The book “Analyzing Grammar: an Introduction” is one of the valuable resources written by Paul R. Kroeger where he delved into dynamics of Grammar. It’s a must-have reference for linguistics majors, young researchers and even fans of the world causality in grammar and why things are the way they are in languages.

1. Information about the book
● AUTHOR: Paul R. Kroeger
● TITLE: Analyzing Grammar
● Subtitle: An Introduction
● PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
● YEAR: 2005
● Pages: 364
● REVIEWER: Mehdi ZOUAOUI, English Instructor
Summary
The book “Analyzing Grammar: an Introduction” is one of the valuable resources written by Paul
R. Kroeger where he delved into dynamics of Grammar. It’s a must-have reference for
linguistics majors, young researchers and even fans of the world causality in grammar and why
things are the way they are in languages.
1. Grammatical Form
In the first chapter, the author begins by talking about grammatical forms and their underlying
implications on grammar and how this changes from one language to another. For instance, in
one of the chinese dialects there is no explicit word that carries the meaning of “hello” but this
meaning is rather conveyed in a different way.The author proposes, per se, that describing the
grammar of a given language designates the ability of the speaker to tell apart correct forms
from incorrect ones. Having said that, we can see that there are some rules that are consciously
learned at schools. These rules tell us how the language should be used and are often called
“prescriptive rules”.
2. Analyzing Word Structure
In the second chapter, the author voices that the method of recurring partials with constant
meaning is fulfilled when:
1. They can occur in the same environment(s).
2. They replace one with the other which leads to a difference in meaning.
This method is used to recognize contrasting linguistic elements and includes three
types:minimal contrast, recurring partials, and pattern-matching.
In the world of words, morphemes, which are according to Hockett (Hockett,1958) the smallest
individually meaningful elements in the utterances of a language, stand out into different forms.
Morphemes that are usually added to the root morphemes are called “affixes” which affect this
root; however, it is not always easy to predict their meanings or functions. Thus, the author
suggests some rules for that purpose:
● An affix is always bound, but a root is often free.

2. ● A root normally carries lexical meaning,and an affix frequently carries only grammatical
meaning.
● An affix is always part of a closed class, unlike roots that usually belong to an open
class.
After that the author focuses on the topic of representing word structure that can be fulfilled by
means of position class chart. This tool demonstrates a position in which a certain class of
morphemes can occur and it is important to bear in mind that position class charts are a best fit
for language where:
1. each morpheme has a simple linear ordering relationship with all other morphemes in
the same word.
2. Each affix expresses only one grammatical feature or category.
3. All affixes which express the same grammatical category have the same ordering
relationships with all other classes of morphemes.
The word structure also defines the typology of languages that can be wrapped up in the
following categories:
1. Analytic (or isolating): one morpheme per word.
2. Agglutinating: strings of affixes with everyone marking a single grammatical feature.
3. Synthetic (Fusional or inflectional): single affixes marking several grammatical categories at
once (portmanteau morphemes) or suppletive forms.
4. Polysynthetic: long strings of affixes or incorporated roots in a single word.
3. Constituent Structure
The author then zooms in the word itself where he posits that words can be classified according
to their grammatical properties, traditionally referred to as “parts of speech” and preferred to be
called “syntactic categories” by linguists. Sometimes groups of words act like one flock of birds
that we call them as “constituents”. Group of words can be grouped sometimes differently and
this may ushers in different interpretations of meaning which leads to ambiguity. Added to that,
the hierarchy of word groups can be divided as follows: sentence, clause, phrase, word, and
morpheme. This classification is called part-whole hierarchy in which each unit is composed of
its sub-units.
The author then moves to syntactic categories classification discourse where he states that, in
order to classify words, we need to answer two vital questions:
- Which words belong together in the same class?
- What name (or label) should we assign a given word class?
The second level of syntactic categories is the phrase that requires two evidences to determine
if two phrases belong to the same category:
● mutual substitutability
● Sameness of internal structure.
The author touches upon analyzing grammatical structure of a sentence in order to identify the
constituent parts from which the sentence is formed; and the order in which these constituents
occur. In order to do that tree diagrams are often used to represent the constituents of a given
clause.

