Indefinite
Indefinite pronouns, the largest group of pronouns, refer to one or more unspecified persons or things.
One group in English includes compounds of some-, any-, every- and no- with -thing, - one and -body, for
example: Anyone can do that. Another group, including many, more, both, and most, can appear alone
or followed by of. In addition,

 Distributive pronouns are used to refer to members of a group separately rather than collectively.
(To each his own.)
 Negative pronouns indicate the non-existence of people or things. (Nobody thinks that.)
 Impersonal pronouns normally refer to a person, but are not specific as to first, second or third
person in the way that the personal pronouns are. (One does not clean one's own windows.)
F) Relative
Relative pronouns (who, whom, whose, what, which and that) refer back to people or things previously
mentioned: People who smoke should quit now. They are used in relative clauses.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

G) Interrogative

Interrogative pronouns ask which person or thing is meant. In reference to a person, one may use who
(subject), whom (object) or whose (possessive); for example, Who did that? In colloquial speech, whom
is generally replaced by who. English non-personal interrogative pronouns (which and what) have only
one form.

H) Antecedents

The use of pronouns often involves anaphora, where the meaning of the pronoun is dependent on
another referential element. The referent of the pronoun is often the same as that of a preceding (or
sometimes following) noun phrase, called the antecedent of the pronoun. The following sentences give
examples of particular types of pronouns used with antecedents:

 Third-person personal pronouns:

• That poor man looks as if he needs a new coat. (the noun phrase that poor man is the antecedent
of he)
• Julia arrived yesterday. I met her at the station. (Julia is the antecedent of her)
• When they saw us, the lions began roaring (the lions is the antecedent of they; as it comes after
the pronoun it may be called a postcedent)
 Other personal pronouns in some circumstances:
• Terry and I were hoping no-one would find us. (Terry and I is the antecedent of us)
• You and Alice can come if you like. (you and Alice is the antecedent of the second – plural – you)
 Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns:
• Jack hurt himself. (Jack is the antecedent of himself)
• We were teasing each other. (we is the antecedent of each other)
 Relative pronouns:
• The woman who looked at you is my sister. (the woman is the antecedent of who)
Some other types, such as indefinite pronouns, are usually used without antecedents. Relative pronouns
are used without antecedents in free relative clauses. Even third-person personal pronouns are
sometimes used without antecedents ("unprecursed") – this applies to special uses such as dummy
pronouns and generic they, as well as cases where the referent is implied by the context.
3. Adjective
In linguistics, an adjective is a describing word, the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or
noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified. Adjectives are one of the English parts
of speech, although historically they were classed together with the nouns. Certain words that were
traditionally considered to be adjectives, including the, this, my, etc., are today usually classed separately,
as determiners. A given occurrence of an adjective can generally be classified into one of three kinds of
use:
1. Attributive adjectives are part of the noun phrase headed by the noun they modify; for example,
happy is an attributive adjective in "happy people". In some languages, attributive adjectives precede
their nouns; in others, they follow their nouns; and in yet others, it depends on the adjective, or on the
exact relationship of the adjective to the noun. In English, attributive adjectives usually precede their

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nouns in simple phrases, but often follow their nouns when the adjective is modified or qualified by a
phrase acting as an adverb. For example: "I saw three happy kids", and "I saw three kids happy enough
to jump up and down with glee." See also Postpositive adjective.

2. Predicative adjectives are linked via a copula or other linking mechanism to the noun or pronoun they
modify; for example, happy is a predicate adjective in "they are happy" and in "that made me happy."
(See also: Predicative expression, Subject complement.)

3. Nominal adjectives act almost as nouns. One way this can happen is if a noun is elided and an attributive
adjective is left behind. In the sentence, "I read two books to them; he preferred the sad book, but she
preferred the happy", happy is a nominal adjective, short for "happy one" or "happy book". Another way
this can happen is in phrases like "out with the old, in with the new", where "the old" means, "that which
is old" or "all that is old", and similarly with "the new". In such cases, the adjective functions either as a
mass noun (as in the preceding example) or as a plural count noun, as in "The meek shall inherit the
Earth", where "the meek" means "those who are meek" or "all who are meek".
Adjectives feature as a part of speech (word class) in most languages. In some languages, the words that
serve the semantic function of adjectives may be categorized together with some other class, such as
nouns or verbs. For example, rather than an adjective meaning "big", a language might have a verb that
means "to be big", and could then use an attributive verb construction analogous to "big-being house" to
express what English expresses as "big house". Such an analysis is possible for the Chinese languages, for
example.
In languages which have adjectives as a word class, they are usually an open class; that is, it is relatively
common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. However, Bantu languages are
well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived.
Similarly, native Japanese adjectives (i-adjectives) are considered a closed class (as are native verbs),
although nouns (an open class) may be used in the genitive to convey some adjectival meanings, and
there is also the separate open class of adjectival nouns (na-adjectives).

Many languages, including English, distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns and pronouns,
and adverbs, which mainly modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Not all languages have exactly
this distinction and many languages, including English, have words that can function as both. For example,
in English fast is an adjective in "a fast car" (where it qualifies the noun car), but an adverb in "he drove
fast" (where it modifies the verb drove).
In English, there are three different means to indicate comparison: most simple adjectives take the
suffixes "-er" and "-est", as
"big", "bigger", "biggest";
a very few adjectives are irregular:
"good", "better", "best",
"bad", "worse", "worst",
"old", "elder", "eldest" (in certain contexts only)
"far", "farther/further", "farthest/furthest"
"many", "more", "most"
"little", "less", "least";
All others are compared by means of the words "more" and "most". There is no simple rule to decide
which means is correct for any given adjective, however. The general tendency is for simpler adjectives,

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and those from Anglo-Saxon to take the suffixes, while longer adjectives and those from French, Latin,
Greek do not—but sometimes sound of the word is the deciding factor.
4. Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action
(bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In
the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many
languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may
also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.
Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action
has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.

In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person,
number, and/or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only
in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walks) or "-
es" (fishes). The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb (I walk, you walk, they walk, etc.).

Latin and the Romance languages inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood (abbreviated 'TAM'), and they
agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish) with the subject. Japanese, like
many languages with SOV word order, inflects verbs for tense-aspect-mood, as well as other categories
such as negation, but shows absolutely no agreement with the subject - it is a strictly dependent-marking
language. On the other hand, Basque, Georgian, and some other languages, have polypersonal
agreement: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object, and even the secondary object if present,
a greater degree of head-marking than is found in most European languages.

Verbs vary by type, and each type is determined by the kinds of words that follow it and the relationship
those words have with the verb itself. There are six types: intransitive, transitive, infinitives, to-be verbs,
and two-place transitive (Vg- verb give), and two-place transitive (Vcverb consider).

An intransitive verb is one that does not have a direct object. Intransitive verbs may be followed by an
adverb (a word that addresses how, where, when, and how often) or end a sentence. For example: "The
woman spoke softly." "The athlete ran faster than the official." "The boy wept."

A linking verb can't be followed by an adverb or end a sentence, but instead must be followed by a noun
or adjective, whether in a single word or phrase. Common linking verbs include seem, become, appear,
look, and remain. For example: "His mother looked worried." "Josh remained a reliable friend." Therefore,
linking verbs 'link' the adjective or noun to the subject.

Adjectives that come after linking verbs are predicate adjectives, and nouns that come after linking verbs
are predicate nouns. A transitive verb is followed by a noun or noun phrase. These noun phrases are not
called predicate nouns, but are instead called direct objects because they refer to the object that is being
acted upon. For example: "My friend read the newspaper." "The teenager earned a speeding ticket." A
way to identify a transitive verb is to invert the sentence, making it passive. For example: "The newspaper
was read by my friend." "A speeding ticket was earned by the teenager."

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Vg- verbs (named after the verb give) precede either two noun phrases or a noun phrase and then a
prepositional phrase often led by to or for. For example: "The players gave their teammates high fives."
"The players gave high fives to their teammates."

When two noun phrases follow a transitive verb, the first is an indirect object ‘that’ which is receiving
something and the second is a direct object, that being acted upon. Indirect objects can be noun phrases
or prepositional phrases.

The verb be is manifested in eight forms: be, is, am, are, was, were, been, and being. These verbs precede
nouns or adjectives in a sentence, which become predicate nouns and predicate adjectives similar to
those that function with a linking verb. They can also be followed by an adverb of place, which is
sometimes referred to as a predicate adverb. For example: "Her daughter was a writing tutor." "The
singers were very nervous." "My house is down the street."
5. Adverb
An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, adjective, other adverb, determiner, noun phrase, clause, or
sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc.,
answering questions such as how? in what way?, when?, where?, and to what extent?. This function is
called the adverbial function, and may be realized by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word expressions
(adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses)

Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. However, modern linguists note that it
has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various different types
of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the
other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.)

