LINGUISTICS TERMS

What's the difference between syntax and grammar?

1. Grammar is a set of rules that set forth (present, describe) the correct standard of usage in a language. These rules dictate how we should say things correctly. For example, agreement between words in relation to other constructions in the sentence.

2. Syntax is the study of sentences and their structure, and the constructions within sentences. Syntax tells us what goes where in a sentence.

1. Grammar is a (occasionally the) set of rules for the organization of meaningful elements into sentences; their economy, in one sense of that word.

There are two basic varieties of grammar; all languages have some of both kinds, but, depending on the kind of language involved, there's a lot of variation in how much of each kind they have.

1.1. One part of grammar is called Morphology. It has to do with the internal economy of words. So a word like bookkeepers has four morphemes (book, keep, -er, -s) and is put together with morphology. English doesn't have nearly as much morphology as most European languages; Russian grammar, for instance, has much more morphology than syntax. Russian is a synthetic (inflected) language.

1.2 The other part is called Syntax. It has to do with the external economy of words, including word order, agreement; like the sentence For me to call her sister would be a bad idea and its syntactic transform It would be a bad idea for me to call her sister. That's syntax. English grammar is mostly syntax. English is an analytic (uninflected) language.

That's why grammar is also called morphosyntax.

2. Syntax is roughly about word order. Grammar has two overlapping meanings: 1. Everything about how a language works, including syntax as a subset. 2. How words are inflected, conjugated, declined according to aspect, degree, gender, mood, number, person, tense, etc. 1. is the sense linguists would use. 2. is what some people not familiar with actual linguistics would use and is why you will encounter claims such as "Chinese has no grammar"

Grammar is not separated from other aspects of language; semantics (meaning), pragmatics, phonology, intonation, gaze, facial expressions, gesture, and many other phenomena influence it.

Grammar is the general term referring to the set of rules in a given language including syntax, morphology, while syntax studies sentence structures. This means that syntax is studied within grammar as a daughter of grammar but sister of morphology where syntax has nothing to share with internal structure of words but grammar have i.e in morphology. So,morphology studies words forming, syntax deals with such formed words by putting them in a correct position within a phrase, clause or/and a sentence under the umbrella of grammar.

Syntax: The structure of phrases and sentences.

morphology: The internal structure of words. Questions include:

"What went wrong with the word (un)deadable, while we can say (un)readable, (un)breakable, and (un)sinkable?"
"Why do we find un-use-ful okay, but un-ful not?"
"How come that it is sing-er-s and not sing-s-er? What is the difference between how a so-called derivational morpheme -er and an inflectional morpheme like -s work?"

What is morphosyntax?

Morphosyntax is another word for grammar.

Grammar can be divided into morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of words and their rules of formation. And syntax is the study of sentences and their rules of formation. Essentially, morphology and syntax are studies of the same thing – formation rules of a language – but at differing “levels”.

By calling it by the transparent term morphosyntax we are highlighting this dualism.

When we talk about word-formation (morphology) we use terms like

Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
Pronoun
Determiner
Preposition
Conjunction

And when we talk about sentence-formation (syntax) we use terms like

Subject
Verb
Object
Complement
Adverbial

The term verb unfortunately has “double duty” for word-forming and sentence-forming. So when using the term be careful and clear to your reader/listener as to which meaning of the verb you are trying to convey.

Note also that the sentence-formation terms do not appear in dictionary definitions, indicating most clearly the idea that dictionaries are about words, and not sentences.

MORPHOLOGY

In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/^[1]) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.^[2]^[3] It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning.

Lexical morphology

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.

Lexemes and word forms

The term "word" has no well-defined meaning.^[9] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different words-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts. Thus, there are three rather different notions of ‘word’.

Morpheme-based morphology[edit]

Morpheme-based morphology tree of the word "independently"

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.^[d] In words such as dogs, dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme.

Types of word formation[edit]

There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (i.e. non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent, for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of the new word represents a specific word in the representation i.e. NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and finally coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept.^[11]

The smallest recognized unit of meaning, morphemes function as the foundation of language. Explore this foundation through a full definition, discussion of types, and examples. Then, test your knowledge with a quiz.

Definition of Morphemes

As scientists have studied the composition of the universe, they've determined that the smallest unit for measuring an element is the atom. If you think of the periodic table of elements, atoms are what comprise elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, silver, gold, calcium, and so on. Scientists utilize this classification system for uniformity, so that they're on the same page in the terminology of their studies.

Similarly, linguists, or those who study language, have devised a category for the smallest unit of grammar: morphemes. Morphemes function as the foundation of language and syntax. Syntax is the arrangement of words and sentences to create meaning. We shouldn't confuse morphemes as only a given word, number of syllables, or only as a prefix or suffix. The term morpheme can apply to a variety of different situations. Let's take a look!

