The verb. Finite and non-finite verbs

The verb. Finite and non-finite verbs

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.

Finite Verbs A finite verb (sometimes called main verbs) is a verb that has a subject, this means that it can be the main verb in a sentence. It shows tense (past / present etc) or number (singular / plural).

For example:- I live in Germay. (I is the subject - live describes what the subject does - live is a finite verb). Non-Finite Verbs A non-finite verb has no subject, tense or number. The only non-finite verb forms are the infinitive (indicated by to), the gerund or the participle.

For example:-

I travelled to Germany to improve my German. (To improve is in the infinitive form).

- See more at: http://www.learnenglish.de/grammar/verbfinitenon.html#sthash.8OeJnj1o.dpuf

Finite Verbs

Finite Verbs are those verbs that have a definite relation with the subject or noun. These verbs are usually the main verb of a clause or sentence and can be changed according to the noun. They are used only in present and past tense. They can be indicative of passive or active voice and also of number (singular or plural).

She walks home. - Here we see that the finite verb is walks and the pronoun is 'she'.

She walked home. - Here we can see how the verb changed/modified to change the tense of the sentence.

Non-Finite Verbs

These verbs cannot be the main verb of a clause or sentence as they do not talk about the action that is being performed by the subject or noun. They do not indicate any tense, mood or gender. They are used as nouns, adverbs and adjectives. They are also used to form non-finite clauses which are simply dependent clauses that use non-finite verbs.

He loves camping in the woods. - Here the non-finite verb is camping and it is used as a noun. These kind of non-finite verbs are called Gerunds.

I need to go to sleep. - Here the non- finite verb phrase is to sleep, it is acting as a noun. Non-finite verbs that use ‘to’ before them are called Infinitives.

Morphology

In linguistics, morphology /mɔːˈfɒlədʒi/^[1] is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphological typology is the classification of languages according to their use of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language's wordstock.

While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to nouns. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of English's rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin"), however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various levels of linguistic analysis.

We'll start with morphology, which deals with morphemes (the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words.

We'll then discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the meaningless elements that "spell out" the sound of morphemes), and phonetics, which studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking, the resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception..

Then we'll look at syntax, which deals with the way that words are combined into phrases and sentences. Finally, we'll take up two aspects of meaning, namely semantics, which deals with how sentences are connected with things in the world outside of language, and pragmatics, which deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate.

Voice.Active and passive voices

To Keep, active and passive voices

Tense	Active voice	Passive voice	Active sentence	Passive equivalent
Simple present	keep	is kept	I keep the butter in the fridge.	The butter is kept in the fridge.
Present continuous	is keeping	is being kept	John is keeping my house tidy.	My house is being kept tidy.
Simple past	kept	was kept	Mary kept her schedule meticulously.	Mary's schedule was kept meticulously.
Past continuous	was keeping	was being kept	The theater was keeping a seat for you.	A seat was being kept for you.
Present perfect	have kept	have been kept	I have kept all your old letters.	All your old letters have been kept.
Past perfect	had kept	had been kept	He had kept up his training regimen for a month.	His training regimen had been kept up for a month.
Simple Future	will keep	will be kept	Mark will keep the ficus.	The ficus will be kept.
Conditional Present	would keep	would be kept	If you told me, I would keep your secret.	If you told me, your secret would be kept.
Conditional Past	would have kept	would have been kept	I would have kept your bicycle here if you had left it with me.	Your bicycle would have been kept here if you had left it with me.
Present Infinitive	to keep	to be kept	She wants to keep the book.	The book wants to be kept.
Perfect Infinitive	to have kept	to have been kept	Judy was happy to have kept the puppy.	The puppy was happy to have been kept.
Present Participle & Gerund	keeping	being kept	I have a feeling that you may be keeping a secret.	I have a feeling that a secret may be being kept.
Perfect Participle	having kept	having been kept	Having kept the bird in a cage for so long, Jade wasn't sure it could survive in the wild.	The bird, having been kept in a cage for so long, might not survive in the wild.

In grammar, the voice (also called diathesis and (rarely) gender (of verbs) ^[1]) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice.

For example, in the sentence:

The cat ate the mouse.

the verb "ate" is in the active voice. However, in the sentence:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.

the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.

In the sentence:

The hunter killed the bear.

the verb "killed" is in the active voice, and the doer of the action is the "hunter". A passive version of the sentence is:

The bear was killed by the hunter.

Active

Further information: Active voice

The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent.

