﻿ Grammar of Words - an introduction to morphology. (Linguistics lessons for language learners)

How languages build words

In this course, we will study how languages build their words. We will explore what linguists call morphology, which is a way of talking about the grammar of words and parts of words. The first lesson will introduce the basic concepts that allow languages to build words. Subsequent lessons will examine individual parts of speech, the grammatical categories we may use to sort words. The final lesson discusses features that emerge only when we consider relations between words. Along the way, you will meet a variety of languages. You will have the chance to sharpen your linguistic senses as you learn to analyze the pieces of words in languages clearly and efficiently.

If you've had a traditional education in grammar before (e.g. English class), you may first want to get some background info on the perspective behind these lessons. Entirely optional but relevant background info includes how linguistics studies language, what counts as linguistic evidence and technical approaches to good and bad grammar.

I've also posted a glossary that will help you juggle all of the terms you're about to meet. If you enjoy this course and want more activities, explanations and review tests, consider my book for beginners titled Native Grammar: How Languages Work.

Morphemes and allomorphs

Every sentence spoken in every language is built from grammatical atoms called morphemes. A morpheme is the "smallest meaningful unit" you can find when you break phrases and words apart. Morphemes can be long like annihilate or very short like the "past tense" -(e)d tacked onto annihilated.

Morphemes have allomorphs, or various ways they show up in a language. In English, -ed marks the past tense, but it doesn't always have the same pronunciation. Speakers pronounce it as [t] in helped but [d] in cubed. Past-tense [t] and [d] are simply two allomorphs of the same past morpheme /d/.

You now have a basic concept of morphemes and allomorphs, but how do you apply this to everyday language? To begin analyzing words, separate morphemes with a hyphen.

English Amazing! The farmer speaks Latin!
amaz-ing the farm-er speak-s Latin

Keep in mind that morphemes and allomorphs are identified based on how speakers of a given language build words. Morphemes are language-specific. English speakers cannot break annihilate into smaller meaningful units, but Latin speakers could find the historical morphemes an-nihil-at-e.

Types of morphemes

Different morphemes have different functions. The morphemes farm, speak and amaz(e) have clear semantic content - if you speak standard English, you know what they mean. But what about less obvious morphemes like -s and -ing? These morphemes attach to another morpheme to provide it with a grammatical meaning, and are known as inflectional morphemes. The grammatical meaning of the inflectional morpheme -ing in amaz-ing is “present participle”.

The case of -er in farm-er doesn't involve the kind of "grammatical meaning" expected from inflectional morphemes. Instead, -er creates a new word with a new meaning. While speaks and speak may be considered a separate form of the same word, farmer and farm are two different words. Morphemes like -er that attach to other morphemes to derive new words are known as derivational morphemes.

Notice that morphemes like speak and Latin can exist on their own - they are free morphemes. On the other hand, bound morphemes must attach to another morpheme before a speaker can use them. Inflectional and derivational morphemes cannot exist on their own - they are known as affixes (from the Latin stem af-fix 'fixed to'), and are necessarily bound morphemes.

Affixes that attach before other morphemes are called prefixes, including the derivational pre– in pre-fix. Suffixes attach to the end of another morpheme, such as the inflectional -ed in studi-ed. Since they fall at the end of words, suffixes are also referred to by the informal name endings. When written alone, you may see prefixes with a hyphen following the morpheme and suffixes with a hyphen preceding the morpheme.

Base morphemes and attaching morphemes

The morpheme that carries the word's central meaning is often called the root morpheme. In French, the root port- has the meaning 'carry'. French speakers must add inflectional affixes to that root to make it usable, such as porter 'to carry', portant 'carrying' or elle porte 'she carries'.

French speakers may add derivational prefixes to the root port- to form ap-port- 'carry towards'/'bring' and its opposite em-port- 'carry away'/'take'. These are derived words, but we do not call them roots - they are stems formed from the root port-. Again, French speakers must add inflectional affixes to that stem to use it, as in apporter 'to bring' or elle apporte 'she brings'. The morpheme port- is the root and stem of porter, while apporter has the root port- and the stem apport-.