3. 4. Semantic Roles and Grammatical Relations
The author then moves to the grammatical relations of these constituents from a meaning
perspective where these relations can be divided into predicate and argument. Semantic roles
that can be taken up by arguments are summarized in the following roles:
- Agent: causer or initiator of events.
- Experiencer: animate entity which perceives a stimulus or registers a particular mental or
emotional process or state.
- Recipient: animate entity which receives or acquires something.
- Beneficiary: entity for whose benefit an action is performed.
- Instrument: inanimate entity used by an agent to perform some action.
- Theme: entity which undergoes a change of location or possession, or whose location is
being specified.
- Patient: entity which is acted upon, affected, or created; or of which a state or change of
state is predicated.
- Stimulus: object of perception, cognition, or emotion; entity which is seen, heard, known,
remembered, loved, hated, etc.
- Location: spatial reference point of the event.
- Source: the origin or beginning point of a motion.
- Goal: the destination or end-point of a motion.
- Path: the trajectory or pathway of a motion.
- Accompaniment: entity which accompanies or is associated with the performance of an
action.
It is important to notice that subjects arguments which are not subjects or objects are called
indirect or oblique arguments. Also, elements that are used to convey the flow of the story, the
time or place of an event of an action are not arguments but rather adjuncts.
5. Lexical Entries and well-formed clauses
The author then shifts to the topic of lexical entries where he requires that this latter must
specify at least:
1. Phonological shape.
2. Meaning (semantic properties).
3. Syntactic category (part of speech)
4. Other grammatical information
5. Irregular forms or patterns associated with that specific word.
The author goes then to the properties of a well-formed clause and the subject of selectional
restrictions or constraints. This is where lexical items may occur in combination with each other.
Hence, any violation in these selectional restrictions leads to what is termed as collocational
clash. Having said that, the conditions of the well-formedness are completeness, coherence,
and uniqueness.

4. 6. Noun phrases
The author then proceeds forward to the category of noun phrases with its building blocks. What
we notice in English is that many NP’s start with an article, demonstrative, or a quantifier.
Possessor phrases can also function as determiners in which the relationship is described as
inalienable when it is necessary and permanent unlike alienable relationship that can be
conditional or temporary.
7. Case and Agreement
In this chapter, the author tires to identify the term relations (subjects and objects) with these
basic devices:
- Case: that can be demonstrated by means of morphological markings on the NP. Among
these, we can mention ergative case which is used for transitive subjects and absolutive
case for transitive objects.
- Agreement: that describes a situation where the grammatical feature determines the
morphological shape of a given word. Needless to say that verb agreements reflect the
person, number, and/or the gender of the arguments.
8. Noun Classes and Pronouns
In this chapter, the author mentions the syntax, morphology, semantics of nouns and noun
phrases as well. In this regard, we have to say that classifiers, words or morphemes used in
some languages to classify a noun according to its meaning1
, are considered to be separate
words that occur inside NP in some contexts. They also have a function of identifying the
subclass of the head noun and they don’t contribute to the meaning of the noun or NP. One of
the classifiers that we start with is the gender where we have to differentiate between biological
gender, namely male and female, and grammatical gender that is a sub-classification of nouns.
The author then moves to the pronouns, a special category of NP that have a similar syntactic
distribution like nouns but they differ semantically which can be interpreted in different ways
depending on the context the pronoun is situated in. This can be summarized in the following
elements:
- Anaphora and deixis: where the speech situation is interpreted based on the time and
place in which the conversation takes place and also referred as deictic elements. As for
anaphoric elements, they are mainly words whose interpretations depend on some other
elements called antecedents.
- Reflexive and emphatic pronouns.
- Personal pronouns and agreement features: many languages express personal
pronouns in multiple ways such inclusive and exclusive pronouns such as Malay
language. Other languages have extra number of categories of personal pronouns such
as trial and paucal (groups containing few individuals)
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AClassifier_(linguistics)

