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| Grammatical features |
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In linguistics, a feature is any characteristic used to classify a phoneme or word. These are often binary or unary conditions which act as constraints in various forms of linguistic analysis.
In phonology, segments are categorized into natural classes on the basis of their distinctive features. Each feature is a quality or characteristic of the natural class, such as voice or manner. A unique combination of features defines a phoneme.
Examples of phonemic or distinctive features are: [+/- voice ], [+/- ATR ] (binary features) and [ CORONAL ] (a unary feature; also a place feature).
Surface representations can be expressed as the result of rules acting on the features of the underlying representation. These rules are formulated in terms of transformations on features.
In morphology and syntax, words are often organized into lexical categories or word classes, such as "noun", "verb", "adjective", and so on. These word classes have grammatical features (also called categories or inflectional categories), which can have one of a set of potential values (also called the property, meaning, or feature of the category). [1]
For example, consider the pronoun in English. Pronouns are a lexical category. Pronouns have the person feature, which can have a value of "first", "second", or "third". English pronouns also have the number feature, which can have a value of either "singular" or "plural". As a result, we can describe the English pronoun "they" as a pronoun with [person:3] and [number:plural]. Third person singular pronouns in English also have a gender feature: "she" is [gender:feminine], "he" [gender:masculine] and "it [gender:neuter].
Different lexical categories realise or are specified for different grammatical features: for example, verbs in English are specified for tense, aspect and mood features, as well as person and number. The features that a category realises can also differ from language to language. [1]
There is often a correspondence between morphological and syntactic features, in that certain features, such as person, are relevant to both morphology and syntax; these are known as morphosyntactic features. Other types of grammatical features, by contrast, may be relevant to semantics (morphosemantic features), such as tense, aspect and mood, or may only be relevant to morphology (morphological features). Inflectional class (a word's membership of a particular verb class or noun class) is a purely morphological feature, because it is only relevant to the morphological realisation of the word. [1]
In formal models of grammar, features can be represented as attribute-value pairs. For example, in Lexical functional grammar, syntactic features are represented alongside grammatical functions at the level of functional structure (f-structure), which takes the form of an attribute-value matrix. [2]
In semantics, words are categorized into semantic classes. Intersecting semantic classes share the same semantic features. Semantic features can include [±human] and [±animate]. These features may in some instances be realised morphologically, in which case they may also be called morphosemantic features. [1]
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender; the values present in a given language are called the genders of that language.
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful lexical item in a language. A morpheme is not a word. The difference between a morpheme and a word is that a morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but a word on this definition always stands alone. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.
In traditional grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntaxic behavior, sometimes similar morphology in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
Case roles, according to the work by Fillmore (1967), are the semantic roles of noun phrases in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including theta roles and thematic roles, that can be independent of the morpho-syntax. The concept of case roles is related to the larger notion of Case which is defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of semantic or syntactic relationship they bear to their heads. Case traditionally refers to inflectional marking.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Mbula is an Austronesian language spoken by around 2,500 people on Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.
A grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values, which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word which is not a noun as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological transformation, but it does not always. Nominalization can refer, for instance, to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech by adding a derivational affix, but it can also refer to the complex noun that is formed as a result.
In historical linguistics and language change, grammaticalization is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions become grammatical markers. Thus it creates new function words by a process other than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions, instead deriving them from content words. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much.
In linguistics, the term nominal refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement. Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives. Languages with overt nominal agreement vary in how and to what extent agreement is required.
This rather technical article provides a typological sketch of the Pipil language. Another related article outlines Pipil grammar in fuller detail. The distinctive purpose of the present article is to single out those specific features of Nawat linguistic structure that are relevant to this language's general typological classification and characterization, answering the question: What major features make this language similar to or different from other languages? Most of the assertions in this article are generalizations from information found in the Pipil grammar article.
Nivaclé is a Matacoan language spoken in Paraguay and in Argentina by the Nivaclé. It is also known as Chulupí and Ashluslay, and in older sources has been called Ashluslé, Suhin, Sujín, Chunupí, Churupí, Choropí, and other variant spellings of these names. Nivaclé speakers are found in the Chaco, in Paraguay in Presidente Hayes Department, and Boquerón Department, and in Argentina in Salta Province.
Odia grammar is the study of the morphological and syntactic structures, word order, case inflections, verb conjugation and other grammatical structures of Odia, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles etc., as declension.
The Integrational theory of language is the general theory of language that has been developed within the general linguistic approach of integrational linguistics.