Ways of expressing grammatical concepts

In this course and especially in the parallel book Native Grammar, I will give examples from a variety of languages. Each language handles grammar differently, but we can remark on a few general cross-linguistic tendencies.

A language may grammatically mark a word by attaching an affix or placing it near another word with some grammatical meaning. The French word porté 'carried' is grammatically marked, but so is the Japanese word 日本語 nihongo 'Japanese (language)' in 日本語の 　nihongo no hon (Japanese - possessive affix - book) '(a) Japanese book'. Words that do not take such morphemes are unmarked.

Keep in mind that unmarked or less marked words may also represent a grammatical concept: the word mom is an unmarked singular noun (the plural mom-s is marked). Since in this case nothing means something, we can talk about a zero morpheme or null morpheme, sometimes written as a zero (0). Applying this concept, mom-0 represents the singular (only one mom) while mom-s represents the plural (two or more moms).

A language might explain a feature in words rather than mark it outright. The marked Romanian word omului has the root om 'person' and an affix –ului that marks direction towards. English uses periphrasis, Greek for 'speaking around', to translate this single Romanian word: 'to the person'.

A language may also rely on compounding, which involves combining two or more words to form a new concept: keyphrase simply compounds the noun key with another noun phrase.

A language may simply appropriate a word from one word class and use it in another, a technique known as conversion. For example, the noun query (class = N) has also come to be used as a verb query (class = V) without undergoing any change in form: query the database.

Lastly, a language may use word order, or arranging words in a specific way. This is an especially important when considering basic word order, which describes the normal arrangement of subjects, verbs and objects in a language. So, English may be considered an SVO (subject-verb-object) language, Classical Latin an SOV language, and Classical Arabic and Modern Irish a VSO language.

Classifying languages by their word-building tendencies

Some languages, including Indo-European languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, tend to form words by tacking on all kinds of grammatical affixes. We describe these languages as synthetic languages. Synthetic languages build words by adding affixes to roots and stems. Synthetic languages are associated with bound morphemes, especially when it comes to content words like nouns and verbs. Consider Caesar’s famous quote, in which the verbs ‘come’, ‘see’ and ‘conquer’ are necessarily bound to an affix:

Latin Ven-i vid-i vic-i.
'I came, I saw, I conquered.'
Ven-io vid-eo vinc-o.
'I come, I see, I conquer.'

There are two major types of synthesis. Fusional languages shove a lot of grammatical information into their affixes. The ending -i in the Latin examples above fuses together information about who conquers and when the conquest takes place. Each affix contains multiple pieces of grammatical information.

More commonly, synthetic languages divide grammatical information into separate affixes. Such agglutinative languages often add strings of affixes to form words. Each affix contains one piece of grammatical information.

Turkish Ev-iniz-de-yiz.
'We are at your house.'

Many languages are not synthetic at all, and require few if any affixes. Such languages are analytic. In analytic languages, the vast majority of morphemes are individual, usable words in their own right. Modern English has this tendency: learn is a root morpheme and a word in its own right, while equivalent Italian root impar- must take on affixes that turn it into a usable word, such as imparo 'I learn' or imparare 'to learn'. Compare this to a Mandarin Chinese word like () 'drink', which never takes affixes. Analytic languages may employ periphrasis, compounding and word order to convey the kind of information explicitly marked in synthetic languages.

Crucially, all of the terms in this section represent general tendencies rather than exceptionless rules. Languages aren't purely synthetic or analytic. Synthetic languages have words that cannot attach to affixes, while analytic languages may use separate words to mark grammatical function in a way strongly reminiscent of affixation.

Practice Exercise

1) Divide the following phrase into morphemes.

I reread the book's ending but it still doesn't make sense.

2) Which morphemes are free and which are bound in the sentence above? Identify the roots, stems and affixes.

3) Based on that same sentence, how would you classify English (among the types of languages introduced above)?

4) English speakers may talk about many books (with an [s] sound) but many songs (with a [z] sound). What is the relationship between the suffix pronounced [s] and the suffix pronounced [z]?

The grammar of nouns

Words that provide labels and names for people, things and concepts are known as nouns. In fact, the term 'noun' comes from the Old French word for 'name'. In this section, we'll examine the various ways languages look at nouns and consider the basic properties of nouns.