The English word adverb derives (through French) from Latin adverbium, from ad- ("to"), verbum ("word",
"verb"), and the nominal suffix -ium. The term implies that the principal function of adverbs is to act as
modifiers of verbs or verb phrases. An adverb used in this way may provide information about the
manner, place, time, frequency, certainty, or other circumstances of the activity denoted by the verb or
verb phrase. Some examples:
 She sang loudly (loudly modifies the verb sang, indicating the manner of singing)
 We left it here (here modifies the verb phrase left it, indicating place)
 I worked yesterday (yesterday modifies the verb worked, indicating time)
 You often make mistakes (often modifies the verb phrase make mistakes, indicating frequency)
 He undoubtedly did it (undoubtedly modifies the verb phrase did it, indicating certainty)
Adverbs can also be used as modifiers of adjectives, and of other adverbs, often to indicate degree.
Examples:
 You are quite right (the adverb quite modifies the adjective right)
 She sang very loudly (the adverb very modifies another adverb – loudly)
They can also modify noun phrases, prepositional phrases, or whole clauses or sentences, as in the
following examples:
 I bought only the fruit (only modifies the noun phrase the fruit)
 She drove us almost to the station (almost modifies the prepositional phrase to the station)
 Certainly we need to act (certainly modifies the sentence as a whole)
Adverbs are thus seen to perform a wide range of modifying functions. The major exception is the
function of modifier of nouns, which is performed instead by adjectives (compare she sang loudly with

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her loud singing disturbed me; here the verb sang is modified by the adverb loudly, whereas the noun
singing is modified by the adjective loud). However, as seen above, adverbs may modify noun phrases,
and so the two functions may sometimes be superficially very similar:
 Even camels need to drink
 Even numbers are divisible by two
The word even in the first sentence is an adverb, since it is an "external" modifier, modifying camels as a
noun phrase (compare even these camels ...), whereas the word even in the second sentence is an
adjective, since it is an "internal" modifier, modifying numbers as a noun (compare these even numbers
...). It is nonetheless possible for certain adverbs to modify a noun; in English the adverb follows the noun
in such cases, as in:
 The people here are friendly
 The show features dances galore
 There is a shortage internationally of protein for animal feeds
Adverbs can sometimes be used as predicative expressions; in English this applies especially to adverbs
of location:
 Your seat is there.
When the function of an adverb is performed by an expression consisting of more than one word, it is
called an adverbial phrase or adverbial clause, or simply an adverbial.

In English, adverbs of manner (answering the question how?) are often formed by adding -ly to
adjectives. Other languages often have similar methods for deriving adverbs from adjectives (French, for
example, uses the suffix -ment), or else use the same form for both adjectives and adverbs. Many other
adverbs, however, are not related to adjectives in this way; they may be derived from other words or
phrases, or may be single morphemes. Examples of such adverbs in English include here, there, together,
yesterday, aboard, very, almost, etc.

Where the meaning permits, adverbs may undergo comparison, taking comparative and superlative
forms. In English this is usually done by adding more and most before the adverb (more slowly, most
slowly), although there are a few adverbs that take inflected forms, such as well, for which better and
best are used.

For more information about the formation and use of adverbs in English, see English grammar: Adverbs.
For other languages, see In specific languages below, and the articles on individual languages and their
grammars. Adverbs are considered a part of speech in traditional English grammar, and are still included
as a part of speech in grammar taught in schools and used in dictionaries. However, modern grammarians
recognize that words traditionally grouped together as adverbs serve a number of different functions.
Some describe adverbs a "catch-all" category that includes all words that do not belong to one of the
other parts of speech.

A logical approach to dividing words into classes relies on recognizing which words can be used in a
certain context. For example, the only type of word that can be inserted in the following template to form
a grammatical sentence is a noun: The _____ is red. (For example, "The hat is red".) When this approach
is taken, it is seen that adverbs fall into a number of different categories. For example, some adverbs can
be used to modify an entire sentence, whereas others cannot. Even when a sentential adverb has other
functions, the meaning is often not the same.

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For example, in the sentences She gave birth naturally and Naturally, she gave birth, the word naturally
has different meanings: as a sentential adverb it means something like "of course", while as a verb-
modifying adverb it means "in a natural manner".
Words like very afford another example. We can say Perry is very fast, but not Perry very won the race.
These words can modify adjectives but not verbs. On the other hand, there are words like here and there
that cannot modify adjectives. We can say The sock looks good there but not It is a there beautiful sock.
The fact that many adverbs can be used in more than one of these functions can confuse the issue, and
it may seem like splitting hairs to say that a single adverb is really two or more words that serve different
functions. However, this distinction can be useful, especially when considering adverbs like naturally that
have different meanings in their different functions. Rodney Huddleston distinguishes between a word
and a lexicogrammatical-word.

Grammarians find difficulty categorizing negating words, such as the English not. Although traditionally
listed as an adverb, this word does not behave grammatically like any other, and it probably belongs in a
class on its own.
6. Preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called ad positions, are a class of words that express spatial or
temporal relations (in, under, towards, before) or marking various semantic roles (of, for).

A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun or pronoun, or more generally a noun
phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. A preposition comes before its
complement; a postposition comes after its complement. English has prepositions rather than
postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, as in in England, under the table, of
Jane. Some languages, which use a different word order, have postpositions instead, or have both types.
The phrase formed by a preposition or postposition together with its complement is called a prepositional
phrase (or postpositional phrase, ad positional phrase, etc.) – such phrases usually play an adverbial role
in a sentence.

A less common type of ad position is the circum-position, which consists of two parts that appear on
each side of the complement. Other terms sometimes used for particular types of adposition include
ambiposition, inposition and interposition. Some linguists use the word preposition in place of adposition
regardless of the applicable word order.

An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase (or, in a
different analysis, a determiner phrase). In English, this is generally a noun (or something functioning as
a noun, e.g., a gerund), together with its modifiers such as adjectives, articles, etc. The complement is
sometimes called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase, formed by the adposition together
with its complement, is called an adpositional phrase or prepositional phrase (PP) (or for specificity, a
postpositional or circumpositional phrase). An adposition establishes a grammatical relationship that
links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a semantic
relationship, which may be spatial (in, on, under, ...), temporal (after, during, ...), or of some other type
(of, for, via, ...). The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun
phrase as complement and indicates the grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb
in the containing clause.

Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase
appears in italics, and the preposition within it appears in bold. The word to which the phrase expresses

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a relation – that is, the word to which the prepositional phrase is an adjunct or complement – is
underlined. In some of the examples, the same word has two prepositional phrases as adjuncts.
 As an adjunct to a noun:
• the weather in March
• cheese from France with live bacteria
 As a predicative expression (complement of a copula)
• The key is under the stone.
 As an adjunct to a verb:
• sleep throughout the winter
• danced atop the tables for hours
• dispense with the formalities (see Semantic functions, below)
 As an adjunct to an adjective:
• happy for them
• sick until recently
In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalized to
serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement, below. Prepositional phrases themselves are
sometimes nominalized:
 In the cellar was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies.
An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of
prepositions take the objective case where available (from him, not *from he).

The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings (for example, the meaning of the English
preposition of is expressed in many languages by a genitive case ending), but adpositions are classed as
syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological.

Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of forms (for
different tenses, cases, genders, etc.) in the same way as verbs, adjectives and nouns may do. There are
exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with a pronominal object to form inflected
prepositions.
7. Conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, sentences, phrases, or clauses. A
discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other
parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In general, a
conjunction is an invariable grammatical particle, and it may or may not stand between the items it
conjoins. The definition may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same
function, e. g. "as well as", "provided that". Conjunctions may be placed at the beginning of sentences.
But some superstition about the practice persists.

Coordinating conjunctions, also called coordinators, are conjunctions that join, or coordinate, two or more
items (such as words, main clauses, or sentences) of equal syntactic importance. In English, the mnemonic
acronym FANBOYS can be used to remember the coordinators for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. These

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are not the only coordinating conjunctions; various others are used, including "and nor" (British), "but
nor" (British), "or nor" (British), "neither" ("They don't gamble; neither do they smoke"), "no more" ("They
don't gamble; no more do they smoke"), and "only" ("I would go, only I don't have time"). Types of
coordinating conjunctions include cumulative conjunctions, adversative conjunctions, alternative
conjunctions, and illative conjunctions. Here are some examples of coordinating conjunctions in English
and what they do:
For; presents rationale ("They do not gamble or smoke, for they are ascetics.")
And; presents non-contrasting item(s) or idea(s) ("They gamble and they smoke.")
Nor: presents a non-contrasting negative idea ("They do not gamble, nor do they smoke.")
But; presents a contrast or exception ("They gamble, but they don't smoke.")
Or; presents an alternative item or idea ("Every day they gamble or they smoke.")
Yet; presents a contrast or exception ("They gamble, yet they don't smoke.")
So: presents a consequence ("He gambled well last night so he smoked a cigar to celebrate.") Correlative
conjunctions work in pairs to join words and groups of words of equal weight in a sentence. There are
many different pairs of correlative conjunctions (either...or, not only...but (also), may...but, neither...nor,
both...and, whether...or, just as...so, the...the, as...as, as much...as, no sooner...than, rather...than)
Examples:

Subordinating conjunctions, also called subordinators, are conjunctions that join an independent clause
and a dependent clause, and also introduce adverb clauses. The most common subordinating
conjunctions in the English language include after, although, as, as far as, as if, as long as, as soon as, as
though, because, before, even if, even though, every time, if, in order that, since, so, so that, than, though,
unless, until, when, whenever, where, whereas, wherever, and while.

Complementizers can be considered to be special subordinating conjunctions that introduce complement

clauses: e.g. "I wonder whether he'll be late. I hope that he'll be on time". Some subordinating
conjunctions (until and while), when used to introduce a phrase instead of a full clause, become
prepositions with identical meanings.

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The subordinating conjunction performs two important functions within a sentence: illustrating the
importance of the independent clause and providing a transition between two ideas in the same sentence
by indicating a time, place, or cause and therefore effecting the relationship between the clauses.
In many verb-final languages, subordinate clauses must precede the main clause on which they depend.
The equivalents to the subordinating conjunctions of non-verb-final languages such as English are either
 clause-final conjunctions (e.g. in Japanese); or
 suffixes attached to the verb, and not separate words
Such languages often lack conjunctions as a part of speech, because:
1. the form of the verb used is formally nominalised and cannot occur in an independent clause
2. the clause-final conjunction or suffix attached to the verb is a marker of case and is also used in nouns
to indicate certain functions. In this sense, the subordinate clauses of these languages have much in
common with postpositional phrases.
8. Interjection

In grammar, an interjection or exclamation may be a word used to express an emotion or sentiment on

the part of the speaker (although most interjections have clear definitions). Filled pauses such as uh, er,
um are also considered interjections. Interjections are often placed at the beginning of a sentence.

