Essential Morphosyntactical Elements of English
Essential Morphosyntactical Elements of the English Language
Morphology vs. Syntax
Morphosyntax moves between two essential units: the minor unit called a word and the major unit called a sentence. Let’s now look at both.
The Word
Words are formed by two essential elements:
- Lexemes (the root or invariable part).
- Morphemes (inflections of gender, number, mode, etc.).
The Formation of Words
Morphology recognizes two main fields through which words have been modified or formed:
- Inflection refers to the form in which words can vary to allow the expression of grammatical contrasts in a phrase: singular/plural, past/present/future, etc.
- Derivation studies the principles governing the construction of new words, without referring to the grammatical function these words may perform in a sentence.
According to Quirk, the processes through which a root of a word may be modified are:
- Affixation
- Conversion
- Composition
- Reduplication
- Clipping
- Blending
- Acronyms
Parts of Speech
Distinct existing classes of words or “parts of speech” in Quirk. This differentiates two classes:
- Open class: composed of nouns, adjectives, lexical verbs, and adverbs.
- Closed class: fundamentally composed of determiners, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, modal and auxiliary verbs.
The Sentence
- Traditionally a main distinction has been established where we divide the sentence into the “subject” and the “predicate”.
- We may carry out a more complex analysis through which a sentence is composed of five units, called “elements of the sentence”. They are as follows: Subject, Verb, Complement, Object, Adverbial phrase.
Let’s describe each one.
- The Verb
According to Quirk and Greenbaum, we can classify them in two forms:
1) Stative and Dynamic
2) Intensive and Extensive
- Complement
- Complement of the subject: is related to the subject of the sentence
- Complement of the object: is related to the object of the sentence
- The Object
- Direct object: is the most frequent type of object and should always be present if an indirect object appears in the sentence
- Indirect object: almost always precedes the direct object. It generally deals with a noun that refers to an action of a verb and the verb normally receives it
- Adverbs
Adverbs are words that modify:
- a verb (e.g., He drove slowly)
- an adjective (e.g., He drove a very fast car)
- another adverb (e.g., She moved quite slowly down the aisle)
If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb (modifying the verb of a sentence), it is called an Adverb Clause: (e.g., When this class is over, we’re going to the party)
When a group of words not containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb, it is called an adverbial phrase.
Adverbs often function as intensifiers, conveying a greater or lesser emphasis to something. Intensifiers are said to have three different functions: they can emphasize, amplify, or downtone.
Types of Sentences
We can classify the sentences from distinct criteria: If we combine all the elements analyzed up to now, we can establish a sentence typology, based on that realized by Randolph Quirk, which is summarized in the following schema:
Sentence Types
- S V intr e.g., Someone was crying
- S V trans Do e.g., My mother enjoys parties
- S V cop Cs e.g., The city became totally independent
- S V cop As e.g., She has been in my house
- S V trans Io Do e.g., Tom gave him a cup of coffee
- S V trans Do Co e.g., Most people consider this pub quite expensive
- S V trans Do Ao e.g., You must put it on the table
Paying attention to the structure of the sentences, we can establish the following classification: simple and multiple (compound – complex)
Simultaneously, from a syntactical viewpoint, we make a classification distinguishing four groups of sentences: Declarations, Interrogatives, Imperatives, and Exclamations.