Lexicon/ lexical The word lexical is used in a number of different ways . Since a lexicon is a dictionary , the expression lexical item means “word”, the expression lexical entry means “the entry in the dictionary for a particular word” , the term lexical property means “property associated with some individual word” , and the term lexical learning means “learning words and their idiosyncratic properties”. However, the word lexical is also used in a second sense, in which it is contrasted with functional. In this second sense, a lexical category is a category whose members are contentives.
Modal / Modality A modal auxiliary is an auxiliary which expresses modality .the set of modal auxiliaries in English is usually assumed to include will / would / can /could and need / dare when followed by a bare ( to - less) infinitive complement.
Morpheme The smallest unit of grammar structure. Thus, a plural noun such as cats comprises two morphemes , namely the stem cat and the plural suffix + s.
Morphology The study of how morpheme are combined together to form words.
Noun phrase A phrase whose head is a noun . Thus, the expression lovers of opera is a noun phrase , since its head is the noun lovers. In earlier work, determiners were thought to be the spcifiers of noun phrase , so that an expression such as a fan of football players would have been analysed as a noun phrase ( though in more recent work it would be analysed as an expression headed by the determiner a, and hence as a determiner phrase, DP).
Phrase The term phrase is used to denote an expression larger than a word which is a maximal projection: see projection. In traditional grammar, the term refers strictly to nonclausal expressions (hence, reading a book is a phrase, but He is reading a book is a clause, not a phrase). However, in more recent work, clauses are analysed as types of phrases: e.g. He will resign is an auxiliary phrase (IP), and That he will resign is a complementizer phrase (CP).
Tree diagram A way of representing the syntactic structure of a phrase or sentence.
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