In the active voice the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Examples of active voice include the following; Kabaisa "ate" the potatoes The verb ate indicates the active voice. But consider the following sentence which is in passive voice; The potatoes were eaten by Kabaisa. The verb were eaten indicates the presence of passive voice. therefore for the case of active voice it shows that someone has done something or has caused something to happen. But for the case of passive voice it shows that some thing has been done by some else.

Passive

Further information: Passive voice, English passive voice

The passive voice is employed in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the verb. That is, it undergoes an action or has its state changed.^[4]

In the passive voice the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient (not the doer) of the action denoted by the verb.

Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice is simply marked on the verb by inflection: librum legit "He reads the book"; liber legitur "The book is read".

Parts of speech. Adjectives

Main Page: Parts of Speech

1. Adjectives
1. Descriptive Adjectives
2. Proper Adjectives
3. Possessive Adjectives
4. Numerical Adjectives
5. Demonstrative Adjectives
6. Relative Adjectives
7. Interrogative and Exclamatory Adjectives
8. Indefinite Adjectives
9. Comparison of Adjectives
10. Attributive and Predicative Use

Adjectives

An adjective is a word that modifies or describes a noun. Sometimes adjectives precede the noun they modify. Sometimes they follow a linking verb. For instance:

The red book was on the table. (Precedes its noun.)
The book on the table was red. (Follows the linking verb was.)

In the following sentences the adjectives modify the noun in the sense they describes it, or say what it looks like, feels like, sounds like, etc:

The balloon is green.

The adjective green tells us what the balloon looks like.

The cloth felt rough.

The adjective rough tells us what the cloth felt like.

The whining noise stopped.

The adjective whining tells us what the noise sounded like.

The following adjectives modify the nouns, but they do not tell us how they appear to the senses.

The best computer

We cannot tell the computer is the best by using our senses directly. We need to compare this computer with the others and make our own judgement or rely on what we have been told. The adjective best modified the noun computer by telling us it is the one that comes out top on some evaluation of all the computers considered. In future we might recognize it by its shape or colour, but the adjective best allows us to distinguish this computer from the others based on an evaluation.

This is my friend

The adjective my does not describe friend by saying what the person looks like, etc. You know that person is my friend because I said so, or for some other reason.

The last chocolate

The adjective last does not tell us what the chocolate looks like or tastes like. The chocolate looks like all the others. We deduce it is the last one, because it is the only one remaining in the box.

Descriptive Adjectives

These modify a noun and tell us what it is like, but not necessarily how it appears to the senses. Here 'descriptive' is used in the widest sense of the word.
The following descriptive adjectives describe the noun:

The flowery dress. The long train. The hairy pig. The smelly dog. The noteworthy example. The spacious garden. The rough surface. The insipid drink. The crazy idea.

They tell us what the noun, or thing, looks like, sounds like, tastes like, feels like or smells like.

These adjectives might look a bit like adverbs!

The moor is lonely. It feels tacky. The bush is prickly.

The following are also descriptive adjectives:

The last dance. The new computer. The top man. The late train.

They describe the noun, but they do not tell us what it looks like, smells like or sounds like.

Proper Adjectives

These are derived from proper names. For instance:

John's car
Australian English
Ford car

Possessive Adjectives

These show ownership:

my car, your cat, our house, their ideas

In traditional grammar, these are considered adjectives; nowadays, they are usually considered pronouns or determiners. They define the nouns, but do not describe them (Or describe them in the widest sense of describe, whatever that means). Because they do this, we can think of them as adjectives. Also they stand for a noun. The word my stands for mine (of me). So my is also a pronoun.

Numerical Adjectives

The ordinal numbers: first, second, third, etc., are usually adjectives:

The first one. The second train. The third man.

Also, the adjectives of quality: few, many, several are adjectives.

Demonstrative Adjectives

These point something out:

this book that pencil, these boxes, those cats,

Like possessive adjectives, nowadays, these are considered pronouns. In traditional grammar, they are demonstrative adjectives. But when used like this:

He gave me this. That is the pencil he gave me. These are her cats.

current grammar, like traditional grammar, calls them pronouns.

Relative Adjectives

Having faith is what matters most. This is the dog whose collar we found.