Languages may grammatically count how many people or things are being labeled by marking the noun. This property of the noun is known as number. Languages that distinguish singular nouns from plural nouns have two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. Other languages have more grammatical numbers, such as dual (two instances of a noun), collective (when the noun represents a single group) and nullar number (for zero instances of a noun).

English a language some language-s no language-s
(singular) (plural) (nullar)
Ancient Greek ποῦς poû-s πόδε pód-e πόδες pód-es
'a foot' (singular) 'two feet' (dual) 'feet' (plural)
Japanese tomo 友達 tomo-dachi
'friend(s)' (sing & pl) 'a group of friends' (collective)

Class & gender

Languages may divide nouns into categories. This property of categorizing nouns is known as class. Class may be related to the meaning of a noun, the form of a noun, or may be largely arbitrary. English does not distinguish noun classes, but check out a few languages that do.

Sesotho se-phiri bo-hobe le-loko
class: (se-) (bo-) (le-)
'secret' 'bread' 'family'
Kannada maga-nu maga-lu pustaka
class: (masculine) (feminine) (neuter)
'son' 'daughter' 'book'

One type of class, or feature similar to class, is noun gender. Languages with noun gender may separate masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. Keep in mind that gender is a grammatical property, and, depending on the language, may not relate to physiology or meaning. In the Kannada examples above, you can start to see that Kannada ties gender to the meaning of nouns: nouns that label females are feminine, while nouns that do not are not feminine. On the other hand, in Indo-European languages, most feminine nouns label neuter concepts like French la vie 'life' or une maison 'a house' (both feminine nouns in French). Similarly, languages with masculine nouns do not necessarily insist that a masculine noun is literally male, they only signal that the noun belongs to a specific grammatical category ("masculine").

Spanish el cuarto la cas-a
gender: (masculine) (feminine)
'the room' 'the house'
Swedish plats-en hus-et
gender: (common (masc + fem)) (neuter)
'the room' 'the house'


Languages may mark a noun's use in a sentence, which is called the noun's case. Consider again the place of S (subjects) and O (objects) in a sentence. When a noun is the subject, a language might mark it with the nominative or subject case. When a noun is the object, a language might mark it with the accusative or object case.

Latin Die-m perd-idi.
day-object lose-past(-I)
'I lost (the) day.'
Die-s fug-it.
day-subject flee-present
'(The) day is fleeing.'

As you can see, Latin clearly marks the subject noun dies with a nominative case suffix and the object noun diem with an accusative case suffix. Recall that affixes aren't the only way to mark case - Japanese and Hawaiian mark case with separate small words that sit next to the noun. Also, languages may distinguish further cases, such as the genitive (possessive), as in English the dog's bone, or the dative case (for "giving to") seen in Romanian om-ului 'to the person' and Latin homin-ī 'to the man'.

Languages may mark case formally like Latin. Alternatively, a language may use periphrasis (the way English translates the Romanian dative case omului with the phrase 'to the person') or word order (the way English places subjects before verbs and objects after instead of marking them with nominative and accusative case).

For convenience, you can list some or all of the forms of a noun in a language, taking note not only of case but of all of the properties introduced above. To give certain forms of a noun is to decline it. For instance, Latin diem is the singular accusative form of the masculine noun dies.

Practice Exercise

1) Identify the properties marked on the following English nouns:

language, languages, language's, languages'

2) The Latin noun caseus 'cheese' has the nominative case suffix -s like dies above. How would you translate 'I lost the cheese'?

3) The German noun Freundin '(female) friend' is feminine, Freund '(male) friend' is masculine and Mädchen 'girl' is neuter. What can you say about German noun gender based on these few examples?

The grammar of verbs

Very roughly, verbs are action words. Rather than label or name, they state what happens or what is done. Below we will explore grammatical properties of verbs, coupled with examples from languages that explicitly demonstrate those properties in their verbs.

Person, number & gender

Like nouns, verbs can reflect grammatical number and gender. At its core, this is no different from the number and gender introduced when we discussed nouns above.

