Pg.128

​

According to Curzan and Adams ---> Schoolhouse rock does not provide adequate explanations for concepts such as conjunctions in English. 

​

Nouns are not just people places and things. 

Some aren't even words for persons, places, or things. 

How would you classify words such as being, nothingness, karma, metaphor, or phoneme? 

Are these things in a conventional sense? 

All conjunctions are "hook ups", are they all equivalent? 

Isn't there a big difference between the function of the word "and" and that of the because? 

 

Many college students feel shaky about their control of grammar. 

 

 Pg. 129 

Many students learn the most about English grammar from studying a foreign language. 

Example: Learning direct and indirect object pronouns in French makes the distinction clear in English. 

Example 2: Distinguishing the perfect and imperfect verb aspect in Spanish clarifies aspect in English verbs. 

​

In this chapter we will describe the grammatical categories of English words both  those that correspond to distinctions 

​

This chapter will focus on how words behave grammatically. Nouns all function similarly in sentences. so we will describe how the category of nouns will behave "syntactically". 

 

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, syntactically is an adverb that means doing something in a way that relates to the grammatical arrangement of words in a sentence, or in computing, the structure of statements or elements in a computer language. 

​

Syntax refers to the study of how words combine systematically to form meaningful strings.

 

In this chapter we stay at the level of the word. 

 

Chapter 6 will focus on changes to phrases, clauses, and sentences. 

 

In ch. 5 & 6 we will parse sentences: Break them down into theor component parts in order to examine the form and function of each part. 

Parsing helps us understand how all parts work together to create meaning of the sentence. 

 

SYNTAX & LEXICAL CATEGORIES ---> Fundamental to English Syntax

We know that words cannot just appear in any order to form a grammatical sentence. 

​

If given the three words Book. In, The and told to place them in order that "sounds right" or is grammatical. 

​

chapter perplexed the reread students the 

​

Given the requirement of grammaticality,

you could not say

* The reread students chapter perplexed the,

but you could go with

The perplexed students reread the chapter.

 

In any context, the function of some words will help determine their placement. For example, adjectives modify nouns, and they come before the noun they modify in a noun phrase. 

 

In the collection of words above,

the only adjective is perplexed, and

the only nouns are students and chapters .

Obviously,

perplexed could only describe the students—there are no perplexed chapters!

We also have two instances of the .

The word "the" is a “determiner,” a function word that introduces a noun phrase. (We’ll return to determiners later in the chapter.) So we know that we have two noun phrases: the perplexed students and the chapter. If the phrase the chapter is the object of reread, then it must appear after the verb, as a requirement of English syntax (we’ll talk more about direct and indirect objects later).

 

Then, if we wanted to combine this sentence with another one—say, The material was challenging —we could use a variety of conjunctions to do so: The perplexed students reread the chapter because/if/when/and/although the material was challenging, or The material was challenging so/and the perplexed students reread the chapter. Knowing, understanding, and practicing this ordering of words, even if we do it unconsciously, is knowing syntax

​

Syntax describes: (1) the systematic ways in which words are combined to create well-formed phrases, clauses, and sentences; and (2) the systematic ways in which clauses and sentences combine to create more complex sentences. Before we get to how words behave in combination, we discuss the properties and behavior of different categories of words, which affect how words can and do combine with one another.

 

Parts of speech (the more traditional term) or lexical categories (the more technical linguistic term) describe classes of words that behave similarly in the grammar of a language. You may previously have thought of these classes as words that “share some kinds of meaning”: for example, nouns are persons, places, or things. These semantic criteria, however, often prove unsatisfactory. For example, the word confusion, although definitely a noun (and perhaps a noun referring to a condition that you associate with grammar),is not a person, place, or thing (at least in any concrete sense of thing ),nor is tomorrow, which is a noun but can also function as an adverbial (a word “acting like”an adverb).

​

Tomorrow as a noun: Tomorrow is my birthday. 

Tomorrow as an adverbial: I hope I will receive lots of presents tomorrow. 

​

We can often more precisely describe and determine lexical categories by morphological and syntactic criteria—for example, the inflectional endings that they can take or the “slots” that they can fill in a sentence (e.g., the ___). These criteria also allow us to test any given word of unknown or difficult categorization. For example, what part of speech is yes ? Don’t worry: we will come back to this question.

​

​

In descriptive grammar, we distinguish between a word’s grammatical form and its function.

Form refers to the grammatical or lexical class of a word—what kind of word it is (e.g., a noun or a preposition).

Function describes the role of a word in a phrase or clause—what the word does in a grammatical environment (e.g., functions as a subject or an adverbial).

An analogy may help clarify this distinction. If you were to use your economics textbook as a doorstop (we know that you would never use your linguistics textbook for this purpose), the textbook remains a textbook in form, but at that moment, it functions as a doorstop. Now back to grammar. Compare the phrases the fast car and the company car. In the first case, we have an adjective, fast, modifying the noun car.
Fast behaves morphologically like other adjectives, for example, it takes the comparative and superlative (faster, fastest). Company, however, is a noun in form. It behaves like other nouns (e.g., a/the company, company’s) and not like adjectives (*companier, *companiest). But in the phrase the company car, the noun company functions as an adjectival modifier. Be careful not to confuse lexical categories like noun and verb with descriptions of function such as subject, object, and predicate. The description subject or object refers to the function of a given word or phrase within a clause. Nouns often function as subjects and objects, but other grammatical constructions can as well. For example, in the
sentence Students say things, the noun things functions as the direct object of the verb say. In the sentence Students say that they never learned grammar in high school, the direct object of say is the full clause that they never learned grammar in high school.

​​​

​​

​

Key Vocabulary

Grammaticality ---> Definition: A measure of whether a linguistic string is well-formed according to formal grammatical rules. ---> 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-linguistics/article/abs/toward-a-model-of-grammaticality-judgments1/75EBDF71069387995E48D9C97B3F2313

​

Grammaticality vs. Acceptability: Sentences that are strictly grammatical can sometimes sound unnatural or cause processing difficulty, while ungrammatical sentences are occasionally accepted in casual speech.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-of-experimental-syntax/acceptability-grammar-and-processing/FA57442F3F44AB724E6B117F47916F19

​

Grammaticality Judgment Tests (GJTs): Tools used in linguistics and second-language acquisition research to test whether speakers consider specific sentences correct or incorrect.

​

Hodge-Podge ---> According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, hodgepodge is a noun that means a confused mixture of different things

​

Adverbial ---> Adverbial Phrase: A group of words that acts as an adverb (for example, "with great speed" in "He ran with great speed"). [1, 2]

​

 Adverbs ---> According to the Cambridge Dictionary, adverbs give more details about how, when, where, why, or to what degree something happens. [1, 2]

​

Lexical Categories ---> Verbs, nouns, and Adjectives are examples 

​