5. 9. Tense, Aspect, and Modality
In this chapter, the author strives on to provide a succinct definition of tense, aspect, and
modality that refer to three kinds of information that are often encoded by verbal morphology.
Tense marking indicates, to varying degrees of precision, the time when an event occurred or
when a situation existed. In other words, it specifies the situation’s “location” in time. Aspect
relates to the distribution of an event over time: is it instantaneous or a long, slow process?;
completed or ongoing?; happened once only or a recurring event?. Modality covers a wide
range of semantic distinctions but generally relates to either the speaker’s attitude toward the
proposition being expressed (e.g. his degree of certainty about whether the proposition is true or
not), or the actor’s relationship to the described situation (e.g. whether he is under some kind of
obligation to act in a certain way).
In fact, tense is used only for time reference which is marked grammatically –that is, by purely
grammatical elements such as affixes, auxiliaries, or particles. In this framework, we can notice
that there are absolute and relative tense systems where the formers function as the reference
point relative to which the other events are located in time, and in the latter a different reference
point is used to locate a situation relative to another situation.
As for aspect, the author states that it identifies the shape, and distribution of the event in time
and tries to answer questions like:
- Is the situation changing or static?
- Is the event spread over a period of time, or is it thought of as being instantaneous?
- Does the situation have a definite end point, or is it open-ended?
- Does the situation involve a single unique event, or an event which is repeated over and
over?
Mood can be defined as an indication of “what the speaker wants to do with the proposition” in a
particular discourse context.
10. Non-verbal predicates
In this chapter, the author shifts gears towards predicates that can be expressed without a verb
unlike what has been shown before. In fact, there are many languages that don’t need verbal
elements in order to fulfill this purpose such as Tagalog and Arabic. Some of these can be
expressed by adjectival phrase called an attributive clause, and an equative clause where the
semantic predicate is fulfilled by a noun phrase. Conversely, English must always have a copula
or linking verb in order to fulfill this. It is often called as a predicate complement. It is necessary
to bring forward one of the elements that are often referred to as “dummy”. These elements
carry no semantic element but rather serve a grammatical function such as subject position.
11. Special Sentence types
In this chapter, the author moves to speech acts and the notions that are related to it. The
author states that we can divide these into direct and indirect speech acts, and postulates that
the three most common things that speakers do by means of speaking are:
1. Making statements such as asserting or denying the truth of a proposition.
2. Asking questions

6. 3. Giving commands.
Having said that, he defines indirect speech acts as those in which there is a mismatch between
the sentence type and the intended force.
This brings us the basic word order which is, according to the author, crucial in telling types of
sentences apart and distinguishing the exotic structure referred to as marked. However, it is not
possible to know the marked before knowing the unmarked, namely the usual or normal. For
instance, we have in English commands (imperative sentences), questions (interrogative
sentences) including yes-no type. These can be distinguished from a simple declarative
sentence by looking at the following elements:
- Intonation.
- Clitics.
- Verbal affix (interrogative mood).
- Change in word order.
After that the author moves to some examples of languages around the world and the
mechanism of forming questions in these languages such as Mandarin, Quechua, Russian, etc.
In the section of negation, the author offers some of the common tools used to form negative
sentences and also highlights the importance of being able to differentiate between positive and
negative sentences where negation is not merely a matter of morpheme or meaning. In this
context, he corroborates his claim with the two tests suggested by Klima2
that can be used to
identify negative sentences in English: only negative sentences can be continued with neither or
not even.
12. Subordinate Clauses
In this chapter, the author jumps to one of the most debated topics by syntacticians which is
embedded sentences. He starts with the usual classification of clauses which is: coordinate and
subordinate clauses. Thus, a clause can be embedded by two tools: coordination and
subordination. On one hand, coordinate structures underlie two independent constituents of the
same category being conjoined to form another constituent of that category. On the other hand,
a dependent subordinate clause has three types:
- Complement clauses that occur as complements of a verb.
- Adjunct clauses that serve as an adjunct or adverbial element of another clause.
- Relative clauses which function as modifiers within an NP.
13. Derivational Morphology
Derivational morphology changes one word (or lexeme) into another and it can be compared
with inflectional morphology, which creates different forms of the same lexeme.
2
Klima, E. S. 1964. Negation in English. In J. Fodor and J. Katz (eds.), The structure of
language. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, pp. 246–323.

