WORD FAMILY and GRAMMATICAL WORDS
*******************************************
We can divide all English words into two categories--a) content words and b) grammatical words.
In schools we are taught that there are 8 parts of speech in the English language. These are NOUN, PRONOUN, VERB, ADJECTIVE, ADVERB, PREPOSITION, CONJUNCTION and INTERJECTION.
Of these only FOUR of them are called Content words or main words. They belong to a family called The Word Family. NOUN, VERB, ADJECTIVE and ADVERB belong to this family. These parts of speech are inter-related. Let us take some examples:
Let us take the noun BEAUTY. We get the verb BEAUTIFY, the adjective BEAUTIFUL and the adverb BEAUTIFULLY from the base word Beauty. It is a family in this sense. When we pronounce these words we put stress or accent on these words.
The other four members i.e PREPOSITION, CONJUNCTION, INTERJECTION and PRONOUNS and articles,modals etc belong to a different class= GRAMMATICAL WORDS.
We do not put the same emphasis on these words when pronouncing them. They are generally not accented or stressed. They play very important roles in writing English correctly. We are concerned with Grammatically correct language. Ornamentation comes at a later stage. In communicative or day-to-day English we are not bothered if the language sounds poetic or musical to our ears or not. It the sentence is grammatically correct it is more than acceptable. Ornamental or decorative language is better left to the poets and politicians.
*********************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment