2 WORDS AND WORD CLASSES

Introduction:
English grammar is the structure of expressions in the English language. The essence of
grammatical units is that they are meaningful elements and combine with each other in systematic
ways grammar is the system which organizes and controls these form-meaning relationships.
We may distinguish a hierarchy of units according to the size of unit:
-Sentence
-Clause
-Phrase
-Word
-Morpheme
A sentence consists of clauses, a clause consists of one or more phrases, a phrase consists of one
or more words, a word of one or more morphemes, a morpheme consists of one or more
phonemes
Morphology: the part of grammar dealing with morphemes
Syntax: the part of grammar dealing with the other types of grammatical units (words, phrases,
clauses, and sentences)
Grammatical Units can be combined to form longer written text or spoken interaction which is
known as discourse. On the other hand, language can be analyzed in terms of its phonemes (the
individual sound which make up the language)
graphemes (the written symbols we use to communicate in language)

Grammatical units are described in terms of four factors:

Structure: in terms of their internal structure (words in terms of bases and affixes, phrases in
terms of heads and modifiers, clauses in terms of clause elements);
Syntactic role: subject, object, etc.;
Meaning: expression of information (place, time, manner, etc.);
The way they are used in discourse: how they behave(act) in discourse (their use in different
registers, their frequency, factors which influence their use in speech or in written texts: ex.
Pronouns)

INTRODUCTION TO WORDS:
What are words?
Word are the basic elements of language, the items defined in dictionaries.
Words are relatively fixed in their internal form you cannot interrupt them by inserting another
word or morphemes inside them. For example insertions(the word we insert between other words
to form a longer sentence) can usually be made between words but not within words, we could
not easily interrupt a word by inserting another word or morpheme inside it.
DIFFERENT SENSES OF THE WORD WORD
We identify a number of different senses of the notion word:
1)Orthographic words: as they appear in written language, separated by spaces (They wrote us a
letter)
2)Grammatical words: a word falls into one grammatical word class, or part of speech. A part of
speech is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) which have similar grammatical
properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar behavior
in terms of syntaxthey play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentencesand
sometimes in terms of morphology, in that they undergo inflection for similar properties. For
example the orthographic word leaves can be either of two grammatical words: a verb (the
present tense-s form leave) or a noun(the plural of leaf).
3)Lexemes: a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and
the same word class (ex. leave, leaves, left, leaving)

A)Each occurrence of a word in a written or spoken text is a TOKEN.

B) The different vocabulary items that occur in a text are Word Types
3 MAJOR FAMILIES OF WORDS: according to their main function and their grammatical
behavior(comportamento)

1)Lexical words
2)Function words
3)Inserts

A)LEXICAL WORDS
A lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words that forms the basic elements
of a language's In most general terms, lexical word. They can subdivided into the following word
classes (or part of speech):
1)Nouns
2)Lexical Verbs
3)Adjectives
4)Adverbs
The most numerous word family, growing in time: they are an open class. They have fairly
independent meanings and may be meaningful even in isolation or in a series.
They can be heads(main words)of phrases