Lecture 1  Grammatical Hierarchy
Hierarchy is one of the basic properties of a language. On the grammatical level, the structure of the English language can be divided into five ranks: morpheme, word, phrase, clause, and sentence, while on the textual level, into three ranks: sentence, sentence group, and text. Sentence is the highest rank in grammatical hierarchy, and the lowest rank on the textual level. The following is a brief description of the grammatical hierarchy of the English language.
1.1 Morphemes
A morpheme is the smallest meaning-carrying grammatical unit. It falls into two categories: free morphemes and bound morphemes.
1) Free morphemes
A free morpheme has a complete meaning and can stand by itself as a simple word. It can sometimes act as a complete utterance in connected speech. Chair, boy, desk, and cruel are
free morphemes. A free morpheme can be the root of a derivative, such as kindly, friendliness.
2) Bound morphemes
Bound morphemes are mostly affixes. They are also meaningful, but the meaning is not complete in itself unless it is attached to some other form. Therefore, a bound morpheme cannot stand by itself: it only exists as an affix or a combining form.
The affix can be divided into two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes include: plural –s/-es, possessive – ’s, third person singular-s/-es, past –ed, participle –ing, participle –ed, comparative –er, and superlative –est. Derivational affixes can be further divided into prefixes and suffixes, such as anti-war, co-exist, movement, and careless. The use of an inflectional affix does not change the identity of a word, but that of a derivational affix usually results in a new lexeme.
Bound morphemes can also be combining forms, which can act as bound root to form primi
tive derivatives, such as receive, conceive, and perceive. They can also be used together with other combining forms or words to form compound words or neo-classical compounds, such as minibus, miniskirt, biology, telescope, and electrocardiogram.
1.2 Words
The word is composed of one or more than one morpheme. Words can be classified in two ways:
1) Simple words, derivatives & compounds
Words that are composed of one morpheme only are called simple words. art, joy, kind, up, down, hand, foot and able, for example, are simple words.
Words that are formed by adding an affix to an existing word are called derivatives. For example, interference, unhelpful, driver, management, unfair, disloyal, and nonviolent are derivatives.
A word formed by combining two or more bases is called a compound. For example, whichever, snowfall, downfall, bookcase, home-made, tax-free and babysitting.
2) Closed-class words & open-class words
In terms of syntactic function, words can be classified into closed-class words and open-class words. Closed-class words refer to those sets of words whose items are “closed” or limited in number and are only exceptionally extended by the creation of additional numbers. In English, function words such as auxiliaries, conjunctions and prepositions are closed-class words.
Open-class words refer to those sets of words whose items are indefinitely extendable. New items are constantly being created and old items are giving place to new ones. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open-class words.
1.3 Phrases
The phrase is composed of one or more than one word. Generally, the phrase is a group of
words organized in a specific way with a key word as its head. The head determines the class of the phrase and the way in which the words are organized.
1) The noun phrase
The noun phrase is a phrase with a noun as its head. The general pattern of a noun phrase is :
discourse(determiner+) (premodifier+) noun (+ postmodifier)
a pretty little girl standing at the door
all the wooden cottages that have survived the earthquake
2) The verb phrase
The verb phrase which is a phrase with a main verb as its head can be simple or complex. A simple verb phrase is just a main verb or “modifier + main verb”. A complex verb phrase is a main verb preceded by an auxiliary (or auxiliaries) (+modifier). For example:

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