Indefinite Adjectives

The words in bold are indefinite adjectives:

any person, each difficulty, another twinge

Comparison of Adjectives

Some adjectives can be compared:

Descriptive	Comparative	Superlative
Describing	Comparing 2 things	Comparing More Than 2 Things
good	better	the best
bad	worse	the worst
little	less	the least
few	fewer	the fewest
important	more important	the most important

Some adjectives cannot be compared. They are in the absolute degree. Here are some of them:

absolute	impossible	principal
ideal	whole	stationary
chief	perpetual	sufficient
complete	main	unanimous
dead	enough	unavoidable
devoid	manifest	unbroken
entire	minor	unique
fatal	paramount	universal
perfect

For instance, is someone or something is dead, they cannot be deader, or the deadest! Such words cannot be compared because it is illogical to do so. paramount means of the highest rank or importance. If it is the highest, nothing can be higher. So we cannot say something is more paramount (more higher!). Similarly, it doesn't make sense to say something is more unique. As unique means "the only one of its kind", something cannot be more unique (If something is rarer than something else, then the first thing isn't unique, but rare).

It is not the real world that determines whether an adjective is absolute or not, it is our knowledge of language. For instance, engineers might make a rod which is one metre long. Every known measure shows the length is accurate. We can say it is a perfect metre. However, later, scientists discover better ways of measuring things and, after all, the perfect metre is not exactly one metre long. They make another rod which is exactly one metre long according to every known measure. We do not say the new metre is more perfect than the old one: we say the old one wasn't really perfect.

Types of number

Singular versus plural

Main article: Plural

In most languages with grammatical number, nouns, and sometimes other parts of speech, have two forms, the singular, for one instance of a concept, and the plural, for more than one instance. Usually, the singular is the unmarked form of a word, and the plural is obtained by inflecting the singular. This is the case in English: car/cars, box/boxes, man/men. There may be exceptional nouns whose plural is identical to the singular: one sheep/two sheep.

Dual

Main article: Dual (grammatical number)

The distinction between a "singular" number (one) and a "plural" number (more than one) found in English is not the only possible classification. Another one is "singular" (one), "dual" (two) and "plural" (more than two). Dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many ancient Indo-European languages that descended from it—Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Gothic, Old Norse, and Old English for example—and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Slovene.^[7] Many more modern Indo-European languages show residual traces of the dual, as in the English distinctions both vs. all, either vs. any, neither vs. none, and so on. (Note, however, that Norwegian både, for example, though cognate with English both, can be used with more than two things, as in X sparer både tid, penger, og arbeid, literally "X saves both time, money, and labour".)

Many Semitic languages also have dual number. For instance, in Arabic all nouns can have singular, plural, or dual forms. For non-broken plurals, masculine plural nouns end with ون -ūn and feminine plural nouns end with ات -āt, whilst ان -ān, is added to the end of a noun to indicate that it is dual (even among nouns that have broken plurals).

Pronouns in Polynesian languages such as Tahitian exhibit the singular, dual, and plural numbers.

Trial

The trial number is a grammatical number referring to 'three items', in contrast to 'singular' (one item), 'dual' (two items), and 'plural' (four or more items). Several Austronesian languages such as Tolomako, Lihir, and Manam; the Kiwaian languages; and the Austronesian-influenced creole languages Bislama and Tok Pisin have the trial number in their pronouns. No language is known with trial number in its nouns.^{[ citation needed ]}

Quadral

The quadral number, if it existed, would denote four items together, as trial does three. No known natural language has it, nor is there any proof that any natural language ever did. It was once thought to exist in the pronoun systems of Marshallese, spoken in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean,^[8] and in Sursurunga,^[9] in Tangga,^[10][11] and in several other Austronesian languages. While not all of these languages are adequately attested, it turns out that Sursurunga instead has both a "lesser paucal" (labeled "trial", but in fact referring to small groups, with typically three or four members) and a "greater paucal" (misnamed the "quadral", as it has a minimum of four, e.g. a pair of dyadic kin terms)—the distinction is along the lines of "a few" vs. "several";—and that what Marshallese actually has is a trial and a paucal.^[12] None of them has a "quadral"; in at least two cases the field workers who originally suggested they did have a "quadral" were also the first to publish a peer-reviewed article contradicting that suggestion.

Paucal

Paucal number, for a few (as opposed to many) instances of the referent (e.g. in Hopi, Warlpiri, some Oceanic languages,^[13] Motuna,^[14] Serbo-Croatian,^[15] and in Arabic for some nouns). Paucal number has also been documented in some Cushitic languages of Ethiopia, including Baiso, which marks singular, paucal, plural.^[16] When paucal number is used in Arabic, it generally refers to ten or fewer instances.

