- Words can be made up of a single unit of meaning (morpheme) or can have a more complex structure through inflection, derivation, and compounding. Inflection involves adding suffixes to change word class or meaning. Derivation adds affixes to change word identity or class. Compounding combines word stems. - Phrases group words into higher units and can contain other phrases. The head determines the phrase type as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. Noun phrases contain a noun head and may take syntactic roles. Verb phrases center around a lexical verb and show tense.

1. Unit 1
Introductory concepts and categories
(III)

2. The structure of words: Morphology
• Lexical words may be made of a single morpheme (stem) or
have a more complex structure by means of inflexion,
derivation & compounding
– Inflexion: lexical words take inflexional suffixes to signal
meanings & roles important to their word class (plural for
nouns or past tense for verbs)
• Other classes of words are generally invariable
(prepositions, conjunctions, & determiners)

3. The structure of words: morphology
– Derivation usually involves adding an affix (morpheme
attached to the beginning – prefix – or to the end – suffix –
of a word)
• Different from inflexion because it changes the identity
of a word and creates new nouns, adjectives, verbs and
adverbs
• It changes the meaning of a word or the class of a word
and can create a new base form for the word (e.g.
consider → reconsider → reconsideration )

4. The structure of words: Morphology
– Compounding is a form of derivation where a word
contains more than one stem (Noun+noun (chair+man);
Verb+noun (cook+book); Adjective+noun (blue+bird);
Noun+adjective (water+tight))
• Three tests to check if the word is a compound:
– The word will be spelt as a single word (no spaces)
– The word will be pronounced with the main stress
on first element
– The word will have a meaning not determined from
individual parts

5. The structure of words: Morphology
• Apart from compounds, there are other multi-word units
(sequences of words that behave as a unit):
 Lexical bundle/chunk: group of words commonly found
together (content + grammar words). For ex. : on top of
 Idiom: multi-word unit where meaning can’t be predicted
from the meanings of its parts. For ex.: make up (one’s) mind)
 Collocation: relationship between one/more independent
words commonly appearing together (mainly content
words(ex.: broad agreement)

6. Introduction to phrases
• Phrases are higher units into which words are organized
• A phrase may consist of one single word or a group of words
• Phrases can be embedded (i.e. be part of another structure)
– E.g. [They] [passed] [the table [with [the two men]]]

7. They passed the table with the two men

8. Classes of phrases
• For each type of lexical word there is a type of phrase,
where the lexical word is the head (function words are
also found):
– Noun phrase
– Verb phrase
– Adjective phrase
– Adverb phrase
– Prepositional phrase

9. Noun phrase
• Noun phrase/Nominal group: A phrase with a noun as its
head (determiner)+(modifier)+HEAD+(qualifier) d m h q
– Ex.: A house/These houses/Her beautiful big charming house
• Abstract nouns can also be followed by complements
completing the meaning of the noun (esp. that-clauses and
infinitive to-clauses). Ex.: He feels awkward about her refusal
to show any sign of emotion
• Proper nouns, pronouns and sometimes adjectives can also
be head of NP. Ex.: Thomas lives in Wembley/They said
they’d got it/Show me how the impossible can be possible
• NPs can take the syntactic role of subject or object as well as
of predicative, adverbial, and complement in PPs.

10. Verb phrases
• Verb phrase/Verbal group: a phrase with a primary/lexical
verb as its head: (operator)+(auxiliary)+VERB o x v (ex.: do
you go/has gone/go)
• Finite VPs show distinctions of tense (present/past) & include
modal auxiliaries (different from non-finite VPs)
• VPs are the essential part of a clause, referring to a type of
state/action (the main verb determines the other elements in
the clause)
• Sometimes VPs are split into two parts (e.g. in questions,
when adverbs and other adverbials are placed in the middle)
– What were you doing?
– This year has definitely started well