Grammar

Question 1

State + explain the Hierarchy of Grammar.

Answer 1

The Hierarchy of Grammar:
- Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning (e.g. ‘birds’- ‘bird’ + ‘s’ are two separate morphemes; the ‘s’ means more than one bird)
- Word: made up of one or more morphemes (e.g. perch- a single morpheme)
- Phrase: made of more than one word (e.g. two birds)
- Clause: a complete grammatical unit, which makes sense, made up of words + phrases. (e.g. ‘one turns to the other and he says.’ 2 clauses joined by ‘and’)
- Sentence: a complete grammatical unit which makes sense and can stand on its own. (e.g. ‘two birds are sitting on a perch.’) Sentences often contain more than 1 clause (e.g. ‘One turns to the other and he says, “Can you smell something fishy?”’)
- Discourse: longer than a single sentence; will have some kind of structure which relates to the type of text you are looking at. (e.g. ‘Two birds are sitting on a perch. One turns to the other and he says, “Can you smell something fishy?”’)

Question 2

Explain what Lexical Words (Content words) are.

Answer 2

• Lexical words (content words) carry the main meaning in a sentence.
  -Nouns
• Adjectives
• Verbs
• Adverbs

Question 3

Explain what Grammatical Words (Function Words) are.

Answer 3

• Function words- carry only grammatical meaning in a sentence.
  • Determiners
  • Pronouns
  • Prepositions
  • Conjunctions