tailieunhanh - The grammar book teacher course part 4

But when all was said and done, this was an enormous undertaking (on top of our full-time jobs), and Howard came to our rescue when it was clear we were going to miss yet another deadline without some assistance. We also found his feedback on other chapters helpful. | 14 The Grammar Book argue that blue is the name of a thing a color and is therefore rightfully a noun. The structural or descriptive grammarians eschewing such traditional semantic or meaningbased definitions of nouns as the one just given chose instead to identify word classes through their structural or formal characteristics their position in a sentence adjacent function words if any and their constituents. For instance common nouns in English typically occupy positions such as the following and arc preceded by function words such as the or their. The was very amusing. Did you notice their As for the constituents of nouns a simple noun like book is a minimal unit there is no way to break it down further. As such we say it has one morpheme. A noun like books on the other hand has two morphemes book and the grammatical morpheme -s. There are two grammatical morphemes that can be used to mark nouns in English. Countable nouns have plural inflections to distinguish between one and more than one boy vs. boys and all nouns can have possessive inflections girt vs. girl s to signal possession or a number of other meanings see Chapter 16 . In addition to plural and possessive grammatical morphemes English nouns often have derivational morphemes that mark nouns derived from other parts of speech see Chapter 3 . For example adding -ness to the adjective sad gives us the noun sadness. There are several dozen noun derivational morphemes although some are used only in a few words such as -dow as in kingdom and wisdom Roberts 1958 whereas others like -nrssare frequent and productive. Not surprisingly relying on structural criteria for identifying nouns can create problems. Not all nouns have distinctive noun-like morphemes and even when they do the words don t always function as nouns for example wilderness does not function as a noun in the compound urildemess park. Furthermore many of the words without distinctive morphology would also appear to belong to more than one part