GRAMMAR I GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS Grammatical units are meaningful elements which combine with each other in a structural pattern.

Essentially, grammar is the system which organizes and controls these form-meaning relationships. The types of grammatical units can be graded according to size of the unit. In the simplest cases, a unit consists of one or more elements on the level below: 1. a clause consists of one or more phrases. 2. a phrase consists of one or more words. 3. a word consists of one or more morphemes. Morphemes are parts of words i.e. stems, prefixes and suffixes. For example un + friend + ly contains three morphemes: a prefix un-, a stem friend and suffix ly. The part of grammar dealing with morphemes is morphology. The grammar dealing with other types of grammatical units (words, phrases, clauses, sentences) is known as syntax. Semantics refers to the meaning the words convey Grammatical units can be combined to form longer written texts or spoken interaction which is known as discourse. Language can also be analyzed in terms of phonemes (the individual sounds which make up a language) and graphemes (the written symbols we use to communicate language). In general, grammatical units are described in terms of four factors: their structure (e.g. words in terms of base and affixes, phrases in terms of heads and modifiers and clauses in terms of clause elements), their syntactic role (e.g. a phrase can have the role of object, subject or adverbial in a clause) , their meaning (adverbs for example give information about time, place or manner) and the way they are used in discourse function (use in different registers, frequency and what they refer to as for example the pronouns). INTRODUCTION TO WORDS: Words are considered the basic element of language. They are relatively fixed in their internal form but they are independent in their role in larger units. In the following example we can see how they can be inserted between but not within words. There were two pedal-bins against the wall. There were two (large new) pedal-bins (standing) against the (side) wall. There are three major families of words: Lexical words: are the main carriers of information in a text or speech, they can be divided into different word classes: nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They are the most numerous and belong to open classes which means that they are being added to or changed all the time for example: privatize, retiree, brownish, fanwise, etc.. They often have a complex internal structure for example un + friend + li + ness. They can be heads of phrases and they are the ones that are generally stressed in speech. They are the ones that remain if a sentence is compressed as in newspaper headlines e.g. HOUSE DESTROYED BY FIRE, MISSING BOY FOUND UNHARMED. This is called BLOCK LANGUAGE. 1

Function words: they can be divided into word classes such as prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs and pronouns. They usually relate the lexical words to each other and help us interpret the separate units. They belong to closed classes because they are limited and fixed (for example the coordinators: and, or, but, nor). They occur frequently in any kind of text. Inserts: They are found mostly in spoken language and tend to be freely inserted in discourse. They generally carry emotional or discoursal meanings and are used to express the speakers emotional response to a situation such as: oh, ah, wow, yeah, no, okay, hm, uh-huh. There are 8 major classes of inserts: interjections (oh); greeting / farewells (hi, bye); discourse markers (well); attention-getters (hey); response-getters (okay?); response forms (right): polite formulas (thank you), and expletives (damn, which are taboo words and can sometimes be offensive. **************************