| Grammatical features |
|---|
Syntax relationships |
Inlinguistics, agrammatical category orgrammatical feature is a property of items within thegrammar of alanguage. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes calledgrammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:
Although the use of terms varies from author to author, a distinction should be made between grammatical categories and lexical categories.Lexical categories (consideredsyntactic categories) largely correspond to theparts of speech of traditional grammar, and refer to nouns, adjectives, etc.
Aphonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending that marks "number" on a noun) is sometimes called anexponent.
Grammatical relations define relationships between words and phrases with certain parts of speech, depending on their position in the syntactic tree. Traditional relations includesubject,object, andindirect object.
A givenconstituent of an expression can normally take only one value in each category. For example, a noun ornoun phrase cannot be both singular and plural, since these are both values of the "number" category. It can, however, be both plural and feminine, since these represent different categories (number and gender).
Categories may be described and named with regard to the type ofmeanings that they are used to express. For example, the category oftense usually expresses the time of occurrence (e.g. past, present or future). However, purely grammatical features do not always correspond simply or consistently to elements of meaning, and different authors may take significantly different approaches in their terminology and analysis. For example, the meanings associated with the categories of tense,aspect andmood are often bound up in verbconjugation patterns that do not have separate grammatical elements corresponding to each of the three categories; seeTense–aspect–mood.
Categories may be marked onwords by means ofinflection. InEnglish, for example, the number of anoun is usually marked by leaving the noun uninflected if it is singular, and by adding the suffix-s if it is plural (although some nouns haveirregular plural forms). On other occasions, a category may not be marked overtly on the item to which it pertains, being manifested only through other grammatical features of the sentence, often by way of grammaticalagreement.
For example:
The bird can sing.
The birds can sing.
In the above sentences, the number of the noun is marked by the absence or presence of the ending-s.
The sheepis running.
The sheepare running.
In the above, the number of the noun is not marked on the noun itself (sheep does not inflect according to the regular pattern), but it is reflected in agreement between the noun and verb: singular number triggersis, and plural numberare.
The birdis singing.
The birdsare singing.
In this case the number is marked overtly on the noun, and is also reflected by verb agreement.
However:
The sheep can run.
In this case the number of the noun (or of the verb) is not manifested at all in thesurface form of the sentence, and thus ambiguity is introduced (at least, when the sentence is viewed in isolation).
Exponents of grammatical categories often appear in the same position or "slot" in the word (such asprefix,suffix orenclitic). An example of this is theLatin cases, which are all suffixal:rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosa, rosā ("rose", in thenominative,genitive,dative,accusative,vocative andablative).
Categories can also pertain to sentence constituents that are larger than a single word (phrases, or sometimesclauses). A phrase often inherits category values from itshead word; for example, in the above sentences, thenoun phrasethe birds inherits plural number from the nounbirds. In other cases such values are associated with the way in which the phrase is constructed; for example, in thecoordinated noun phraseTom and Mary, the phrase has plural number (it would take a plural verb), even though both the nouns from which it is built up are singular.
In traditional structural grammar, grammatical categories are semantic distinctions; this is reflected in a morphological or syntactic paradigm. But ingenerative grammar, which sees meaning as separate from grammar, they are categories that define the distribution of syntactic elements.[1] For structuralists such asRoman Jakobson grammatical categories were lexemes that were based on binary oppositions of "a single feature of meaning that is equally present in all contexts of use". Another way to define a grammatical category is as a category that expresses meanings from a single conceptual domain, contrasts with other such categories, and is expressed through formally similar expressions.[2] Another definition distinguishes grammatical categories from lexical categories, such that the elements in a grammatical category have a common grammatical meaning – that is, they are part of the language's grammatical structure.[3]
Media related toGrammatical categories at Wikimedia Commons