Grammar for Grown-ups

WORD CLASSES

Many of us were taught at school that words are divided into groups known as parts of speech. That is an incomplete description and is no longer used. We speak instead of word classes. They’re generally reckoned to be noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, determiner, preposition and conjunction (divided into subordinator and coordinator). The first four (but excluding pronouns) are lexical words and the rest are functional words.

The distinctions are not as clear as such a list suggests. The same word can be used sometimes in one class and at other times in another: ‘leaves’ can be both the plural of the noun leaf and a form of the verb leave. Moreover, a word can fall into different classes depending on context without changing its basic meaning. In Fight the good fight, the word fight appears first as a verb and then as a noun.

WHAT IS A WORD?

You might think you know what a word is, but can you say how many words there are in this sentence? You might say 21 and in one sense you’d be right. A word is a grammatical unit larger than a morpheme, but smaller than a phrase. A written word is a string of letters which has a space at each end, and which can form part of the structure of a sentence or which can be used to convey meaning, or both. In speech, a word is not always phonologically distinct, but it shares the other features of a written word.

But, to return to the first sentence, should we really count word and words separately? Is it right to count you twice? And how should we consider is and are? There are labels to help us get around this kind of difficulty. The word that the word processing program counts is an orthographic word (or a token) and the word you look up in a dictionary is a lexeme. So that first sentence has 21 orthographic words but only 17 lexemes: you, might, think, know, what, a, word, but, can, say, how, many, there, in, this, sentence and be. Be itself doesn’t appear in the sentence at all, but is and are are two manifestations of it.

ARE THEY ALL THE SAME ?

No. The example just discussed contains the phrase in this sentence. Three words, three lexemes, but there’s a difference between the first and the last on the one hand and the third on the other.  This tells us something about sentence, but it doesn’t really have much meaning in isolation. If we just say the word sentence on the other hand it conveys meaning, if not very much. Such words are called lexical words and they are the words in a sentence that contain information. The number of such words is always growing, or at least changing, and for that reason they belong to the open class of words: the class is open to receive newcomers. Words like  this are function words and include determiners, coordinators and auxiliary verbs. They belong to the closed class of words, a class that does not welcome strangers.

SMALLEST UNIT OF MEANING?

No. Take a word like willingness. It is composed of three components. The basis is the verb will. We can add -ing to it and get willing. We can then add –ness and get willingness. Each of the three components contains part of the meaning of the whole word. These components are called morphemes. They, not words, are the smallest unit of meaning, although a word, such as word, can itself be a morpheme as it cannot be broken down any further in terms of meaning.