Latin dat dant
'gives' (singular) 'give' (plural)
Polish mówił mówiła
'speaks' (masculine) 'speaks' (feminine)

Verbs often display another property called person. Don't let the term confuse you - person refers to the level of remove from the speaker. The speaker is the first person, the addressee is the second person and the third person represents others spoken about. Person and number tend to combine to form a full set of persons, which we'll hash out later when we study pronouns.

Catalan parlo 'I speak' (1st person singular)
parles 'you speak' (2nd person singular)
parlem 'we speak' (1st person plural)
parleu 'you all speak' (2nd person plural)

As is true of every property we've seen, some languages have a grammatical way of indicating person, gender & number, while other languages do not. In Japanese, for instance, verbs are not marked for person, number or gender: yomu 'read' can refer to any person, any number and any gender. Likewise, English verbs in the past tense are unmarked when it comes to these properties.



Spanish habla habó hablará
'speaks' (present) 'spoke' (past) 'will speak' (future)
Japanese 話します 　hanashimasu 話しました 　hanashimashita
'speaks'/'will speak' (nonpast) 'spoke' (past)


The verb's aspect refers to the frequency or the duration of an action. This information is grammatically marked in a number of languages. Languages often make a basic distinction between complete one-time actions (called "perfective" from Latin perfectum 'done through' or 'carried out'), and ongoing or incomplete actions (labeled "imperfective"). Other aspects include the "progressive" (for actions in progress at a given time, like was studying) or the "frequentative" (actions done over and again like keep studying). Crucially, pay attention to the difference between aspect and tense.

Spanish habló hablaba
'spoke' (perfective) 'used to speak' (imperfective)
Hawaiian ʻale ʻaleʻale
'form a wave' (unmarked/default aspect) 'form ripples' (frequentative)


Languages may indicate the verb's mood, which is the speaker's manner of construing the action. Common moods may relate facts or declarations (the so-called factitive, realis, indicative or declarative moods), ask questions (the interrogative mood) or make counter-to-fact statements (subjunctive, optative, conditional, irrealis and many other moods). Few languages mark very many moods (English uses "modal verbs" like can or should to stand in for most of these ideas), but languages the world over have a cumulative variety of ways to express mood.

Latin amas ut ames ama
'you love' (indicative) 'that you may love' (subjunctive) 'love!' (imperative)
Japanese yomimasu yomimasen yomemasu
'(does) read' (affirmative) 'doesn't read' (negative) 'can read' (potential)


The verb's voice refers to the level of participation in an action. In languages that distinguish formal voice, it is a morphological feature marked on verbs. The active voice involves the direct participation of an actor or agent. The passive voice indicates that the verb's action is done to a participant or "patient".

Latin amo amor
'I love' (active) 'I am loved' (passive)
Japanese yomimasu yomareru
'reads' (active) 'is read' (passive)

Practice Exercise


she is reading, I stopped, do you know?, it was made, you must leave


3) We can list specific forms of verbs in languages that formally mark their verbs, and such a process is called verb conjugation. For which of the following concepts can you conjugate the English verb talk, and which must be represented with periphrasis?

past indicative active, imperfect (= past tense + imperfective aspect), present progressive indicative active, third person singular present indicative active

The grammar of pronouns

Pronouns stand in for nouns. They often allow speakers to reference a noun without repeating or explicitly labeling it. As you will see, this doesn't mean that pronouns are entirely dependent on nouns - they hold their own in most sentences without any specific tie to any specific noun. Instead, pronouns may refer back to a noun already mentioned, like in English John installed the patch, and it fixed the problem. Pronouns may also gesture towards a person or thing (or people or things) without refering back to a specific noun, as in they haven't found the gene that explains all of human language. Note that these two examples stray into the use of pronouns in a sentence rather than the forms that pronouns take, which will be the focus of this section.

Person, number & gender revisited

We would expect the fundamentals of pronouns to work a lot like nouns. If you continue to study syntax, you will learn more about the differences between nouns and pronouns. Still, for our basic understanding of morphology, it's helpful to notice that pronouns often share the properties of number and gender.

