Teaching Notes
Chapter One
The Hierarchical Structure of Grammar
Ⅰ Teaching Aims:
This chapter aims to:
1. help students to know the hierachial structure of English
grammar.
2. get students to learn morphemes words, phrases and sentences
and their classification.
Ⅱ Teaching Procedures
1. Introduction
The grammatical structure of English is a hierarchical one, which can be divided into five levels, i.e. Sentence, Clause, Phrase, Word and Morpheme. A sentence is the largest unit and highest level in a grammatical structure while a morpheme is the smallest and lowest one.
2. Morphemes
A morpheme is the smallest unit in English grammar, and also the smallest meaningful unit of language.
1) Free Morphemes
Free morphemes are morphemes which can constitute words by themselves, e.g. boy, girl, work, water.
2) Bound Morphemes
Some morphemes like de-, dis-, -ness, -ly are never used independently in speech and writing. They are always attached to free morphemes to form new words. These morphemes are called bound morphemes.
Bound morphemes are mostly affixes. Affixes are attached to free morphemes either to form new words or to indicate grammatical categories. Affixes can be divided into two types: prefixes and suffixes.
3. Words
1) Simple Word, Derivative, Compound Word
a) simple words (morpheme words):at, far, hand, get
b) derivatives:
prefixes: dislike, unhappy, pronoun, prewar
suffixes: worker, widen, foolish, manly
c) compound words: handbook, outline, moreover, anybody
2) According to grammatical function, English words can be classified
into Closed Class and Open Class.
a) Closed Class
Closed class refers to all the Function words. The number of this type of words are limited. No new comers will enter into this class.
Therefore, this kind of words are called Closed Class. They include:
Preposition: in, on, without
Pronoun: you, he, one, this
Determiner: a, the, his, that, some
Conjunction: and, or, but, when
Auxiliary: do, can, must, will
b) Open Class
Open class refers to all the Content Words. In this type of words, new words appear continuously. Therefore, they are called Open Class. They included:
Noun: Smith, Paris, man, book
Adjective: old, big, cheap
Adverb: here, fast, early
Main Verb: work, make, give
4. Phrases
A phrase is a grammatical unit which is formed by one word or more than one word. A phrase is usually a string of words built up around a head word which determines both the class that the phrase belongs to and the way the phrase is structured.
Noun Phrase ( N P ):
all the college students
the tall boy sitting there
Verb Phrase ( V P ):
looks pale
arrived last night
Adjective Phrase ( Adj P ):
very difficult
careful enough
Adverb Phrase ( Adv P ):
very clearly
so slowly
