The Structure of English Language

Introduction

Introduction

This web page is intended for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) specifications in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science. It contains a basic guide to the structure of the English language.

Please note that I have not set down prescriptive rules which must be obeyed. I have described language, using both traditional terms and some of the categories and descriptions of modern grammar. English is not "derived" from Latin (whatever Prince Charles thinks) but has a Germanic origin, although much of our lexicon comes from French and the classical languages of Greek and Latin. None of this classical lexis was found in Old English, of course - it has entered English from the Renaissance onwards, most of it in comparatively modern times, thanks to its extensive use in science.

Some of the language categories of traditional grammar have more coherence than others. Nouns and verbs are fairly coherent, while adverbs (or all the words classed by lexicographers as such) are certainly not.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the guide, please contact me.

We can study the structure of language in a variety of ways. For example, we can study

classes of words (parts of speech),meanings of words (semantics), with or without considering changes of meaning,how words are organised in relation to each other (syntax),how words are formed (morphology),the sounds of words (phonology) andhow written forms represent these (lexicography).

There is no universally accepted model for doing this, but some models use the notion of a hierarchy, and this may prove fruitful for you. The framework (description of structure) you will study here is written to be comprehensive yet succinct. Elsewhere, in studying language theory, you will focus on a selective area, and investigate this in more detail.

The most basic units of meaning are simple words (e.g.: dog, yes and swim) or the elements of complex words (e.g.: un- -happi- and -ness in unhappiness). These basic elements are called morphemes, and the study of how they are combined in words is morphology.

The study of how words are organised into phrases, clauses and sentences is usually referred to as syntax.

A longer stretch of language is known as discourse, the study of its structure as discourse analysis.

This hierarchy is partly explained by the table below, from David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. The right hand column should be read upwards, in the direction of the arrow.

Outline structure of Englishsentences
are analysed into
clauses
are analysed into
phrases
are analysed into
words
are analysed into
morphemes↓ ↑sentences
are used to build
clauses
are used to build
phrases
are used to build
words
are used to build
morphemes

The following table shows a three-part model of the structure of English.

Three-part model of EnglishMorphologySyntaxDiscoursemorphemes
↓
wordsphrases
↓
clauses
↓
sentencesrelationships between sentences in longer stretches of language