Spanish él ella
'he' (masculine) 'she' (feminine)
ellos ellas
'they' (masculine) 'they' (feminine)

English he refers to males, she to females and it to nonhuman or inanimate "neuter" words. In languages like French and Spanish, which distinguish only masculine and feminine gender, the pronoun used for apparently "neuter" words corresponds to the grammatical gender of the noun: French elle means both 'she' for females and 'it' for feminine nouns. Of course, many languages fail to distinguish pronominal gender at all (the way the same English pronoun you refers to any addressee regardless of gender).

Unlike nouns in most languages, pronouns often distinguish person (although consider examples of languages that mark person on nouns like the Uto-Aztecan languages). Not only does English have a pronoun for a single person being spoken about (3rd person singular (s)he), but it also has a pronoun for the person spoken to (2nd person singular you) and the speaker (1st person singular I).

Iraqi Arabic aani inte huwwe
'I' (masc & fem) 'you' (masculine) 'he'
inti hiyye
'you' (feminine) 'she'

Case revisited

Pronouns may also follow the noun's lead and distinguish grammatical case. English nouns are impoverished when it comes to morphological (formal) case marking, but our pronouns still manage to distinguish case quite clearly: I is used as the subject (nominative case), but me as an object (accusative case). Compare examples of case-marked pronouns in Classical Greek and English.

Ancient Greek ἐγώ egó 'I' (nominative)
ἐμέ emé 'me' (accusative)
ἐμοῦ emoû 'of me' (genitive)
ἐμοῖ emoî 'to me' (dative)

Practice Exercise

1) List the nominative case singular, accusative singular, genitive singular and nominative plural forms of the English second person pronoun.

2) List the same forms of the first person pronoun in English.

3) How many genders does the English third person pronoun reflect in the singular? What about in the plural?.

4) Look at the Arabic data above. For which persons does the Arabic pronoun mark gender, and for which does it not?

The grammar of adjectives

Many languages have words whose primary purpose is description. Words that describe are called adjectives. Examples of adjectives in English include easy in an easy language, and brown and fuzzy in fuzzy, brown dog.

The way adjectives work

Not all languages have adjectives. Among languages with adjectives, two general trends appear. Some languages treat adjectives rather like nouns. Latin adjectives decline for gender, number and case: bon-us 'good' (masculine nominative singular) but bon-arum 'of the good (ones)' (feminine genitive plural).

Other languages treat adjectives more like verbs. More specifically, adjectives in such languages act like stative verbs, because they indicate states like 'be sad' or 'is ready'. Compare some examples from Japanese, which has both noun-like and verb-like adjectives.

Japanese 可愛い本屋 　kawaii hon'ya 本屋は可愛い。 　hon'ya wa kawaii
'(a) cute bookstore' 'the bookstore is cute'
熱い! 　atsui! 熱いです 　atsui desu!
'(It) is hot!' '(It) is hot!'

A last point to consider is that many languages have productive ways of forming adjectives. For instance, adjectives may be formed from verbs, and in this vein participles represent an adjective-like form of a verb. English derives participles through affixation: the present participle morpheme -ing is suffixed to sing in the phrase the singing parrot.

Practice Exercise

1) Do English adjectives work more like nouns or verbs? Give some examples and defend your position.

2) I mentioned that Latin adjectives decline for number and gender. Attempt to explain the role number and gender could play in forming an adjective. Start with this basic question: to what would the number and gender of, say, a feminine singular adjective refer?

The grammar of particles

Particles are usually small, invariable words that play a grammatical function but have little content. The English words and, to, well, if and ouch may be classified as particles.

Placement of particles

Many particles have a fixed place next to a word that they clearly relate to, and such words are known as adpositions. The fixed place of an adposition may be in front of another word, in which case the word is a preposition. The English word to in to the beach is a preposition, but so is the Maori object case marker i in te kōrero i te reo (the speaking object the language) 'speaking the language' (where reo 'language' is marked as object). Likewise, adpositions placed after a word are known as postpositions, such as the Japanese object marker wo in 本を読む 　hon wo yomu (book object read) 'to read the book' (where hon 'book' is marked as object).

Types of particles

Particles that specify nouns are commonly known as articles. The definite articles specify a certain noun, such as English the in the language of the Romans. The indefinite article specifies one instance or some instances of a noun, such as a and some in a language of some tribes. Not all languages have articles. Some have one type but not the other - Irish has singular definite article an and plural na only, while Latin, Russian and Chinese have no articles whatsoever.

