§ Grammar – the set of rules that describe the structure of a language and control the way that sentences are formed
§ Morphology – the study of how words are formed in a language
§ Syntax – the rules about how words are arranged and connected to make phrases and sentences
Units of speech
Speech consists of continuous sounds. All speech consists of meaningful units that are created by regular, always valid, rules:
§ Discourse (context) – everything what influences the meaning of a sentence (situation changes the meaning of a entence)
§ Sentence and clause
§ Phrase – 4 basic types: noun, verb, adverb, adjective and prepositional phrase
§ Words
§ Morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit which can be one word or a part of a word, which can not be further divided into smaller units (flower/s)
The | weather | has | turned | very | cold | just | recently |
Noun phrase | Verb phrase | Adjective phrase | Adverbial phrase | ||||
determ. | noun | primary v. | lexical v. | adverb | adject. | adverb | adverb |
1 | 1 | 1 | 2 turn/ed | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 recent/ly |
Word classes
§ closed – the number of words is stable, no new members are accepted, they function as grammatical words (pronouns, prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, numerals (they stand separately))
§ opened – new words are coined, what means, that this category accepts new members (items) and their number is changeable and they reflect whole society ( nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs)
Sentence elements
Sentence elements are:
Subject,
Verb,
Object,
Adverbials of manner, place & time,
Subject or Object complement.
Object is either direct (accusative) or indirect.
“I gave him flowers.” - HIM is an indirect object (dative) and FLOWERS is a direct object
“I gave flowers to him. “ - TO is a preposition of dative
When there is only one object in a sentence, it is always direct! Indirect object can not stand without direct object in a sentence!
Subject always stands in front of a finite verb form. Object stands after a finite verb form.
Subject complement – adds additional information to the subject, can be a noun (“I am a man.” - A MAN is additional information to the subject) or an adjective (“I am happy.”).
Object complement – adds additional information to the object, can be a noun or an adjective as well (“I consider you a genius.” - A GENIUS is an object complement as it adds additional information to YOU).
“I gave you flowers.” - “Flowers were given to you.”
“You were given the flowers.” Here we have two objects (you and flowers), so we can make two passive sentences.
“I consider you a genius.” - “You are considered to be a genius.” - “impossible ! “ In this sentence there is only one object (you), (a genius) is not an object, it is object complement, and so only one passive sentence can be made.