An interjection is sometimes expressed as a single word or non-sentence phrase, followed by a

punctuation mark. The isolated usage of an interjection does not represent a complete sentence in
conventional English writing. Thus, in formal writing, the interjection will be incorporated into a larger
sentence clause.

Interjection as a figure of speech refers to the use of one word. For example, lawyers in the United States
of America traditionally say: Objection! or soldiers: Fire!. Conventions like Hi, Bye and Goodbye are
interjections, as are exclamations like Cheers! and Hooray!. In fact, like a noun or a pronoun, they are very
often characterized by exclamation marks depending on the stress of the attitude or the force of the
emotion they are expressing. Well (a short form of "that is well") can also be used as an interjection:
"Well! That's great!" or "Well, don't worry." Much profanity takes the form of interjections. Some linguists
consider the pro-sentences yes, no, amen and okay as interjections, since they have no syntactical
connection with other words and rather work as sentences themselves. Expressions such as "Excuse me!",
"Sorry!", "No thank you!", "Oh dear!", "Hey that's mine!", and similar ones often serve as interjections.
Interjections can be phrases or even sentences, as well as words, such as "Oh!" "Pooh!" "Wow!" or "sup!".

9. Auxiliary
An auxiliary verb is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it appears—
for example, to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany
a main verb. The main verb provides the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb
have in the sentence I have finished my dinner. Here, the main verb is finish, and the auxiliary have helps
to express the perfect aspect. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary
verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. They may be glossed with the
abbreviation AUX.

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Below are some sentences that contain representative auxiliary verbs from English, with the auxiliary
verb marked in bold:
a. Do you want tea? – do is an auxiliary accompanying the main verb want, used here to form a question
b. He has given his all. – has is an auxiliary used in expressing the perfect aspect of give. These auxiliaries
help express a question, show tense/ aspect, or form passive voice. Auxiliaries like these typically appear
with a full verb that carries the main semantic content of the clause.

Auxiliary verbs typically help express grammatical tense, aspect, mood, and voice. They typically appear
together with a main verb. The auxiliary is said to "help" the main verb. The auxiliary verbs of a language
form a closed class, i.e., there is a fixed, relatively small number of them. They are often among the most
frequently occurring verbs in a language.

Widely acknowledged verbs that can serve as auxiliaries in English and many related] languages are the
equivalents of be to express passive voice, and have (and sometimes be) to express perfect aspect or past
time reference.

In some treatments, the copula be is classed as an auxiliary even though it does not "help" another verb,
e.g.
The bird is in the tree. – is serves as a copula with a predicative expression not containing any other
verb.

Definitions of auxiliary verbs are not always consistent across languages, or even among authors
discussing the same language. Modal verbs may or may not be classified as auxiliaries, depending on the
language. In the case of English, verbs are often identified as auxiliaries based on their grammatical
behavior, as described below. In some cases, verbs that function similarly to auxiliaries, but are not
considered full members of that class (perhaps because they carry some independent lexical
information), are called semi-auxiliaries.
The following sections consider auxiliary verbs in English. They list auxiliary verbs, then present the
diagnostics that motivate this special class (subject-auxiliary inversion and negation with not). The modal
verbs are included in this class, due to their behavior with respect to these diagnostics. be (am, are, is,
was, were, being, been), can, could, dare, do (does, did), have (has, had, having), may, might, must, need,
ought, shall, should, will, would The status of dare, need (not), and ought (to) is debatable and the use of
these verbs as auxiliaries can vary across dialects of English. If the negative forms can't, don't, won't, etc.
are viewed as separate verbs (and not as contractions), then the number of auxiliaries increases. The
verbs do and have can also function as full verbs or as light verbs, which can be a source of confusion
about their status. The modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, and dare,
need and ought when included) form a subclass of auxiliary verbs. Modal verbs are defective insofar as
they cannot be inflected, nor do they appear as gerunds, infinitives, or participles.
The following table summarizes the auxiliary verbs in Standard English and the meaning contribution to
the clauses in which they appear. Many auxiliary verbs are listed more than once in the table based upon
discernible differences in use.

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Deontic modality expresses an ability, necessity, or obligation that is associated with an agent subject.
Epistemic modality expresses the speaker's assessment of reality or likelihood of reality. Distinguishing
between the two types of modality can be difficult, since many sentences contain a modal verb that
allows both interpretations.
The verbs listed in the previous section can be classified as auxiliaries based upon two diagnostics: they
allow subject–auxiliary inversion (the type of inversion used to form questions etc.) and (equivalently)
they can take not as a post dependent (a dependent that follows its head). The following examples
illustrate the extent to which subject–auxiliary inversion can occur with an auxiliary verb but not with a
full verb:
a. He was working today.
b. Was he working today? - Auxiliary verb was allows subject–auxiliary inversion.
a. He worked today.
b. *Worked he today? - Full verb worked does not allow subject–auxiliary inversion.
a. She can see it.
b. Can she see it? - Auxiliary verb can allows subject–auxiliary inversion.
a. She sees it.

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b. *Sees she it? - Full verb sees does not allow subject–auxiliary inversion.
(The asterisk * is the means commonly used in linguistics to indicate that the example is grammatically
unacceptable.) The following examples illustrate that the negation not can appear as a post dependent
of a finite auxiliary verb, but not as a post dependent of a finite full verb:
3.2 Content and Function Words
Words that carry the content of our communications are called content words. These are the words that
connect language to the world outside of language: to the people, creatures, things, ideas, place, times,
events, qualities, actions and relationships that we talk and write about. Content words are nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs. Many words in the sample text are content words: for instance nouns like
authorities and problem, the verbs shouting and penalized the adjectives professional and notorious, the
adverbs currently and enormously. These make important connections to the world that is being written
or spoken about. Of course, words like racists, racism and football, which are closely connected to the
text’s topics, are also content words.

Grammatical words, such as the, and, with, for, after, since, or, hence, and by do not have links – close or distant –
to topics; they are used in texts about anything and everything. Grammatical words carry some very general
meanings and they link words into sentence structures. When content words and grammatical words are counted
we find differences.

Grammatical words tend to be recycled a lot. This is because there are fewer of them (a few hundred
headwords only; see Nation 2001: 430–1) and they are needed regardless of what people are writing or
talking about. How often tokens of a word appear in large, balanced samples of text is the frequency of
use of the word. Frequency of use is commonly stated as number of tokens per million words of text.
An up-to-date reference book on the frequency of use of words in written and spoken English (Leech et
al. 2001) was based on a very large collection of texts, totalling 100 million words. Its figures show very
high frequencies for some grammatical words: for instance tokens representing the word family be
averaged out at more than 40,000 times per million words of text and tokens of the more than 60,000
times per million. By contrast, the same book shows much lower frequencies for content words, e.g. the
noun abuse had 37 tokens/million, the adjective black 226/million, and there were 138/million for player.
There are thousands of content headwords to choose from; so, on average, individual ones do not get
used as frequently as a typical grammatical word.
3.3 Word analysis
We saw above that morphemes are added in a fixed order. This order reflects the hierarchical structure
of the word. A word is not a simple sequence of morphemes. It has an internal structure. For example the
word unsystematic is composed of three morphemes, un-, system, and –atic. The root is system, a noun,
to which we add the suffix –atic resulting in an adjective, systematic. To this adjective, we add the prefix
un- forming a new adjective, unsystematic. In order to represent the hierarchical organization of words
(and sentences) linguists use tree diagrams or square brackets. The tree diagram for unsystematic is as
follows.

This tree represents the application of two morphological rules.

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1. Noun + -atic → Adjective

2. Un- + Adjective → Adjective
Rule 1 attaches the derivational suffix –atic to the root noun, forming an adjective. Rule 2 takes the
adjective formed by rule 1 and attaches the derivational prefix un-. The diagram shows that the entire
word – unsystematic – is an adjective that is composed of an adjective – systematic – plus un-. The
adjective is itself composed of a noun – system – plus the suffix –atic.

Like the property of discreteness discussed earlier, hierarchical structure is an essential property of
human language. Words (and sentences) have component parts, which relate to each other in specific,
rule-governed ways. Although at first glance it may seem that, aside from order, the morphemes un- and
–atic each relate to the root system in the same way, this is not the case. The root system is closer to –
atic that it is to un-, and un- actually connected to the adjective systematic, and directly to system. Insteed
*unsystem is not a word.

Further morphological rules can be applied to the structure given above. For example, English has the
derivational suffix –al as in egotistical, fantastical, and astronomical. In these cases, -al
is added to an adjective -egotistic, fantastic, and astronomic- to form a new adjective. The rule for –al is
as follows:
3. Adjective + al → Adjective
Another affix is –ly, which is added to adjectives –happy, lazy, hopeful- to form adverbs happily, lazily,
hopefully. The following is the rule for –ly.
4. Adjective + ly → Adverb
Applying these two rules to the derived form unsystematic, we get the following tree diagram for
unsystematically.

This is a rather complex word. Despite its complexity, it is well formed because it follows the
morphological rules of the language. On the other hand, a very simple word can be ungrammatical.
Suppose, in the above example, we first added un- to the root system that would have resulted in a non-
word *unsystem.

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*Unsystem is not a possible word because there is no rule of English that allows un- to be added to nouns. The large
soft drink company whose ad campaign promoted the uncola successfully flouted this linguistic rule to capture
people’s attention. Part of our linguistic competence includes the ability to recognize possible vs. impossible words,
like *unsystem and *uncola. Possible words are those that conform to the rules of morphology (as well as
phonology); impossible words are those that do not.

Tree diagrams are the linguist’s hypothesis of how speakers represent the internal structure of the morphologically
complex words in their language. In speaking and writing, we string morphemes together sequentially as in un +
system + atic. As shown by tree diagrams, however, our mental representation of words is much more complex.

The hierarchical organization of words is most clearly shown by structurally ambiguous words, words that have more
than one meaning by virtue of having more than one structure. Consider the word unlockable. Imagine you are inside
a room and you went some privacy. You would be unhappy to fine the door is unlockable – “not able to be locked.”
Now imagine you are inside a locked room trying to get out. You would be very relieved to find that the door is
unlockable – “able to be unlock.” These two meanings correspond to two different structures, as follows.

In the first structure the verb lock combines with the suffix –able to form an adjective lockable (able to be
locked). Then the prefix un- means “not” combines with the derived adjective to form a new adjective
unlockable (not able to be locked). In the second case, the prefix un- combines with the verb lock to form
a derived verb unlock. Then the derived verb combines with the suffix –able to form unlockable, (able to
be unlocked).

An entire class of words in English follows this pattern: unbuttonable, unzippable, and unlatchable are
among others. The ambiguity arises because the prefix un- can combine with adjectives or with verbs.

If words are only strings of morphemes without any internal organization, we could not explain the
ambiguity of words like unlockable. These words also illustrate another important point which is that
structure is important to determine meaning. The same three morphemes occur in both versions of
unlockable, yet there are two distinct meaning. The different meanings arise because of the two different
structures.

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CHAPTER - FOUR
WORD FORMATION PROCESSES
4.1 Compounding
In many languages, compounding (also called composition) is the most frequently used way of making
new lexemes. Its defining property is that it consists of the combination of lexemes into larger words. In
simple cases, compounding consists of the combination of two words, in which one word modifies the
meaning of the other, the head.

A compound is a complex lexeme that can be thought of as consisting of two or more base lexemes. In
the simplest case, a compound consists of two lexemes that are joined together (called compound
members). As in the examples given below, English allows several types of combinations of different word-
classes (N: noun, A: adjective, V: verb), but not all such combinations are possible.
 N + N lipstick (lipN + stickN)
 A + N hardware (hardA + wareN)
 V + N drawbridge (drawV + bridgeN)
 N + V babysit (babyN + sitV)
 N + A leadfree (leadN + freeA)
 A + A bitter-sweet (bitterA + sweetA)
Like derivational rules, compounding rules may differ in productivity. In English, the N + N rule/pattern is
extremely productive, so that novel compounds are created all the time and are hardly noticed. By
contrast, the V + N rule/pattern is unproductive and limited to a few lexically listed items, and the N + V
pattern is not really productive either (for instance, one cannot say to hair-wash 'wash one's hair').

In a compound that consists of two lexemes, it is really the lexeme stems that are combined - in this
respect compounding is no different from derivational affixes, which attach to stems, i.e. lexemes without
their inflection. Thus, we get English compounds such as lipstick (not *lipsstick), although it is used for
both lips, and child support (not ^children support), even if several children are supported, and
drawbridge (not *drewbridge), even if the bridge was 'drawn' only in the past.

4.2 Inflection
As we have already seen inflectional morphemes, by adding different affixes (prefixes and/ or suffixes) it
is possible to create new words from a pre-existing words without changing the class of the word.
Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new lexemes, but
rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical contexts. In other words,
inflection is the morphological marking of properties on a lexeme resulting in a number of forms for that
lexeme, a set of grammatical words. Nouns are inflected for number (singular and plural) and case
(nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative). These two inflectional
dimensions for nouns are found in many languages and are referred to as morpho-syntactic features.

Another category of words that plays a prominent role in inflection are verbs, which are often inflected
for categories such as tense (present, past and future), aspect, and mood. The following list presents a
(non-exhaustive) survey of the different types of morpho-syntactic information that are found as
morphological markings on nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the languages of the world:

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 Nouns: Number (singular, plural, dual, etc.), Case (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, ablative,
possessive, locative etc), Definiteness, Gender (feminine, masculine, neuter)
 Verbs: Tense (present, past, future), Aspect (imperfective, perfective, etc.), Mood (indicative,
subjunctive, imperative, etc.), Voice (active, passive, etc.), Number (singular, plural, etc.), Person (first,
second, third), Gender;
 Adjectives: Degree (positive, equative, comparative, superlative), Number, Gender, Case, Definiteness.
Let us discuss in brief the different types of inflections.
1. Number;
Perhaps the most familiar inflectional category for speakers of English is number. In English, nouns can
be marked as singular or plural:
Singular = cat, mouse, ox, child
Plural = cats, mice, oxen, children
Although the vast majority of nouns pluralize in English by adding -s (or in terms of sounds, one of the
variants [s], [z], or [ǝz]), some nouns form their plurals irregularly. We will return to the issue of regular
versus irregular inflections shortly. In English, it is required to mark the plural on nouns in a context in
which more than one of that noun is being discussed (I have six beagles).

2. Person;
English verbs exhibit different endings depending on whether the subject of the sentence is the speaker
(first person), the hearer (second person), or someone else (third person) However, English verb forms
are ambiguous with respect to these distinctions. If we say (for example) “we write,” neither the form of
the verb nor the form of the pronoun makes explicit whether the hearer is included or not, or how many
other than the speaker are involved.

3. Gender;
In English, the grammatical gender is represented in masculine or feminine for natural gender and in
neuter for non-natural gender.

4. Case
Case is another grammatical category that may affect nouns (or whole noun phrases). In languages that
employ the inflectional category of case, nouns are distinguished on the basis of how they are deployed
in sentences, for example, whether they function as subject, direct object, indirect object, as a location,
time, or instrument, or as the object of a preposition. The nominative case forms are used for the subject
of the sentence. Accusative is generally used for the direct object and dative for the indirect object.
Genitive is used for the possessor (for example, the boy’s shirt). Ablative is used for the objects of
prepositions (for example, with, to, from, at, in).

5. Tense and Aspect

Tense and aspect are inflectional categories that usually pertain to verbs. Both have to do with time, but
in different ways. Tense refers to the point of time of an event in relation to another point – generally the
point at which the speaker is speaking. In present tense the point in time of speaking and of the event
spoken about are the same. In past tense the time of the event is before the time of speaking. And in
future tense the event time is after the time of speaking. This can be represented schematically below,
where S stands for the time of speaking and E for the time of the event:
Present S = E
Past E before S
Future S before E

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In English, we mark the past tense using the inflectional suffix -ed on verbs (walked, yawned), but there is
no inflectional suffix for future tense. Instead, we use a separate auxiliary verb will to form the future
tense (will walk, will scream). The use of a separate word to form a tense is called periphrastic marking.
Strictly speaking, periphrastic marking is a matter of syntax rather than morphology.

Aspect is another inflectional category that may be marked on verbs. Rather than showing the time of an
event with respect to the point of speaking, aspect conveys information about the internal composition
of the event or the way in which the event occurs in time.

One of the most frequently expressed aspectual distinctions that can be found in the languages of the
world is the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect. With perfective aspect, an event is
viewed as completed; we look at the event from the outside, and its internal structure is not relevant.
With imperfective aspect, on the other hand, the event is viewed as on-going; we look at the event from
the inside, as it were. English isn’t the best language with which to illustrate this distinction, as tense and
aspect are not completely distinct from one another, but I can give you a rough example from English. In
English, when we say I ate the apple, we not only place the action in the past tense, but also look at it as
a completed whole. But if we say I was eating the apple, although the action is still in the past, we focus
on the event as it is progressing.

Other forms of aspect focus on particular points in an event. Inceptive aspect focuses on the beginning of
an event. Continuative aspect focuses on the middle of the event as it progresses, and completive on the
end.
English can make some of the aspectual distinctions mentioned above, but it does so periphrastically,
using a combination of extra verbs, prepositions, and adverbs to convey such nuances of meaning. In other
words, many of these aspectual differences are expressed lexically rather than inflectionally:
Inceptive = She began to walk.
Habitual = She always/usually walks.
Continuative = She keeps on walking.
Iterative = She reads over and over.
6. Voice
Voice is a category of inflection that allows different noun phrases to be focused in sentences. In the active
voice in a sentence with an agent and a patient, the agent is focused by virtue of being the subject of the
sentence:
The cat chased the mouse.
But in the passive voice the patient is the subject of the sentence, and it gets the focus:
The mouse was chased (by the cat).
In English the passive is expressed periphrastically by a combination of the auxiliary verb be plus the past
participle, as in the above example chased,

7. Mood and Modality

The inflectional categories of mood and modality have to do with a range of distinctions that include
signaling the kind of speech act in which a verb is deployed. Speech acts are classically defined as things
we can do with words, for example, making a statement, asking a question, or giving a command.
Languages often have three moods: declarative for making ordinary statements, interrogative for asking
questions, imperative for giving commands. But some languages can have other moods as well, for
example, expressing a speaker’s attitude about a statement, including whether it is necessary, possible,
certain, or sometimes whether it is hearsay and not necessarily true.

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4.3 Derivation
The basic function of derivational processes is to enable the language user to make new lexemes. Lexemes
belong to lexical categories such as N, V, and A and the derived lexemes may belong to a different category
than their bases. The description of each process of derivation consists of a specification of the properties
of the input words, and those of the output words. When we talk of derivation, we make distinctions
among nominalization (the derivation of nouns from words of other word classes), verbalization (the
derivation of verbs from other word classes), adjectivalization (the derivation of adjectives from other
word classes), and adverbialization (the derivation of adverbs from other word classes) as types of
category-determining processes.
4.4 Conversion
By changing a noun denoting an artifact or substance into a verb, English expresses the meaning of an
action for which the noun is denoted by adding [to] to the pre-existing noun.
Example,
N → V
Bomb to bomb
Hammer to hammer
Salt to salt
Oil to oil
Saw to saw
Nail to nail
4.5 Clipping
Clipping refers to the way of abbreviation of longer words or phrases becoming autonomous by their own
right. Longer words like gymnasium, mathematics, advertisement, bicycle, gasoline, telephone and
information are shortened to create shortened words gym, math, ad, bike, gas, tele and info respectively.
Clipping is a word formation process where part of a word from the sides or from middle is cut and added
to the vocabulary of the language. This type of word formation may be given different names based on
the position the word from which the process of clipping is made
 Back clipping – the beginning of the word remains but the rest part of the word os reduced as in Doc(tor),
math(ematics), memo(randum), pub(lic house), pop(ular music)
 Fore clipping – retains the final part of the prototype and reduces the initial part as in (ro)bot,
(cock)roach, (alli)gator, (tele)phone, (inter)net
 Medial clipping – words with the medial part is left out and parts from the beginning and end remain
as in math(ematic)s, spec(tacle)s, fan(ta)cy, ma(da)m.
4.6 Acronymy
Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words; such words are pronounced as the spelling
indicates:
 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Agency),
 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization),
 UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund)
 RADAR (Radio Detecting And Ranging)

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 LASER (Light Application by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)

 SCUBA (Self-Contained Under Water Breathing Apparatus)
 RAM (Random Access Memory)
 AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)
 HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus)
 ROM (Read-Only Memory)
 PROM (Programmed Read-Only Memory)
 EPROM (Erasable Programmed Read-Only Memory)
Acronyms are being added to the vocabulary daily with the proliferation of computers and wide spread
use of the internet, including MORF (Male Or Female), FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions), WYSIWYG
(what you see is what you get) and POP (Post Office Protocol) among many others. Other common
acronyms are FYI (for your information) BTW (by the way) and TGIF (thanks God It’s Friday).
4.7 Blending
Blending is another word formation process which encompasses both clipping and compounding where
parts of words are clipped and combined wither part of other word. This type of word formation is
commonly applied in English. For example parts of the Greek borrowed words into English Thermos ‘hot’
and metron ‘measure’ provide us with a new blend word thermometer. Below are more examples;

4.8 Back- formation

Ignorance sometimes can be creative. A new word may enter the language because of an incorrect
morphological analysis. For example, peddle was derived from peddler on the mistaken assumption that
er was the agentive affix. Such words are called back-formation. The verbs hawk, stoke, swindle, and edit
all came into the language as back-formations – of hawker, stoker, swindler, and editor. Language purists
sometimes rail against back-formations and cite enthuse and liaise (from enthusiasm and liaison) as
examples of language corruption. However, language is not corrupt (although the speakers who use it
may be), and many words entered the language this way.

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4.9 Onomatopoeic
Anomatopoeic words are words that phonetically imitate/ resemble/ suggest the source of the sound that
it describes. Common occurrences of anomatopoeas in English include animal noises such as oink, miaow,
roar, croak, and chirp.

4.10 Eponyms
Eponyms are words derived from proper names and are another of the very many creative ways that the
vocabulary of a language expands. Following are examples of eponyms derived from proper names
Sandwich = named for the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who put his food between two slices of bread so that
he could eat while he gambled.
Robot = after the mechanical creatures in the Czech writer Katel Capek’s play R.U.S the initials standing
for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”
Gargantuan = name for Gargantua, the creature with a huge appetite created by Rabelias.
Jumbo = after an elephant brought to the United States by P.T Barnum. (“Jumbo Olives” need not be as
big as an elephant however.)

4.11 Toponymy
Toponymy is the general name for any place or geographical entry. Place names provide the most valuable
geographical reference system in the world. Consistency and accuracy are essential in referring to a place
to prevent confusion in everyday use. The exact application of toponym and its origins and meanings are
all important facts.

4.12 Replication
Replication creates a replicate – a string of phonemes that is a copy of the replicand, this latter being a
part of the replication base (= root plus perhaps other signs) – and places the replicate to the right, to the
left or inside of the base. In other words, replication iterates a designated part of the word form in
question and includes the copy in the resulting word form. Replications are classified according to the
signs they – it can be characterized by the following seven features:

 Number of iterations: reduplication (one copy is created), triplication (two copies are created),
quadruplication…
 Simple vs. complex (the replication base consists of one/of more than one sign)
 Total vs. partial (the whole replicand/ a part of the replicand is iterated)
 Exact vs. non-exact (the replicand is iterated without/with changes)
 Contiguous vs. distant (in the resulting word-form the replicate is/ is not in contact with the base)
 Left vs. right (the replicate is placed before/behind the base)
 Continuous vs. discontinuous (the copy does not interrupt/interrupts the base)
As a result, there are as many possible types of reduplications and that of triplications. Reduplications are
by far the most common subclass of replication.

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4.13 Stress shifting

As English is a stress language, shift in stress pattern plays a great role in creating new words to the pre-
existing list of vocabulary. Sometimes stress may distinct nouns from verbs. For example, words like
conflict, record, permit, present, transfer and telephone can serve as noun classes as well as verb classes
depending on the position of the syllable stress.
4.14 Coinage
Coinage is the invention of totally new words. The typical process of coinage usually involves the extension
of a product name from a specific reference to a more general one. For example, think of Kleenex, Xerox,
and Kodak. These started as names of specific products, but now they are used as the generic names for
different brands of these types of products.
4.15 Borrowing
Borrowing is taking words from another language. Borrowed words are called loan words. A loanword is
a word which is directly taken into one language from another language with little or no translation.
English has many words borrowed from French, German, Latin, Greek, and Turkish.
CHAPTER - FIVE
COMPOUND WORDS
5.1 The internal structure of compounds
The way of forming a new word, besides by means of derivational and inflectional affixes, is by the
technique of word formation which is commonly called compounding. Compound words are words
formed by combining two or more words into one unit. Study the words below:

Each of words above consists of two parts. These two parts make up one meaningful unit. The two parts
can be as follows:

Many words have meanings that are predictable, more or less, on the basis of their components. Some
words are so predictable, indeed, that they do not have to be listed as lexical items. This predictability of
meaning depends on how the structure of complex word forms guides their interpretation. Even with
words that are lexically listed, unless their meaning is entirely different from what one might expect: such
guidance is relevant.

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In some words, structure is straightforward. For example, the lexeme helpful is derived from the noun
base help by means of the adjective-forming suffix -ful. Because there are only two elements in this word
form, it may seem there is not much to say about its structure. Even with just these two components,
however, there is clearly a distinction between the actual word form helpful and the ill-formed one *-ful-
hel.
5.2 Headed (endocentric) compounds
In a compound that consists of two lexemes, it is really the lexeme stems that are combined - in this
respect compounding is no different from derivational affixes, which attach to stems, i.e. lexemes without
their inflection. Thus, we get English compounds such as lipstick (not *lipsstick), although it is used for
both lips, and child support (not *children support), even if several children are supported, and
drawbridge (not *drewbridge), even if the bridge was 'drawn' only in the past. The first compound
member is a stem, not an inflected word-form.

From the point of view of semantics, not much needs to be said about the compounds that we have seen
so far. The first compound member generally serves to modify and narrow the denotation of the second
compound member, or, in other words, the compound is a hyponym of its second member. Thus, a lipstick
is a special kind of stick (not a special kind of lip), a drawbridge is a special kind of bridge and a child
support is a special kind of support. Since semantically the second member is in this sense more important,
it is referred to as the head of the compound; and the modifying element is called the dependent. In
English, the compound head is always the second member. The semantic head of the compound is inside
the compound; and such types of compounds are technically called endocentric compounds.
The semantic relations that obtain between the head and the dependent in compounds are quite diverse:
purpose (writing desk, lipstick), appearance (hardware, sword fish), location (garden chair, sea bird), event
participant (e.g. agent: swansong, patient: flower-seller), and so on. However, such a classification is not
particularly useful, because there seem to be almost no restrictions on the kinds of semantic relations
that may hold between the dependent and the head in compounds (at least in the languages in which
compound meanings have been studied extensively). It is our knowledge of the world that tells us that a
flower-seller is someone who sells flowers, and that a street-seller is someone who sells something on the
street. But it is easy to imagine a world (say, a fable about commercially active bees) in which selling
happens on flowers, and even easier to imagine a world in which people specialize in selling entire streets.
English morphology does not seem to say more than that the dependent must be in some kind of
pragmatically sensible relation to the head.
5.3 Non-headed (exocentric) compounds
The words like faintheart alongside blackboard and greenstone are AN compound words. However,
whereas a greenstone is a kind of stone and a blackboard is a kind of board, a faintheart is not a kind of
heart but a kind of person – someone who has a faint heart, metaphorically. So, although heart is a noun,
it is not appropriate to call heart the head of the compound. Rather, faintheart is headless or non-headed
compound, in the sense that its status as a noun is not determined by either of its two components. Similar
headless AN compounds are loudmouth and redshank (a kind of bird that has red legs), and headless NN
compounds are stickleback (a kind of fish with spines on its back) and sabretooth. A few VN-type
compound nouns resemble secondary compounds in that the noun at the right is interpreted as the object
of the verb: pickpocket, killjoy, cutpurse. These too are headless, in that a pickpocket is not a kind of
pocket, for example. An implication of these analyses is as follows: if the fact that heart and pocket are

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nouns is really irrelevant to the fact that faintheart and pickpocket are nouns too, we should expect there
to be some headless nouns in which the second element is not a noun at all – and likewise, perhaps,
headless adjectives in which the second element is not an adjective. Both expectations turn out to be
correct. Some nouns consist of a verb and a preposition or adverb: take-off, sell-out, wrap-up, sit-in.
As for headless adjectives, there are quite a number consisting of a preposition and a noun: overland, in-
house, with-profits, offshore, downmarket, upscale, underweight, over-budget. The adjectival status of
these compounds can often be confirmed by their appropriateness in comparative contexts and with the
modifier very:
They live in a very downmarket neighborhood.
This year’s expenditure is even more over-budget than last year’s.
The fact that the word class of these headless compounds is not determined by any element inside them
(that they have no internal ‘center’, one might say) has led some grammarians to call them exocentric –
that is, having a ‘center’ outside themselves, figuratively speaking. According to this approach, headed
compounds would be regarded as having an internal ‘center’; and, sure enough, they are sometimes called
endocentric (as we have seen it earlier)
5.4 Compounds vs. phrases
In this chapter we will look at compounds, that is. words formed by combining roots, and the much smaller
category of phrasal words, that is items that have the internal structure of phrases but function
syntactically as words. As we will see, some types of compound are much commoner than others. There
are also some styles of writing (for example, newspaper headlines) in which compounds are especially
frequent. But first we must deal with an issue that has not arisen so far, because until now all the complex
words that we have looked at have contained at least one bound morpheme. Roots in English are mostly
free rather than bound. How can we tell, then, whether a pair of such roots constitutes a compound word
or a phrase, that is- a unit of sentence structure rather than a complex word?

A definite answer is not always possible, but there are enough clear cases to show that the distinction
between compounds and phrases is valid. Consider the expressions a green house, with its literal meaning,
and a greenhouse, meaning a glass structure (not usually green in colour!) where delicate plants are
reared. There is a difference in sound corresponding to the difference in meaning: in the first expression
the main stress is on house, while in the second the main stress is on green. This pattern of semantic
contrast between expressions stressed in different places is quite common, as in the following examples:

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

The items on the left, like green house, are phrases, because it is characteristic of phrases in English to be
stressed on the last word, unless some contrast is being stated or implied (e.g. They live in a white house,
not a yellow one! ’). The items on the right, stressed on the first element like ‘greenhouse, are generally
classified as compounds – though this stress pattern applies consistently only to compound nouns, not to
compounds in other word classes.

Apart from stress, a second criterion traditionally used for distinguishing compounds from phrases is
semantic: a compound tends to have a meaning that is more or less idiosyncratic or unpredictable. This is
true of most of the compounds in the above mentioned examples: All the compounds in are nouns, and
compound nouns are indeed the commonest type of compound in English.

There is a clear difference between compound word structure and sentence structure. But there are also
complex items that function as words, yet whose internal structure is that of a clause or phrase rather
than of a compound. There is no standard term for these items, so it is better to introduce the term phrasal
words.

An example of a phrasal word is the noun jack-in-the-box. Structurally this has the appearance of a noun
phrase in which the head noun, jack, is modified by a prepositional phrase, in the box, exactly parallel to
the phrases people in the street or (a) book on the shelf. However, it forms its plural by suffixing -s not to
the head noun (as in books on the shelf ) but to the whole expression: not ‘jacks-in-the-box ’ but jack-in-
the-boxes, as in They jumped up and down like jack-in-theboxes. Though structurally a phrase, then, it
behaves as a word. Contrast this with another item which is at least as idiosyncratic in meaning and which
has a superficially similar structure: brother-in-law. A crucial difference is that brother-in-law forms its
plural by affixing -s not to the whole expression but to the head noun: brothers-in-law. Despite its
hyphens, therefore, brother-in-law is not a word at all but a phrase.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER - SIX
INTRODUCTION TO STRUCTURES LARGER THAN WORDS
6.1 Structures of English phrases
Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax, and are closely
associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, being first proposed by Noam Chomsky in
1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as
syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar
that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are
commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase
structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency
grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

Phrase structure rules are usually of the following form:

A → B C
Meaning that the constituent is separated into the two sub-constituents A and B. Some examples for
English are as follows:
 S → NP VP
 NP → (Det) N1
 N1 → (AP) N1 (PP)
The first rule reads: An S (sentence) consists of an NP (noun phrase) followed by a VP (verb phrase). The
second rule reads: A noun phrase consists of an optional Det (determiner) followed by an N (noun). The
third rule means that an N (noun) can be preceded by an optional AP (adjective phrase) and followed by
an optional PP (prepositional phrase). The round brackets indicate optional constituents. Beginning with
the sentence symbol S, and applying the phrase structure rules successively, finally applying replacement
rules to substitute actual words for the abstract symbols, it is possible to generate many proper sentences
of English (or whichever language the rules are specified for). If the rules are correct, then any sentence
produced in this way ought to be grammatically (syntactically) correct. It is also to be expected that the
rules will generate syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical sentences, such as the following well-
known example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
This sentence was constructed by Noam Chomsky as an illustration that phrase structure rules are capable
of generating syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences. Phrase structure rules break
sentences down into their constituent parts. These constituents are often represented as tree structures.
The tree for Chomsky's sentence can be rendered as follows:

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

A constituent is any word or combination of words that is dominated by a single node. Thus each individual
word is a constituent. Further, the subject NP Colorless green ideas, the minor NP green ideas, and the VP
sleep furiously are constituents. Phrase structure rules and the tree structures that are associated with
them are a form of immediate constituent analysis.

In transformational grammar, systems of phrase structure rules are supplemented by transformation

rules, which act on an existing syntactic structure to produce a new one (performing such operations as
negation, passivization, etc.). These transformations are not strictly required for generation, as the
sentences they produce could be generated by a suitably expanded system of phrase structure rules
alone, but transformations provide greater economy and enable significant relations between sentences
to be reflected in the grammar.
6.2 Types of English phrases
A phrase is a group of words without both a subject and predicate. Phrases combine words into a larger
unit that can function as a sentence element. For example, a participial phrase can include adjectives,
nouns, prepositions and adverbs; as a single unit, however, it functions as one big adjective modifying a
noun (or noun phrase). See the following overview of phrases for more.
 Noun Phrase – “The crazy old lady in the park feeds the pigeons every day.” A noun phrase consists of
a noun and all of its modifiers, which can include other phrases (like the prepositional phrase in the park).
o Appositive Phrase – “Bob, my best friend, works here” or “My best friend Bob works here.” An
appositive (single word, phrase, or clause) renames another noun, not technically modifying it. See this
page from the Armchair Grammarian for everything you ever wanted to know about appositives.
o Gerund Phrase – “I love baking cakes.” A gerund phrase is just a noun phrase with a gerund as its head.
o Infinitive Phrase – “I love to bake cakes.” An infinitive phrase is a noun phrase with an infinitive as its
head. Unlike the other noun phrases, however, an infinitive phrase can also function as an adjective or an
adverb.
 Verb Phrase – The verb phrase can refer to the whole predicate of a sentence (I was watching my
favorite show yesterday) or just the verb or verb group (was watching).
 Adverbial Phrase – The adverbial phrase also has two definitions; some say it’s a group of adverbs (very
quickly), while others say it’s any phrase (usually a prepositional phrase) that acts as an adverb.
 Adjectival Phrase – As with adverbial phrases, adjectival phrases can either refer to a group of adjectives
(full of toys) or any phrase (like a participial or prepositional phrase) that acts as an adjective.  Participial
Phrase – “Crushed to pieces by a sledgehammer, the computer no longer worked” or “I think the guy
sitting over there likes you.” A participial phrase has a past or present participle as its head. Participial
phrases always function as adjectives.
 Prepositional Phrase – “The food on the table looked delicious.” A prepositional phrase, which has a
preposition as its head, can function as an adjective, adverb, or even as a noun.
 Absolute Phrase – “My cake finally baking in the oven, I was free to rest for thirty minutes.” Unlike
participial phrases, absolute phrases have subjects and modify the entire sentence, not one noun. Almost
a clause, the absolute phrase can include every sentence element except a finite verb. For example, “My
cake finally baking in the oven” would be its own sentence if you just added one finite verb: “My cake was
finally baking in the oven.”

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER - SEVEN
TYPES AND STRUCTURES OF ENGLISH CLAUSES
7.1 Introduction
A clause is a group of related words. There are several different types of clauses that can be used to
develop sentences. Clauses may generally be divided into dependent and independent types. Let's
take a look at some of these types and discuss how they are important in our writing.

An independent clause is a clause that can stand alone. You can think of this as a simple sentence.
There is a subject, verb, and complete thought. For example, if I were to write: 'John passed the ball,'
I would have a complete, simple sentence. I have a subject, John; a verb, passed; and a complete
thought, the ball. Although independent clauses can stand alone, we often join them with other
clauses to make more complex sentences. Complex sentences allow us to use various types of
sentences in our writing, which is important. We do not want to bore our audience by having the
same type of simple sentence structure throughout!

A dependent clause is a clause that cannot stand alone; it depends on another clause to make it a
complete sentence. You can recognize a dependent clause because it starts with a subordinate
conjunction. A subordinate conjunction is a word that joins ideas together and shows the relationship
between ideas. Some of the subordinate conjunctions that you may already know are 'because,'
'although,' 'where,' and 'after.' Subordinate conjunctions may represent time, cause and effect, and
contrast. It is important to remember that a dependent clause is not a complete thought. For example,
if I were to write, 'Because it was not his turn,' this would not be a complete thought. Your audience
does not know what happened because it was not his turn. To make a dependent clause a complete
thought, you should combine it with an independent one: 'Because it was not his turn, John passed
the ball.' There are three main types of dependent clauses: relative, noun, and adverbial. A relative
clause is an adjective clause that describes the noun.