Particles may instead relate to entire phrases. Conjunctions link words or phrases, and include words like English and in burgers and fries or Latin sed in fide sed qui vide 'trust but watch whom (you trust)'.

Many particles simply express an emotion. Such emotive words are known as interjections, and include words like French aïe ! 'ouch!', bof ! 'shrug!' and hélas ! 'alas!'.

Practice Exercise

1) Identify and list three English examples containing prepositions.


3) List three conjunctions and three interjections not mentioned above.

Putting words together

For the most part, the properties we examined in the previous sections all applied to individual words. We briefly dissected the various parts of speech and considered the kinds of grammatical properties individual morphemes may display. In this last section, we will take a look at the kinds of relationships that link words but still have some morphological impact on individual words.


Languages often have some explicit way of marking possession, a tight relationship between two words which often asserts a kind of ownership. English nouns and pronouns both mark possession outright. Singular nouns add the suffix -'s (like John's or the car's), while pronouns take a different form (like mine for I). Pronoun-derived possessive adjectives like my allow us to construct a pronominal parallel to "apostrophe s" statements: John's book or his book.

When we discussed cases, you learned about the genitive case. Languages that have a genitive case tend to use that case to show possession, as in Latin pil-a puer-i (ball-nominative boy-genitive) 'the boy's ball'. Languages may instead show possession using periphrasis, as most of the Romance languages do: compare Italian il libro di Anna, Portuguese o livro de Ana or colloquial Romanian cartea de Ană, all meaning (the book of Anna) 'Anne's book'.


When two words must share the same properties, they agree with one another. For instance, we've noticed that both nouns and verbs may mark grammatical number, like singular and plural in English. Crucially, the verb doesn't mark grammatical number in isolation from other words - the verb's number must agree with the number of the subject noun.

English My friend-0 speak-s many languages. Your friend-s speak-0 one language.
(singular noun + singular verb + plural object) (plural noun + plural verb + singular object)


When one word must comply with a certain property because of another, the second word is said to govern the former. This traditional definition is best seen through examples. In the sentence the dog saw me, the first person pronoun must be put into the accusative case to be used as the object of the verb see. The classical way of talking about this situation is to state that the verb see governs the accusative case.

Notice a key difference between this definition of government and our definition of agreement. When two words agree, they share the same form of the same property. When one word governs another, the governed word alone must comply with a grammatical property (the word see from our previous example does not take the property of "object case", but the pronoun it governs does).


When one word describes or qualifies another word, the former is known as a modifier. We've already learned about adjectives, which modify nouns. Another class of words tends to modify verbs, earning them the name adverbs. The Italian adjective buono 'good' modifies the noun giorno 'day' in un buon giorno 'a good day' while the adverb bene 'well' modifies the verb parlare 'speak' in io non so parlare bene 'I don't know (how) to speak well'.


Some verbs take accusative objects, while others do not. Verbs that take such "direct objects" are transitive, while those that do not are intransitive. The transitive verb see takes a direct object (consider again the dog sees me). The intransitive verb go does not (we cannot say "the dog goes me").

Keep in mind that this treatment of transitivity is far too basic to account for the more complex issues that arise in syntax.

Topic and focus


Japanese 本は私のです。 　hon wa watashi no desu 私は本が好きです。 　watashi wa hon ga suki desu
(book topic I genitive is) (I topic book subject like is)

The focus (or comment) relates to information presented in the topic (or other previous information if the sentence has no topic). In English, focus may be brought to the surface by emphasis or periphrasis (consider John was the one she told or she told JOHN as answers to the question who did she tell?). In the Japanese examples above, we can clearly separate the topic from the focus (topic: hon wa versus comment: watashi no desu).

Practice Exercise

1) Is the verb keep transitive or intransitive? Use the concept of government to explain how you know this, and give an example.

2) Spanish speakers may optionally topicalize material in existential statements like para los viajeros no hay manera de llegar (for the travelers not there's way of arrive) 'there's no way for the travelers to get there'. What is the topic and what is the focus of that sentence? How might you replicate the topicalization in the English translation?

