9 - GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE

Summary

Grammatical categories

The term grammar in this chapter includes both what linguists call inflectional morphology and what they call syntax.

Morphology describes the rules that govern the minimal meaningful units of a language, called morphemes, and the way those minimal units are combined to make words. For example, English noun morphemes (e.g., dog) permit various suffix morphemes – called inflections – to be appended to indicate plurality (dogs), possession (spelled dog's but pronounced exactly like dogs), and both plurality and possession (spelled dogs' and again pronounced the same as dogs). Similarly, the verb bark is a morpheme that combines with inflectional suffixes to indicate grammatical agreement (spelled-s), past tense and past participle (-ed in both cases for bark), and progressive aspect and gerundive form (for which-ing serves a dual role). Prefix morphemes (e.g., re- for verbs and non- for nouns) will not be treated here, as linguists generally consider them to be features of word formation (termed derivational morphology) rather than features of the grammar of English. In practice, for English, linguists generally restrict the term inflectional morphology to the kinds of suffixes for nouns and verbs already exemplified here; to the various forms of the personal pronouns (e.g., I, me, my, mine); and to comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (i.e., big, bigger, biggest).