7. The author offers some foundational bases for derivational morphology that we will go over.
First, we call a stem when the word contains no inflectional morphology and only consists of the
root plus any derivational morphology. Also, a root or stem is called bound if it cannot occur on
its own without additional affixation unlike a free form that can occur as an independent word.
Sometimes a stem may contain more than one root and in that case we call it “compound”. To
tell apart a compound from a phrase, these remarks may come in handy:
- A compound word normally contains only one main stress.
- The original meanings of the roots may be lost in a compound.
- In a phrase, each individual word can take its normal range of affixes unlike compound.
- Words in a phrase can often be separated by inserting one or more other words between
them unlike compounds.
The author then attempts to clear the distinction between the two sub-disciplines of morphology,
inflection and derivation, by means of the following points:
- Derivational morphology may change the syntactic category and inflectional morphology,
however, does not generally change syntactic categories.
- Derivational morphology tends to have “lexical” semantic content; inflectional
morphology has purely grammatical meaning.
- Inflectional morphology is often organized in paradigms, while derivational morphology is
not.
- Inflectional affixes are normally attached “outside” the derivational affixes.
- Some derivational processes may apply twice in the same word, but each inflectional
category will be marked only once.
Earlier in chapter 2, the author presented position class chart as a way of presenting the
morphological structure of words from an inflectional point of view since inflectional morphemes
can be organized into sets of paradigms. However, this is not available for derivational
morphemes because they don’t have a paradigm and also they can occur more than one time
within the same word. Another way of representing the derivational processes is by using Word
Formation Rules (WFR) that have to contain at least three types of information:
- The phonological effects on the base form.
- The semantic changes associated with this process
- The syntactic category of the base (input) and of the resulting stem (output)
14. Valence-changing Morphology
Previously, the author discussed the notion of syntactic valence of a verb which is the number of
terms (i.e. non-oblique arguments) it subcategorizes for. In this chapter, the author discusses
the two processes that can increase or decrease this valence, namely semantic and syntactic.
The first category of these processes is meaning-preserving alternations that can be classified
as follows:
- Passive
Passivization is a valence-decreasing process and it is also called a detransitivizing process
because it changes transitive verbs into intransitives.

8. - Applicatives
An applicative affix, which increases the syntactic valence of a verb by introducing a new
primary object. Typically, the applicative “promotes” an oblique argument to primary object, and
so does not affect the argument structure of the verb.
- Reflexives and reciprocals
Grammatically, reflexive pronouns are special in that they can (and frequently must) take an
argument of their immediate clause as their antecedent. Reflexives are used when a single
individual plays more than one role within a given situation.
The second category of valency-changing morphology is grouped under the name “meaning-
changing alternations”. It can be classified as follows:
- Causatives
In causatives the participant is referred to as the causer. The participant who is caused to do
something, corresponding to the subject of the base verb, is called the causee.
- Adversatives
the adversative construction changes an intransitive root into a transitive verb by adding a new
argument, namely the person who suffers as a result of the event being described.
Another category of valence-changing morphology is called noun incorporation (NI) which is
when the noun is morphologically included as a part of the verb. Hence, NI is a special type of
compounding which consists of a verb root and a noun root combine to form a complex stem
whose category and this creates a verb.
The author sums up the chapter by reminding us of the two basic ways of changing the
syntactic valence of the verb. Some of the processes that were tackled in this chapter, notably
the causative and adversative, introduce a new semantic argument into the verb’s argument
structure. Others (e.g. the passive) do not affect the argument structure but only change the
grammatical relations that are assigned to one or more arguments.
15. Allomorphy
In this chapter, the author talks about the morphemes that change their forms depending on the
environment they’re put in. Basically, variant forms of the same morpheme are called
allomorphs. On one hand, the alternation is said to be phonologically conditioned if the choice
wherein allomorph occurs with a predictable environment on the basis of phonological patterns.
On the other hand, the alternation is said to be lexically conditioned if the choice of allomorph is
essentially arbitrary and must be learned on a word-by-word basis. Allomorphy stands out in the
following categories:
- Suppletion
Suppletion is basically an alternation in which the inflectional paradigm for certain words
involve more than one root form. These suppletive forms of the root cannot be derived or
predicted by any regular phonological rule, but must be listed in the lexical entry of the word.
- Morphophonemic changes

9. This involves not replacing but changing the phonological shape of a morpheme. A
morphophonemic process can be described as a change in one or more phonemes triggered by
the phonological properties of a neighboring morpheme. To tell a suppletive process apart from
a morphophonemic process we should know that a morphophonemic process replaces one
phoneme with another, while a suppletive process replaces one allomorph with another.
However, separating them is not a clear-cut process but requires a lot of delicateness and these
are some criteria that may help in this distinction:
A. Naturalness: if the process is phonologically natural, which can be found in the
phonological systems of many different languages, it is more likely to be
morphophonemic.
B. Productivity: if the same process applies to several different morphemes, it is more likely
to be morphophonemic.
C. Simplicity: if a plausible morphophonemic analysis is available, the criterion of simplicity
tends to favor morphophonemic approach over suppletive approach.
The author then ends the chapter by talking about inflectional classes, traditionally known as
declensions for nouns and conjugations for verbs. Again, there are two basic types of
allomorphy: morphophonemic one in which the morpheme is altered phonologically, and
suppletion, where no phonological ties are between two allomorphs. Below is a graph that
summarizes types of allomorphy:
Figure: Kroeger(P.300)
16. Non-linear morphology
In this chapter, the author reminds us of the classification of Hockett (1954) who discussed two
different approaches that linguists have taken in the analysis of word structure:

10. 1. Item and arrangement (IA) model: that assumes that all morphology is affixation and the
rules of grammar must arrange the morphemes in the correct linear order, and then the
rules of phonology will apply to produce the form that is actually pronounced.
2. Item and Process (IP) model: it treats affixation as just one among many ways whereby
morphological rules may modify the form of the base. This model does not treat a
morpheme as a string of phonemes which gets attached to the base, but rather as a
pattern of phonological change which is associated with some consistent semantic or
grammatical effect.
The author then tackles non-linear sequencing of affixes where the affix is added inside another
morpheme and may also occur inside another infix and the circumfix is a discontinuous one,
with elements added both before and after the stem. The two parts of a circumfix must function
as a single unit, both semantically and morphologically. Sometimes phonological features of a
given morpheme get modified by these processes:
1. Mutation which is a change in the quality of one or more phonemes in the base form. It is
also often called “ablaut”.
2. Suprafix: which is sometimes used to refer to a morphological marker which only
consists of a change to some suprasegmental feature: tone, stress, length, nasalization,
etc.
The author groups some other concepts related to the non-linear morphology that can
summarized as follows:
1. Reduplication: that involves the repetition of all or part of the base form.
2. Subtractive morphology (or just subtraction): which is a relatively rare phenomenon. The
term refers to a morphological process which, instead of adding material, deletes one or
more phonemes from the base.
3. Metathesis: which refers to the reversal of two elements: xy → yx. Phonological
metathesis, i.e. a morphophonemic process that reverses the order of two phonemes in
a particular phonological context.
17. Clitics
In this chapter, the author discusses forms that prove to be difficult to classify whether free or
bound morphemes due to their idiosyncratic features. Among them are clitics that are said to be
“phonologically bound” when they’re pronounced as if they are affixed to an adjacent word,
referred to as clitic’s host. In this regard, it is vital to distinguish between phonological words and
syntactic words since a clitic and its host constitute a single phonological word, yet they’re two
separate syntactic words.
In the study of clitics, the author lays the foundational elements that may help distinguish
phonological word from syntactic word. These elements can be summed up as follows:

