Hierarchy
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P32-C3
2025-12-08
8
Hierarchy
We showed that a sentence is not just a string of words. Rather, the words in a sentence may be grouped into grammatical units of various sizes. One very important unit is the CLAUSE, which is sometimes defined as a “simple sentence.” Perhaps a more useful definition would be to say that a clause is the smallest grammatical unit which can express a complete proposition (see Simple sentences and propositions for a discussion of what this means). A sentence may consist of just one clause or, as illustrated in (15), a single sentence may contain several clauses.
(15) a “[Foxes have holes] and [birds of the air have nests],
but [the Son of Man has no place to lay his head].”
b [My wife told me that [I should introduce her little sister to the captain of the football team]], but [I assumed
that [her sister was too shy]].
Another important unit is the PHRASE. (We will propose a definition of “phrase” later.) A single clause may contain several phrases, as illustrated in (16a). A single phrase may contain several words, as seen in (16a) and in our Malay examples above. A single word may contain several morphemes, as illustrated in (16b).
(16) a [The coach’s wife] introduced [her little sister]
[to [the captain [of [the football team]]]].
b dis-taste-ful
read-abil-ity
dis-en-tangle
Each well-formed grammatical unit (e.g. a sentence) is made up of constituents which are themselves well-formed grammatical units (e.g. clauses, phrases, etc.). And there are only a small number of basic types of units. The set of types mentioned above is adequate for a large number of languages: sentence, clause, phrase, word, morpheme. This kind of structural organization is called a PART–WHOLE HIERARCHY: each unit is entirely composed of smaller units belonging to a limited set of types. This is an extremely important aspect of linguistic structure, not only in morphology and syntax but in phonology as well.1
1. Another important kind of hierarchy is a classification, or taxonomy, in which specific classes are grouped into more general classes. An example of this is the biologist’s classification of living things. Taxonomies are especially useful in analyzing certain aspects of word meaning.
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