3) I mentioned that English has a set of pronoun-derived possessive adjectives like my and our. Besides possession, what is the relationship between the possessive adjective and the possessed noun?

Answers to the practice exercises

Practice Exercise (Morphemes & Allomorphs)

1) I read-0 the book-'s end-ing but it still does-n't make sense. (15 total counting a zero morpheme on read to indicate the past)

2) pre-, -'s & -n't are bound; all others are free. The only complex words are book's (root: book, suffix: -'s), (root: end, suffix: -ing, stem: ending) and doesn't (root: does, suffix: -n't).

3) The sentence shows some analytic tendencies (many single-morpheme words), yet also synthetic tendencies (fusional when it adds -'s, but arguably agglutinative in the case of the addition of pre- and -n't). In other words, it's hard to say.

4) [s] and [z] are both allomorphs of the same morpheme /s/ (the plural marker).

Practice Exercise (Nouns)

1) language: singular number, nominative/subject & accusative/object case; language's: singular, genitive/possessive case; languages: plural, nominative/accusative; languages': plural, genitive/possessive. All are unmarked when it comes to gender/class. You may also argue that language and languages unmarked when it comes to case.

2) This answer can be derived through a simple analogy: dies is to diem perdidi as caseus is to caseum perdidi (I lost the cheese).

3) First, German nouns have grammatical gender. There are at least three genders (and only three if this data is comprehensive): masculine, feminine and neuter. It seems that there is some relation between meaning and gender - some nouns that refer to females are feminine, and some nouns that refer to males are masculine. On the other hand, the relation between meaning and gender must, in some cases, be arbitrary (how else can we explain the neuter Mädchen). If -in turns out to be a feminine suffix (which would explain the pair Freund/Freundin), there is a clear correlation between form and gender in at least this example (although we'd need further examples to prove this claim).

Practice Exercise (Verbs)

1) is reading: third person, singular number, present tense, progressive aspect, indicative mood, active voice; stopped: unmarked for person & number, past tense, perspective aspect, indicative mood, active voice; do know: unmarked for person & number, present tense, imperfective aspect, interrogative mood, active voice; was made: third person, singular number, past tense, perfective aspect, progressive aspect, indicative mood, passive voice; must leave: unmarked for person, number, tense & aspect, optative mood (debatable), active voice

2) is read-ing (derivational suffix + periphrasis); stop(p)-ed (marking by inflexion, specifically suffixation); do know (periphrasis & word order); was made (inflexion of was, derivation in the case of made, periphrasis using the verb + participle); must leave (periphrasis).

3) talked, used to talk (periphrasis), is talking (periphrasis), talks.

Practice Exercise (Pronouns)

1) you, you, your, you (or, for some speakers, you all / y'all)

2) I, me, mine, we

3) Arabic second and third person pronouns distinguish gender, while the first person singular does not.

Practice Exercise (Adjectives)

1) The adjective occurs next to the noun it describes in English: the green book. A separate linking verb (or copula) is required when it describes a state: the book is green. Further, a number of English adjectives are derived from nouns, and vice-versa: the derivational affix -y forms the adjective sunny from the noun sun, and the derivational affix -ness forms a noun happiness from the adjective happy. This all suggests that English adjectives work more like nouns. On the other hand, adjectives derived from verbs (called participles) like learned in the learned student suggest that there is some connection between adjectives and verbs, too.

2) In Latin, an adjective takes the gender and the number of the noun it describes. The noun described and the adjective must agree in number and gender. Agreement is discussed in more detail in the section Putting Words Together.

Practice Exercise (Particles)

1) For example: to you, for you, without you.

2) Postpositions and suffixes both occur after the morpheme to which they relate. Also, both may carry grammatical information concerning the morpheme to which they relate. However, postpositions are considered separate words, while suffixes attach to the morphemes to which they relate.

3) Answers will vary.

Practice Exercise (Relationships between words)

1) The verb keep is transitive, since it clearly governs an object case noun or pronoun: don't keep him in a cage.

2) Topic: para los viajeros; focus: no hay manera de llegar. For example: The travelers, there is no way for them to get there.

3) Possessive adjectives act as modifiers (they modify the nouns they describe).