Types of Morphemes

In linguistics, we would further classify morphemes either as phonemes (the smallest units of grammar recognizable by sound) or graphemes (the smallest units of written language). For our purposes, we will focus on graphemes.

Let's examine the word nonperishable, analyze it, and then discuss terms associated with it.

Nonperishable is comprised of three morphemes: non-, perish, and -able. It actually has five syllables though, which is a good example of why morphemes and syllables are not synonymous.

non- is an example of a prefix, or a morpheme that precedes a base morpheme
perish is an example of a base morpheme, as it gives the word its essential meaning
-able is an example of a suffix, or a morpheme that follows a base morpheme

Both non- and -able are examples of an affix, a morpheme attached prior to or following a base that cannot function independently as a word.

We can also take a look at this chart to see some examples of how morphemes work:

A Morpheme as a word

When we can take a morpheme independently and use it as a stand-alone word in a sentence, it is known as a base. As the chart indicated, these can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, or determiners. We also classify a morpheme that can function as a stand-alone word as free.

In the sentence:

The bird-like man hardly touched his food at dinner.

There are a total of twelve morphemes, and ten of the twelve are free:

the (article)
bird (noun)
like (adjective)
man (noun)
hard (adjective)
touch (verb)
his (determiner)
food (noun)
at (preposition)
dinner (noun)

The other two morphemes, -ed and -ly, are types of affixes, which brings us to our next topic.

Inflectional morphemes

In English morphology, an inflectional morpheme is a suffix that's added to a word (a noun, verb, adjective or an adverb) to assign a particular grammatical property to that word, such as its tense, number, possession, or comparison. Inflectional morphemes in English include the bound morphemes -s (or -es); 's (or s'); -ed; -en; -er; -est; and -ing. These suffixes may even do double- or triple-duty. For example, - s can note possession (in conjunction with an apostrophe in the proper place), can make count nouns plural, or can put a verb in the third-person singular tense. The suffix -ed can make past participles or past-tense verbs.

Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck, authors of "Linguistics for Everyone," explain why there's overlap: "This lack of distinction in form dates back to the Middle English period (1100–1500 CE), when the more complex inflectional affixes found in Old English were slowly dropping out of the language."

What Are Derivational Morphemes?

When you're talking about biology, morphology is defined as the branch of study that deals with the form and structure of organisms and their unique structural features. Linguists often think of language as a living thing because, like a biological life form, it is reshaped by external forces acting on its structure and also changes over time. Linguistic morphology, then, is the study of how words are formed and how they relate to other words in a common language. Much the same way a biologist might study the phenomenon of metamorphosis, a linguist might study a word and its component parts to learn how its structure and meaning have evolved. In grammar, a derivational morpheme is an affix—a group of letters added before the beginning (prefix) or after the end (suffix)—of a root or base word to create a new word or a new form of an existing word.

Adding Derivational Morphemes

Adding a derivational morpheme often changes the grammatical category or part of speech of the root word to which it is added. For example, adding "ful" to the noun beauty changes the word into an adjective (beautiful), while replacing the "e" with "er" at the end of the verb merge changes it into a noun (merger). The form of a word that results from adding a derivational morpheme is known as a derived word or a derivative.

You can add derivational morphemes to free morphemes, which are those words that can't be divided into smaller component parts and retain meaning. Most one-syllable words in the English language are free morphemes. For instance, in the sentence: "I hit the man on his head," each of the words is a free morpheme that can't be broken down into smaller parts. To give the sentence a more precise meaning, I could toss in a derivational morpheme. By adding the prefix "fore" to the word "head" the reader now knows which part of the head the man was hit on. Not only does it give the precise location of the injury, it indicates a greater potential for harm since the forehead is a very sensitive part of the human anatomy.

You can also add more than one derivational morpheme to a root word to create several different meanings. For example, the verb "transform" consists of the root word "form" and a derivational morpheme, the prefix "trans." By adding the derivational morpheme "ation" as a suffix, "transform" becomes the noun "transformation." But you don't have to stop there. By adding another derivational morpheme suffix "al" after "ation," you can create the adjective "transformational."

Inflectional Morphemes vs. Derivational Morphemes

Inflectional morphemes define certain aspects pertaining to the grammatical function of a word. There are only eight inflectional morphemes in the English language—and they’re all suffixes. The two inflectional morphemes that can be added to nouns are -’s (apostrophe + s) to indicate the possessive case and -es to indicate the plural case. The four inflections that can be added to verbs are -(e)d to indicate past tense, -ing to indicate the present participle, -en, to represent the past participle, and –s, for the third person singular. The two inflections can be added to adjectives are: -er, for the comparative and -est, for the superlative.