Of the Indo-European languages, Northern Kurdish or Kurmanji is one of the few known languages with paucal number. For instance: "car-IN-an" (sometimes), cf. "gelek car-an" (many times). In Russian, a form similar to genitive singular (the remnants of the dual number^{[ citation needed ]}) is also applied to three or four items (2, 3 or 4 kamn'a – stones, but 5 or eight kamney (genitive plural)), making it effectively paucal. Italian language, although among Romance languages, has a similar pattern, using prepositions "di" + article, named "articolo partitivo" (partitive article).

Distributive plural

Distributive plural number, for many instances viewed as independent individuals (for example, in Navajo).

having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural.

Parts of speech. The noun

Parts of Speech
Chapter 2 - Nouns

A noun is often defined as a word which names a person, place or thing. Here are some examples of nouns: boy, river, friend, Mexico, triangle, day, school, truth, university, idea, John F. Kennedy, movie, aunt, vacation, eye, dream, flag, teacher, class, grammar. John F. Kennedy is a noun because it is the name of a person; Mexico is a noun because it is the name of a place; and boy is a noun because it is the name of a thing.

Some grammar books divide nouns into 2 groups - proper nouns and common nouns. Proper nouns are nouns which begin with a capital letter because it is the name of a specific or particular person place or thing. Some examples of proper nouns are: Mexico, John F. Kennedy, Atlantic Ocean, February, Monday, New York City, Susan, Maple Street, Burger King. If you see a word beginning with a capital letter in in the middle of a sentence, it is probably a proper noun. Most nouns are common nouns and do not begin with a capital letter.

Many nouns have a special plural form if there is more than one. For example, we say one book but two books. Plurals are usually formed by adding an -s (book s) or -es (box es) but some plurals are formed in different ways (child - children, person - people, mouse - mice, sheep - sheep).

Nouns

A noun is the name of a person, a place, a thing or an idea. Sometimes a noun is the name of an action.

person	man, woman, child
place	ocean, desert, wood, farm
thing	cabbage, hammer,
idea	hope, plan, memory
action	intention, thinking, running

Common and Proper Nouns

Common nouns describe groups or members of groups; whereas, proper nouns identify a unique example. Proper names are usually capitalised.

Common Noun	Proper Noun
man	Tom
aircraft	Tiger Moth
religion	Christianity
entertainers	The Beatles
nation	England

In English, the days of the week and the months are capitalised:

January, February... November, December

but the seasons are not:

winter, spring, summer, autumn

(Although the seasons are capitalised in USA).
Directions are not capitalised:

north, west, south, east

Identifying Nouns

Proper nouns are easy to identify because they are the names of particular people or things. For instance, Rob, Betty, Lorraine.

Common nouns have the following properties:

• They can be preceded by some determiners.
• They sometimes have plurals.
• They can have a possessive case.

 

Determiners

Common nouns can be preceded by determiners: a, the, some, a few, my,...

If a word is a common noun, then the following sentence makes sense when the word is inserted:

My [ insert noun ] (is/are here).

For instance, house is a noun, so:

My house is here,

makes sense.

The word happy, however, isn't a noun, so:

My happy is here,

does not make sense.

Note on Using the Tests

Most tests show whether a word could be a noun - sometimes. They do not indicate the word is a noun in the given sentence. To do this, we need to apply the test in that sentence. Consider this sentence:

The delicate and time-consuming work is important.

Using our test [My [ insert noun ] (is/are here).]:

My work is here.

makes sense. So the word work can sometimes be a noun. (Sometimes it is a verb, of course).

To determine whether a word is a noun, we need to apply the test in the sentence. In the sentence:

The delicate and time-consuming work is important.

We note that 'work' is preceded by the determiner 'The', so it is a noun.

In this sentence:

They work till they drop.

We cannot precede the word work with my:

My work till they drop.

Therefore work isn't a noun in this sentence. (It is, of course, a verb, in that sentence).

Plurals

Nouns often have plurals; whereas other parts of speech do not. So if a word has a plural, it is a noun. Uncountable Nouns, however, do not have plurals.

Singular	Plural
cat	cats
man	men
fish	fishes
formula	formulae
MP (Member of Parliament)	MPs

Nowadays, in Standard English, acronyms do not have periods. So M.P. becomes MP. Plurals are made by adding an s – MPs. If periods are retained, then apostrophe s is used – M.P.'s. The 's plural is sometimes used when confusion might result – Dot the i's and crosss the t's, 1's and 2's (because 1s might look like Is, and 2's for consistency).

Possession

We can check whether a word is a noun, by asking whether it has a possessive form. For instance:

Noun	Possessive Form
dog	the dog's dinner.
Charles	Charles' dinner.
yesterday	yesterday's error.

