Grammatical categories

The lexicon and the grammatical categories

ARELY SÁNCHEZ VALDEZ

What is the lexicon?

All the words used in a particular language or subject, or a dictionary

Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs.

Structure of lexicón

When we study semantic structure, we are trying to expound all the relationships of meaning that relate lexemes to each other. However, because of the size and complexity of the English lexicon, very little of thi s structure has been described.

The structure of lexicon is defined by the networks of meaning relationships which bind lexemes together.

Hyponymy

Antonymy

Synonymy

Antonyms are lexemes which are opposite in meaning – again a definition which sounds straightforward, until we begin to think about what is meant by opposite.

Hyponymy is less familiar term to most people than either synonymy or antonymy, but it refers to a much more important sense relation.

Synonyms are lexemes which have the same meaning

What is a Gramatical Category?

A grammatical category is a class of units (such as noun and verb) or features (such as number and case) that share a common set of characteristics.

Identifying Grammar Groups

There are two families of classes: lexical functional

Classes are word sets that display the same formal properties, such as inflection or verb tense.

The lexical class includes: nouns verbs adjectives adverbs

Lorem Ipsum

The lexical

A lexical category is a class of lexical items. – Lexical items are items in the lexicon of a language (= the language’s vocabulary). eat, pinch, elephant, cookie, pretty, … – Common lexical categories: noun, verb, adjective, … • Lexical category is also known as part of speech

info

Functional

The functional class includes: determiners particles prepositions modals qualifiers question words conjunctions other words denoting position or spatial relationships

Refernce:• (Andrew Radford, Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) - Wee, Lian-Hee and Winnie H.Y. Cheung (2009) An animated and narrated glossary of terms used in Linguistics. Hong Kong Baptist University

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