11. I. A phonological word is the smallest possible utterance in the language; speakers do not
normally say anything which is smaller than a complete phonological word.
II. Each phonological word is composed of one or more well-formed syllables (i.e. syllables
which satisfy the constraints on syllable structure in the language).
III. Stress placement is frequently determined by phonological word boundaries, and each
phonological word normally contains only a single primary stress.
In the same line and in order to recognize a syntactic word, these elements should be taken into
consideration:
I. The arrangement of affixes in a word is normally quite rigid, while the order of words in
a clause or phrase is often more flexible.
II. Lexically specific irregularities are more typical of affixation than of syntactic word
combinations.
In talking about the clitics, the author suggests that one way of classifying clitics is by position:
those which attach to the right edge of their hosts are called enclitics, while those which attach
to the left edge of their hosts are called proclitics. Nevertheless, this classification may not
satisfy this phenomenon thoroughly.
- Simple clitics: the author states simple clitics and classifies them as follows:
1. Bound words: which are phonologically bound (attached to a host), but behave
like normal words.
2. Phrasal affixes: such as the English possessive marker ‘s.
3. Special clitics: which are particles that occupy a special syntactic position, one
which is not determined by the normal rules of syntax.
a. Second position clitics
b. Verbal clitics: that are clitic particles (normally pronouns) which always
take a verb as their host.
- Clitic pronouns or agreement?
The author then mentions that there are a couple of languages that have clitic pronouns as the
sole available form or just as an allomorph of the corresponding free pronoun. Based on that
and in order to distinguish between clitic pronouns and affixes, the following elements may
come in handy:
- if the bound forms attach to words other than the verb which selects them, they are
almost certainly clitic pronouns; if they are always attached to the verb, they could be
either clitic pronouns or agreement markers.
- if the bound forms are in complementary distribution with free pronouns (or full NP
arguments), they are more likely to be clitic pronouns; if they can co-occur with free
pronouns (or full NP arguments), they are more likely to be agreement markers.
- if the bound forms occur inside (i.e. closer to the verb root than) one or more inflectional
affixes, they are almost certainly agreement markers.
- if the bound forms are obligatory, they are more likely to be agreement markers.
The author sums this chapter up by stating the fact that clitics are interesting since they are
challenging to analyze because they behave like affixes but also like independent words. On
one hand, their “affix-like” properties are normally phonological: they form a single phonological

12. word with their host for the purposes of stress placement and other phonological processes. On
the other hand, syntax, does not generally treat the clitic and its host as a unit.
Evaluation
One of the strong pros that the book has is laying a solid ground for young researchers who are
in the quest of normalizing many world languages in terms of grammar and syntax in its broad
sense. In chapter one, the author offers one of the nicest tools that I’ve found useful for a
researcher who wants to analyze morphemes and their relations to the root. This tool is called
Position Class Chart. Even though this tool has some drawbacks, it is a nice starting point to
analyze the grammar of any given language. Also, in the same chapter and in addition to the
types of languages mentioned in the book, we can also add another type called “oligosynthetic
languages”, which are languages that have a limited set of basic morphemes from which all
words are built up3
. Added to that, one of the positive points of the book is studying the
principles of analyzing grammar not only from a English language perspective but it rather
reaches over to other languages. Undoubtedly, the author has achieved, to a great extent, the
goal of providing students with confidence in describing the grammar of a given language.
However, the book may not be a fit for advanced researchers because it doesn’t delve too much
into the field of analyzing grammar and rather offers some advanced topics in a few spots of the
book.The book is well structured in a self-study format through activities to help grasp the
notions and concepts the learner was exposed to. With that said, it would have been better if the
author had offered extensive resources for those who want to go deeper beyond the content
offered in the book.
With the toolbox it contains, the book stands out as a necessary beginning in analyzing
grammar from a morphological and syntactic perspective especially for researchers who label
themselves as beginners in the world of linguistics. Like many other books available in
academia, the author assumes that a prior knowledge is already available in order to conduct a
grammar analysis of a language.
Certainly, the topic of analyzing grammar is no easy task for a linguist and requires a set of
multifaceted skills and a mastery of different related disciplines such as statistics. The author
stated in the introduction the literature that he tended to agree with and highlighted some of the
key research and researchers he based his book on. Undoubtedly, the horizon of research in
this subject is always open to new findings through constant research and analysis and the
author explicitly stated that his book is just the first step toward research and even offers some
challenging exercises and questions that are aimed to sparkle more answers and explanations
for some evergreen questions. However, due to the scope of the book that the author decided to
restrict we cannot find a lot of enticing activities and this may deter advanced researchers away.
About the Reviewer:
Mehdi ZOUAOUI is an education and E-learning consultant with an ELT background and
passion for Linguistics as well as Literature. He’s an evangelist for Non Formal Education and
alternative approaches to schooling and deschooling. He has completed more than 40 Massive
3
https://www.frathwiki.com/Morphological_type

13. Open Online Courses (MOOC) from prestigious universities and the counter is still going on. He
has co-authored two books related to Turkish and Arabic language learning. Mehdi is currently
holding the position of an English instructor at Istanbul University Language Center.