We indicate possession by adding the apostrophe (') s. If Mary is the owner of the book we write – Mary's book. When the word for the owner ends in s anyway, we would normally add only an apostrophe at the end of the word. So we write and say the boys' school. However, especially with proper names, we add the apostrophe s when sound requires it – Charles's book, Odysseus's Quest. But... if this would mean we end up saying a sound like "iz-iz", we do not add the final s. So if the owner of the book is Mr Bridges, we write and say Mr Bridges' book (without an s after the apostrophe).

Notes: In older English, Charles' book and Odysseus' Quest would have been correct, although almost everyone would have said Charles's book, although some might have tried to say Odysseus' Quest (because it sounds more literary).
The apostrophe is not used with pronouns – its, yours, ours.
The apostrophe is sometimes called a mark of elision to indicate some letters have been omitted – it's going (it is going), it'll go fine (it will go fine).

Abstract and Concrete Nouns

Nominalizations

A nominalization is a noun which has been made from another part of speech, such as a verb, adjective or adverb. They are abstract nouns.

Common Ideas

A nominalization can be used to succinctly express a common idea, when it becomes a short-hand way of referring to a complex idea.

For the new year, I resolved to do some new things.
I made some New Year Resolutions.

 

He believed that individuals should be free to inspect what organizations held about them on computer.
He believed in freedom of information.

 

They objected to women being allowed to ask doctors to abort their foetuses, for non-medical reasons.
The objected to abortion on demand.

General and Specific Nouns

A general noun or expression can be concrete or abstract.

General and Specific Nouns
General	More Specific	Even More Specific
animal	carnivore	cat, lion, tiger
furniture	table, chair, sofa,	divan
food	meat, vegetables, fruit, fish,	beef, turnip, apple, cod
subjects	mathematics, English, science	calculus, grammar, chemistry
sport	running, swimming, football, cricket	sprint, back-stroke, soccer, bowling or batting
business	shop	bakery, grocers, supermarket
humanity	people	men, women, children
mind	cognition, affect	thinking, remembering, loving, hating

 

The verb. Finite and non-finite verbs

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.

Finite Verbs A finite verb (sometimes called main verbs) is a verb that has a subject, this means that it can be the main verb in a sentence. It shows tense (past / present etc) or number (singular / plural).

For example:- I live in Germay. (I is the subject - live describes what the subject does - live is a finite verb). Non-Finite Verbs A non-finite verb has no subject, tense or number. The only non-finite verb forms are the infinitive (indicated by to), the gerund or the participle.

For example:-

I travelled to Germany to improve my German. (To improve is in the infinitive form).

- See more at: http://www.learnenglish.de/grammar/verbfinitenon.html#sthash.8OeJnj1o.dpuf

Finite Verbs

Finite Verbs are those verbs that have a definite relation with the subject or noun. These verbs are usually the main verb of a clause or sentence and can be changed according to the noun. They are used only in present and past tense. They can be indicative of passive or active voice and also of number (singular or plural).

She walks home. - Here we see that the finite verb is walks and the pronoun is 'she'.

She walked home. - Here we can see how the verb changed/modified to change the tense of the sentence.

Non-Finite Verbs

These verbs cannot be the main verb of a clause or sentence as they do not talk about the action that is being performed by the subject or noun. They do not indicate any tense, mood or gender. They are used as nouns, adverbs and adjectives. They are also used to form non-finite clauses which are simply dependent clauses that use non-finite verbs.

He loves camping in the woods. - Here the non-finite verb is camping and it is used as a noun. These kind of non-finite verbs are called Gerunds.

I need to go to sleep. - Here the non- finite verb phrase is to sleep, it is acting as a noun. Non-finite verbs that use ‘to’ before them are called Infinitives.

Morphology

In linguistics, morphology /mɔːˈfɒlədʒi/^[1] is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of a given language's morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, affixes, parts of speech, intonations and stresses, or implied context. In contrast, morphological typology is the classification of languages according to their use of morphemes, while lexicology is the study of those words forming a language's wordstock.

While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to nouns. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of English's rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin"), however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various levels of linguistic analysis.

We'll start with morphology, which deals with morphemes (the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words.

We'll then discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the meaningless elements that "spell out" the sound of morphemes), and phonetics, which studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking, the resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception..

Then we'll look at syntax, which deals with the way that words are combined into phrases and sentences. Finally, we'll take up two aspects of meaning, namely semantics, which deals with how sentences are connected with things in the world outside of language, and pragmatics, which deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate.