Grammatical function of words and morphemes
Grammatical function of words
When preparing a vocabulary lesson it
is important to think about some questions in order to clarify how to use the vocabulary
accurately by avoiding potential grammatical errors
Regular/Irregular forms:
When presenting language teachers should
clarify regular and common irregular forms. In some cases they require special
attention such as in irregular verbs, verb patterns, countable and uncountable
nouns, adjective versus adverb.
Checklist:
“Working with Words” Pages 44, 45, Ruth Gairns
and Stuart Redman, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Grammatical
function of morphemes
Morphemes: the minimal parts of words that contain
meaning
Bound morphemes: Cannot be used independently, they need to be
bound to another morpheme
Free morphemes: Can stand alone
grammatical morpheme: Markers such as the past
participle 'ed used in the past tense, the present participle 'ing'
used in the present progressive, or third person singular 's'. Here are some
examples:
present
progressive ing:
He is playing.
plurals s:
Ten
pencils.
possesive 's:
John's hat.
past
tense ed:
I
cleaned the floor.
girls = girl + -s
It seems that girls can
be broken down into two parts, the first of which refers to something in
the world (a
young female human being) and the second indicating a grammatical category – in this case number – and specifying plural.
The same
approach can easily be applied to other kinds of words.
kicked = kick + -ed
While girls is
a noun kicked is a verb, yet the same rules apply. Kicked can be segmented into the first part
that describes a kind of action (kick) and the second part that adds the
information past tense (-ed). Tense is another grammatical category that
can be encoded morphologically in English.
Think about
what kinds of words take which endings for a moment. Only verbs (talked,
laughed, pushed, loved) allow us to add
information about tense, whereas only nouns (girls, boys, zebras, chairs)
permit marking number.
Grammatical Morphemes (two types)
Definition:
Signal grammatical and semantic roles or modify or qualify meaning (“bound” or
“free”):
Free Grammatical Morphemes:
(basically, function words)
A “closed class” Defn:
Words that can stand alone which (1) Signal grammatical & semantic
roles & relationships;
(2) Qualify or
modify meaning (e.g., gender for pronouns)
Articles, prepositions, conjunctions, disjunctions, pronouns
Examples: the, a an, to, of, by, for, and, but, his,
her
Bound Grammatical Morphemes
“Inflectional Morphemes” Defn: Suffixes that (1) indicate grammatical & semantic roles and relationships;
and (2)
Qualify or modify meaning.
Complete list:
{-pl}: plural
morpheme
{-poss}: possessive
{-3 rd person sg. present}
{-present participle}
{-past participle}
{-er comparative} “higher”
{-est superlative} “highest”
part of speech unchanged
(happy
– happily : The part of speech would change from adjective to adverb)
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