Download Grammatical categories Chapter 2 PowerPoint

The grammatical categories of
words and their inflections
Kuiper and Allan Chapter 2.1
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Word and lexeme
• Examine the following simple dictionary
entry.
• sept , n. Clan, esp. in Ireland.
• Word and lexeme
– A lexeme is a three part symbol:
•
•
•
•
form (or a number of forms)
syntactic category
meaning
Lexemes also have non linguistic properties, usage.
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Grammatical/syntactic
categories
• determine where in a sentence a word can
fit.
• Two ways to identify the category
– looking at the structure of phrases and sentences
• done in chapter 7
– looking at the inflection of words
• done next because it is part of looking at word structure
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Inflection & stem
• inflected forms of TRY
– try, tries, tried, trying, as in the following
sentences: The horse must try, The horse tries,
The horse tried, The horse is trying.
– Each is a grammatical word form. The
grammatical endings which create these
different grammatical word forms are termed
inflections.
• stem
– is the form of the lexeme to which they are
attached.
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Morphological processes
• The processes whereby words come to have internal
structure such as a stem and inflection are
morphological processes.
• The categories for which words inflect are often
called morphosyntactic categories. e.g. tense
which accounts for the past tense inflection -ed in
tri-ed is an example of a morphosyntactic category.
• Properties such a present tense or past tense are
therefore morphosyntactic properties.
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Grammatical categories and
inflection
• Not all grammatical categories of words
inflect.
• When they do, the inflection tells you what
the category of the word is.
– i.e. If a word can take a plural inflection, then it
is a noun.
• The converse is not always the case.
– ie. Not all nouns inflect for plural.
– Some grammatical categories do not inflect at
all.
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Major grammatical
categories
• To begin with we will look only at four
grammatical categories:
–
–
–
–
noun
adjective
verb
preposition
• They make up the skeletal, telegraphic
structure of sentences.
– e.g. young boy sits in chair
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