It is important to remember that a relative clause is not a complete thought! They are used in
sentences to further describe the noun. You can identify a relative clause by looking for three main
components:
1. It will contain a subject and a verb.
2. It will begin with a relative pronoun or relative adverb. These would include 'who,' 'whom,'
'whose,' 'that,' and 'which' for a pronoun and 'when,' 'where,' or 'why' for an adverb. Looking for these
signal words can help you identify this type of clause!
3. The relative clause will function as an adjective, answering questions about the noun, such as:
'Which one?' 'What kind?' 'How many?'
There are two ways to write a relative clause. First, you would have a relative pronoun, subject, and
then verb. For example, 'when we go to the movies.' 'When' is the relative pronoun, 'we' is the subject,
and 'go' is the verb. Second, you would have a relative pronoun as a subject followed by the verb. For
example, 'who walked out of the store.' In this example, 'who' is our subject and 'walked' is the verb.
Or for another example, 'that swarmed us.' In this example, 'that' is the subject and 'swarmed' is the
verb.
Remember that relative clauses cannot stand alone. These are incomplete thoughts and should be
joined to an independent clause to become a complete sentence. In our earlier examples, we could
write, 'When we go to the movies, we always buy popcorn.' The phrase 'we always buy popcorn' is an

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independent clause that completes the phrase. Or in another example, 'who walked out of the store,'
we could write, 'Those are the two children who walked out of the store.' In the final example, 'that
swarmed us,' we could write, 'We killed the bees that swarmed us.'

When writing a relative clause, it is important to punctuate them correctly. Remember that these
clauses describe a noun. Sometimes these descriptions are necessary to the meaning of the sentence,
and other times they are just an extra detail. An essential relative clause contains information that is
needed in the sentence. Because the information is needed to understand the sentence, we would
not include any commas. For example, 'The children who eat their dinner can have candy.' The phrase,
'who eat their dinner,' is essential to the sentence because it is only these children who can have
candy. If we did not have this phrase, then it would read like all the children can have candy, which is
not true. This would change the noun or subject of our sentence. It will also change the meaning of
the sentence itself.

A nonessential relative clause is not necessary for the meaning of the sentence. Because of this, it
does require commas. The information is helpful, but the meaning of the sentence and the noun
would still be clear without the clause. For example, 'Aiden and his brother Julian, who is the oldest
of the two, enjoy spending time together.' The clause, 'who is the oldest of the two,' adds extra details,
but the sentence would still be clear without it. We would still know that it was Aiden and Julian who
were brothers and that they enjoy spending time together. We would still have the same subject of
the sentence without the relative clause, and the meaning of the sentence stays the same.
How will this help my writing? Knowing how to identify relative clauses will help you avoid this type
of fragment. Remember that complete sentences require a complete thought, and these do not have
one. You will want to be sure to join these clauses with an independent one. In addition, by knowing
how to identify relative clauses, you will also know how to punctuate your sentence correctly and
avoid a common comma error. You will be able to show your audience what information is essential
to your sentence by remembering how to identify the relative clause and then punctuate correctly.

A noun clause is a dependent clause that acts like a noun. It serves the exact same function as a noun.
It can be a subject, object, or complement. Like the relative clause, a noun clause usually begins with
a relative pronoun. However, it can also begin with a subordinate conjunction. Remember, like other
dependent clauses, a noun clause will not stand alone!

For example, you could write, 'The spoiled milk I accidentally drank at breakfast made me sick,' or
'What I accidentally drank for breakfast made me sick.' Both of these sentences have the same
meaning. In the first one, you use 'spoiled milk' as the noun, but for the second one you use a noun
clause, 'what I accidentally drank for breakfast.'
Because a noun clause works as a noun, it can be used many different ways in a sentence.

1. It can be the subject of the verb, such as in the sentence, 'What my friend did was very hurtful.' In
this sentence, 'was' is the verb. What was hurtful? 'What my friend did.' This is the noun of the
sentence.
2. A noun clause can be the object of the verb. In the sentence, 'She did not know that the window
was open,' the noun clause is the object of the verb. What did she not know? 'That the window was
open.'
3. A noun clause can be the object of the preposition. For example, in the sentence, 'Kelly is the owner
of the yellow house.' What is Kelly the owner of? 'The yellow house.'

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4. A noun clause can be an adjective complement, which modifies the adjective. In the sentence,
'Aiden is sad that he had to go to bed early.' Why is Aiden sad? 'That he had to go to bed early.'
Noun clauses may seem very similar to relative clauses but are different and can be easy to identify.
First, other dependent clauses work as adverbs or adjectives; this does not. Second, remember that a
noun clause is the noun of the sentence, whereas a relative clause will be dependent on the noun of
the sentence. Finally, a noun clause is always essential to the sentence. There are times (like we
discussed) that a relative clause can be removed, but a noun clause is the noun and must be present.
How will this help my writing? Noun clauses can add creativity to your writing. For example, in our
earlier sentences we shared the same idea two different ways. If you were writing a personal story
about what you drank for breakfast, you could refer to the spoiled milk differently without confusing
your audience by using a noun clause. In addition, by recognizing a noun clause, you will recognize
the subject that is essential to your writing and construct your sentence correctly.
7.2 Clause functions
Subordinate clauses have three main sets of functions:
1. Nominal clauses have a range of functions similar to that for noun phrases Example:
subject = Learning a foreign language is no easy task.
Subject complement = The only problem in design is to relate design to people’s needs.
Direct object = I believe that a hot, humid summer has benefited the movie business.
Prepositional complement = I listened to what the candidates had to say.
Nominal relative clauses are clauses that are introduced by a nominal relative pronoun. Whereas relative
clauses post-modify nouns, nominal relative clauses have the same functions as noun phrases:
He gave his children what they wanted (dO).
Whoever said that (S) does not understand the question.
2. Modifier clauses function as modifiers in phrases. One common kind of modifier is the relative clause
which post-modifies a noun:
Drugs that are used in chemotherapy damage a patient’s healthy cells as well.
Non-finite clauses function as reduced relative clauses: The firemen battled an inferno fuelled by toxic
chemicals. (‘that was fuelled by . . .’)
Scientists found no evidence to suggest that neutrinos have mass. (‘that would
suggest that . . .’)
I was engaged in a program of research involving many chemical reactions.
(‘that involved . . .’)
Another common kind of modifier is the comparative clause, which is introduced by than or as:
She is a better doctor than I am.
He spoke more rashly than he used to do.
Norman played as fiercely as I expected.
A third kind is a post-modifier of an adjective:
Roger was afraid to tell his parents.
3. Adverbial clauses function as the adverbial element in sentence or clause structure. When a heart
attack occurs, the electronic device automatically produces charges of electricity that jolt the heart back
into a normal rhythm.

Reflecting on the past three years, she wondered whether she could have made better choices.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER - EIGHT

THEMATIC/ SEMANTIC ROLES

1. Introduction
The concept of thematic roles (or Ɵ-roles) is a means of accounting for the functions of arguments in
respect to the predicate; thematic roles are the “grammatically relevant semantic relations between
predicates and arguments” (Frawley 1992: 201). This approach was first proposed by Charles Fillmore
(1968, 1977) and was originally known as case grammar. To define the roles of arguments, Fillmore
borrows the notion of case from traditional grammar, but uses the term in a slightly different way.
Traditionally, nouns may be inflected for case, for nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and so on. But
the meaning of a case ending is difficult to determine, as is perhaps most obvious with the genitive, which
can express possessive, subjective, objective, descriptive, partitive, or adverbial meaning. The nominative
case, which denotes the grammatical function of subject of the sentence, would seem to be fairly unified
in meaning, but even it expresses a variety of concepts, including agent, cause, recipient, object, or
instrument of an action. Traditionally, it is also unclear whether the notion of case should be restricted to
case inflections - what is known as morphological case - which are used almost exclusively in a synthetic
language such as Finnish, or should embrace other formal means to express the same grammatical
functions, namely periphrases (using prepositions) and word order, which are the primary means for the
expression of case in an analytic language such as English. Since languages seem to make use of various
surface representations for the same grammatical function, Fillmore decides to use case in a new way: to
indicate “semantic case” or the underlying semantic-syntactic functional relationships. He conceives of
these semantic cases as finite in number and universal, not language specific, much like semantic features.
They are a matter of D-structure, while their formal marking is a matter of S-structure.

This approach to the function of noun phrases offers certain advantages over the purely structural
approach of syntactic analysis, where case refers to the position of a noun phrase in D-structure; for
example, the “subject” is the NP to the left of the verb or directly dominated by S, while the “direct object”
is the NP to the right of V or directly dominated by VP. As is obvious from the terms “right” and “left”,
these relations are considered for SVO word order only. While the structural approach could be modified
to account for other word orders, such as SOV, VOS, and OVS, where O is adjacent to V, it would be more
difficult to account for VSO or OSV. Case grammar abandons the idea that noun phrases are ordered in
the base; rather, it sees them as assigned a particular surface position according to their thematic role. D-
structure orders become universal since the structural notions of subject, object, and so on are eliminated.

Another advantage of case grammar is that it is able to recognize a relationship among sentences such as
the following:

 The chef roasted the meat (over the fire).

 The fire roasted the meat.

