What is Grammar? What are the basic units of grammar? What are
variable and invariable words? What are the differences between free and bound
morphemes and roots and affixes? Is word-order important in English? What is
word-class analysis in English?
Until fairly recent years, many linguists divided grammar into
morphology and syntax, but Chomsky and the transformational-generative
linguists divided it into morphology, syntax and phonology. Grammar is
concerned with the description and analysis of stretches of utterances or
stretches of writing and is organised on two dimensions: syntagmatic and
paradigmatic. It seeks to discover the grammatical linguistic universals shared
by all languages, i.e., universal grammar.
In
the European tradition grammar has been built on the word as the basic unit.
But linguists have pointed out that within the grammatical structure of words,
smaller units must be recognised. These are called morphemes. Grammar operates
between the upper limit of the sentence and the lower limit of the morpheme.
Variable words are those in which
ordered and regular series of grammatically different word forms are found,
wherein part remains relatively constant and the variations in the other parts
are matched by similar variations in other words. In English WALK, WALKS,
WALKING, WALKED, CAT, CATS, etc., are variable words. Words appearing in only
one form are invariable words, such as English SINCE, WHEN, SELDOM, etc.
A free morpheme is one that may
constitute a word (free form) by itself; a bound morpheme is one that must
appear with at least one other morpheme, bound or free, in a word. In English
CATS, ‘cat’ is a free morpheme while ‘-s’ is a bound morpheme. Morphemes may be
divided into roots and affixes; the root is being that part of a word structure
which is left when all the affixes have been removed. Root morphemes may be
bound or free and they are not limited in number. Affixes are bound morphemes
and they are limited in number. All words may be said to contain a root
morpheme and some words contain more than one root. In the English word LOVELY,
‘love’ is the root and ‘ly’ is the affix. Bound roots are relatively few, but
some are found, such as –ceive, -tain and –cur in receive, retain, and recur. A
few English roots have bound and free variants, such as sleep and slep- and
child and child- . Affixes may be divided formally into three major positional
classes: prefix, infix and suffix. In English re- and pre- are prefixes while
–s and –ly are suffixes. English does not have true infixes except in one mode
of analysis of some plurals like foot-feet and colloquial Singabloodypore and guaran-damn-tee.
Compound words in English may include one or more bound roots as in
‘ethnobotony’ (ethno-botan-y, bound root+bound root+suffix).
Word order in English is essential to
syntax. Changing the word order may change the meaning of English sentences and
sometimes can render them ungrammatical.
The
men eat
†Men
the eat
The
hunter killed the tiger
The
tiger killed the hunter
Word class analysis has long been
familiar in Europe under the title PARTS OF SPEECH, and for many centuries grammarians
have operated with nine word classes or parts of speech: noun, verb, pronoun,
adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article, and interjection. Words
in frequent use have to be classified under more than one head. The English
classes NOUN, VERB and ADJECTIVE are required respectively for words like
‘death’, ‘pursue’ and ‘malicious’ each of which belongs to one class only.
Words like ‘work’ belong both to the NOUN and VERB classes. Words like ‘mature’
belong to the VERB and ADJECTIVE classes. Words like ‘choice’ belong to the
ADJECTIVE and NOUN classes (choicest flowers; you may take your choice). The
English word ‘round’ belongs to five classes:
1.
One round is enough = noun
2.
You round the bend quickly = verb
3.
A round tower = adjective
4.
He came round = adverb
5.
He wondered around the tower = preposition
Word classes may be OPEN or CLOSED; an open class is unlimited in
membership, such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs in English. A closed
class contains a fixed and limited number of members, such as pronouns,
prepositions and conjunctions in English.
Source:
Robins, R. (1964). General linguistics: An introductory survey.
London: Longmans.