Unlike inflectional affixes, the potential number of derivational affixes in the English language is limited only by the scope of the vocabulary of a given speaker or writer. As a result, it would impossible to create a comprehensive list of derivational morphemes but we can look at a few representative examples. In American English when suffixes such as "-ize" or "-ful" are added to a noun, the noun becomes the corresponding verb, as in cannibalize, vaporize, mesmerize, helpful, playful, thoughtful, and so on. When the suffix "-ize" is added to an adjective, the words are transformed into verbs: realize, finalize, vitalize, etc.

Some Morphemes are Both Inflectional and Derivational

Meanwhile, some inflectional morphemes, specifically -ed, -en, -er, -ing, and -ly, can take on on characteristics of derivational morphemes. For example, the suffix -er can function as both an inflectional and a derivational morpheme. In its inflectional capacity, -er is added to adjectives to indicate the comparative as in "thicker," describing something that has additional mass.

As a derivational morpheme, -er gets a lot of use in the production of forming new nouns. Such morphemes when attached to root verbs form nouns such as "farmer" to describe someone who performs the action indicated by the verb. When -er is added to a root adjective, a noun is formed: as in homesteader, which describes someone in terms of the quality denoted by the adjective. When -er is added to a nominal root noun, the meaning of the resulting noun is incorporated in the modified word. Take the word "freighter" for example. The root word "freight" has been modified, however, the definition of the new noun "freighter"—a type of vessel used to transport freight—retains the quality denoted by the original noun.

FUNCTION WORDS IN ENGLISH (aka function morphemes)

In English grammar, a function word is a word that expresses a grammatical or structural relationship with other words in a sentence.

In contrast to a content word, a function word has little or no meaningful content. Nonetheless, as Ammon Shea points out, "the fact that a word does not have a readily identifiable meaning does not mean that it serves no purpose."

Function words are also known as:

structure words
grammatical words
grammatical functors
grammatical morphemes
function morphemes
form words
empty words

According to James Pennebaker, "function words account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of your vocabulary but make up almost 60 percent of the words you use."

Content Words vs. Function Words

Function words include determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, modals, qualifiers, and question words. Content words are words with specific meanings, such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and main verbs (those without helping verbs.)

Function words

Function words include: the (determiner), and (conjunction), and over (preposition)

Even though the function words don't have concrete meanings, sentences would make a lot less sense without them.

1. Determiners

Determiners are words such as articles (the, a), possessive pronouns (their, your), quantifiers (much), demonstratives (that, those), and numbers. They function as adjectives to modify nouns and go in front of a noun to show the reader whether the noun is specific or general, such as in "that coat" (specific) vs. "a coat" (general).

Articles: a, an, the
Demonstratives: that, this, those, these
Possessive pronouns: my, your, their, our, ours, whose, his, hers, its, which
Quantifiers: some, both, most, many, a few, a lot of, any, much, a little, enough, several, none, all

2. Conjunctions

Conjunctions connect parts of a sentence, such as items in a list, two separate sentences, or clauses and phrases to a sentence. In the previous sentence, the conjunctions are or and and.

Conjunctions: and, but, for, yet, neither, or, so, when, although, however, as, because, before

3. Prepositions

Prepositions begin prepositional phrases, which contain nouns and other modifiers. Prepositions function to give more information about nouns. In the phrase "the river that flows through the woods." The prepositional phrase is "through the woods," and the preposition is "through."

Prepositions: in, of, between, on, with, by, at, without, through, over, across, around, into, within

4. Pronouns

Pronouns are words that stand in for nouns. Their antecedent needs to be clear, or your reader will be confused. Take "It's so difficult" as an example. Without context, the reader has no idea what "it" refers to. In context, "Oh my gosh, this grammar lesson," he said. "It's so difficult," the reader easily knows that it refers to the lesson, which is its noun antecedent.

Pronouns: she, they, he, it, him, her, you, me, anybody, somebody, someone, anyone

5. Auxiliary Verbs

Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs. They pair with a main verb to change tense, such as when you want to express something in present continuous tense (I am walking), past perfect tense (I had walked), or future tense (I am going to walk there).

Auxiliary verbs: be, is, am, are, have, has, do, does, did, get, got, was, were

6. Modals

Modal verbs express condition or possibility. It's not certain that something is going to happen, but it might. For example, in "If I could have gone with you, I would have," modal verbs include could and would.

Modals: may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should

7. Qualifiers

Qualifiers function like adverbs and show the degree of an adjective or verb, but they have no real meaning themselves. In the sample sentence, "I thought that somewhat new dish was pretty darn delicious," the qualifiers are somewhat and pretty.

Qualifiers: very, really, quite, somewhat, rather, too, pretty (much)

8. Question Words

It's easy to guess what function that question words have in English. Besides forming questions, they can also appear in statements, such as in "I don't know how in the world that happened," where the question word is how.

Question words: how, where, what, when, why, who

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