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 The meat roasted (over the fire)

In a purely structural approach, it would need to postulate three separate verbs roast with similar
semantic features but different sub-categorization rules:

 roast ____ NP (PP)

 ____ NP
 ____ (PP)

In case grammar, it is possible to see the three cases as a single verb selecting certain thematic roles,
which then appear in different surface syntactic positions. While Fillmore envisages a finite number of
universal thematic roles, there is not yet general agreement on the inventory of these roles, on their
designations, or on their definitions. Despite the fact that determination of thematic roles is described by
one scholar as “intuitionism run wild” (Dillon 1977: 73), we may consider the following as a list of some
of the possible thematic roles served by arguments in a sentence:
1. Agent (also called “actor”): the animate initiator, causer, doer, or instigator of an action who acts by
will or volition, takes responsibility for the action, and is its direct cause;
2. Force (also “author”): the inanimate cause of an action, which does not act by will orvolition;
3. Instrument (also “means”): the means by which an event is caused, or the tool, generally inanimate,
used to carry out an action; an instrument does not act but is acted upon;
(Agent, Force, and Instrument together could be considered “Cause”.)
4. Experiencer (also “dative” or “affected”): the animate being affected inwardly by a state or action;
5. Source: the place-from-which or person-from-whom an action emanates;
6. Goal (also “recipient”): the place-to-which or person-to-whom an action is directed, including indirect
objects and directional adverbs;
7. Path: the path taken in moving from one place to another in the course of an action;
8. Location (also “place”): the place-at/in-which or the time-at-which an action occurs (also “temporal”);
9. Possessor: the possessor of a thing, really a special kind of locative, since the thing and the possessor
must coincide; there are two kinds of possession, depending on whether the possessor and the thing
possessed are inherently connected, such as Judy’s head(inalienable possession) or not, such as Judy’s car
(alienable possession);
10. Beneficiary: the person or thing for which an action is performed or the person who derives something
from the actions of another;
11. Factitive (also “result” or “effected”): the object resulting from an action or state, having no prior
existence but coming about by virtue of the action or state;
12. Patient (also “affected”, “object(ive)”, or “theme”): the person or thing affected by an action, or the
entity undergoing a change.
13. Theme: the person or thing which undergoes an action, or that which is transferred or moved by an
event but otherwise unchanged;
14. Neutral (also “theme”): the person or thing which is not changed or even acted upon, but simply
present at an action:
15. Range (also “extent”): the specification or limitation of an action; and

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16. Role: a person playing a role or part in an action or state.

Note the differences between Patient, Theme, Neutral, and Factitive:

A Patient is changed in some way by the action, while a Theme is affected by the action, often by changing
location, but is itself unchanged. A Neutral is present at the event but does not undergo an action. A
Factitive comes about by virtue of the action itself.
8.2 The Expression of Thematic Roles in English
Each underlying thematic role is expressed in a variety of ways on the surface in English, including case
inflection, function word and word order. Below are examples of the most common ways in which the
different cases are expressed syntactically.
 AGENT
The logger felled the tree.
The tree was felled by the logger.
 FORCE
The wind felled the tree.
The tree was felled by the wind.
The logger felled the tree with a single blow.
 INSTRUMENT
The tree was felled with an axe.
The sweater was knitted by hand.
He used an axe to fell the tree.
Liquor killed him.
His insights impressed us.
He impressed us with his insights.
 EXPERIENCER
Marianne is lonely/feels lonely/is suffering.
I like the book. The news pleases me.
The news enraged me. The news is pleasing to me.
 SOURCE
I got the book from the library.
I got some money out of the bank.
The child took the book off the shelf.
I borrowed the book from my teacher.
His leaving pleases me (‘is a source of pleasure to’).
The sun gives off heat.
A caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

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The plane left (from) Boston.

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Both Agent and Force are generally expressed as the subject of an active sentence or in the byphrase of a
passive sentence and only rarely as object. Instrument is most often expressed in a with or by phrase.
Experiencer is normally the subject of a state verb. The roles of Source, Goal, Path, and Location are
normally expressed prepositionally: Source typically with from, out of, or off, Goal with to, Path with via,
along, or over, and Location with on, in, over, behind, or under. However, Goal is a complex role including
indirect objects (occurring in three different positions in the sentence) as well as locative goals and
directional adverbs.

8.3 Dual Thematic Roles Often an argument may have more than one thematic role. Dual roles occur with
arguments of certain classes of verbs. First, the animate subject of many verbs of motion, such as run,
walk, swim, wade, climb, stand up, roll over, or travel, is both Agent and Theme:

The subject both performs an intentional action (sitting) and is acted upon, that is, changes location (from
standing to sitting). However, some verbs of motion, such as fall, slip, slide, or sink, may be ambiguous in
respect to thematic role:

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the edge, slid down the slope}.

Here Jack may have intentionally performed these actions (in which case Jack is both Agent and Theme),
but another interpretation of the sentences is that these are events that simply befell Jack, without his
being responsible (in which case Jack is Theme but not Agent). The second reading is obvious if one inserts
“accidentally” in the sentences above. Second, ditransitive verbs and related verbs such as give, sell, lend,
hire, rent, supply, furnish, award, issue, show, or tell show the following thematic structures:

In each case, the subject is both an Agent performing the action of presenting and the Source of the award,
while the indirect object, Sam, is the Goal of the award. However, since the position immediately following
the verb seems to be closely associated with the Theme (or Patient) role, the movement of the indirect
object to this position makes it Theme as well, or part of what the sentence is “about”, as we will see in
the next chapter. Third, verbs such as spray, cram, pile, stack, smear, mark, engrave, plant, beat, or hit
show the following thematic structures:

Again, the position directly following the verb seems to correlate with the Patient role. The assignment of
a secondary role to the Location role seems to affect the view taken of the situation. The second sentence
has a strong implication of ‘completeness’ or ‘total affectedness’, that is, that the wall is completely
covered, since the wall is not only Location but also Patient in this case - that is, the thing affected by the
action - whereas in the other case the wall is merely Location. This sense of completeness seems to hold
up even when the sentences are passivized (suggesting that thematic roles are assigned at D-structure,
before arguments are moved):

The wall was sprayed with paint.

Further evidence that the sense of ‘total affectedness’ is associated with the role of Patient or Theme,
rather than merely with the position immediately following the verb, is provided by sentences such as
the following, in which the relevant argument is in subject position:

atient

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

CHAPTER - NINE
ENGLISH SENTENCE PATTERNS
9.1 Introduction
Grammar deals with the rules for combining words into larger units. The largest unit that is described in
grammar is normally the sentence. However, defining a ‘sentence’ is notoriously difficult, for the reasons
we’ll now discuss. It is sometimes said that a sentence expresses a complete thought. This is a notional
definition: it defines a term by the notion or idea it conveys. The difficulty with this definition lies in fixing
what is meant by a ‘complete thought’. There are notices, for example, that seem to be complete in
themselves but are not generally regarded as sentences: Exit, Danger, 50 mph speed limit.

On the other hand, there are sentences that clearly consist of more than one thought. Here is one
relatively simple example:
This week marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica, a fundamental work for the whole of modern science and a key influence on the
philosophy of the European Enlightenment.

How many ‘complete thoughts’ are there in this sentence? We should at least recognize that the part
after the comma introduces two additional points about Newton’s book: (1) that it is a fundamental work
for the whole of modern science, and (2) that it was a key influence on the philosophy of the European
Enlightenment. Yet this example would be acknowledged by all as a single sentence, and it is written as a
single sentence.

9.2 Syntactic Structures

There are two distinct aspects of syntactic structure; they are labelled as ‘relational structure’ and
‘constituent structure’. The previous two chapters were devoted to relational structure, and in this
chapter the focus is on the other aspect of syntactic structure, constituent structure. The constituent
structure of a sentence is concerned with the units into which the words in a sentence are grouped, which
are the constituents, and their hierarchical organization. Constituent structure of the kind to be discussed
in this chapter is also sometimes referred to as phrase structure. Let us consider the sentence ‘The new
teacher read a new book in the library.’ We can put the constituent elements in labelled bracket as follow.
[S [NP [Det The] [A new] [N teacher]NP] [VP [V read] [NP [Det a] [A new] [N book]NP] [PP [P in] [NP [Det
the] [N library] NP] PP] VP] S]

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ADU GK. English Morphology and Syntax

The above diagram shows the preliminary phrase structure tree the previous sentence. It is now clear what ‘being
a constituent’ means formally. In terms of a tree structure like this one, a group of words is a constituent if there is
a single node in the tree which uniquely and completely dominates them. The sequence the new teacher is a
constituent because the three words are uniquely and completely dominated by node NP1. Similarly, a new book
and the library are constituents because each sequence is uniquely and exhaustively dominated by a single node,
NP2 for a new book and NP3 for the library. In plus the library form a constituent, because the PP node uniquely
and completely dominates them. Read plus a new book plus in the library make up a constituent for the same
reason: there is a single node, VP, which uniquely and exhaustively dominates them. The clause as a whole meets
this condition, as there is a single node (S) which exhaustively and uniquely dominates the whole clause. There is
no node uniquely and completely dominating the sequences teacher read, read a, book in or in the, and accordingly,
these sequences are not constituents. Each of the constituents represented in the labeled tree diagram emerged
from the results of the three tests for constituency presented in the previous chapter. These tests can be used to
diagnose instances of structural ambiguity. For example the sentence ‘Robin decided on the train’ can have two
readings (a) On the train, Robin decided and (b) The train was decided by Robin as in the following labeled tree
structure.

The left tree represents the prepositional-verb interpretation: decide on is a transitive verb and the train
is its direct object. The right tree depicts the PP reading: decide is an intransitive verb, and the PP on the
train is an adjunct locative modifier. The sequence on the train is a constituent only in the right tree, not
in the left, while the sequence decide on is a constituent only in the left tree, not in the right.
Coordination of Adjectives inside NP

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