Theoretical Grammar of English

Five Signals of Syntactic Structure

1. 
   Word Order - is the linear or time sequence in which words appear in an utterance.
   
2. 
   Prosody - is the over-all musical pattern of stress, pitch, juncture in which the words of an utterance are spoken
   
3. 
   Function words - are words largely devoid of lexical meaning which are used to indicate various functional relationships among the lexical words of an utterance
   
4. 
   Inflections - are morphemic changes - the addition of suffixes and morphological means concomitant morphophonemic adjustments - which adopt words to perform certain structural function without changing their lexical meanings
   
5. 
   Derivational contrast - is the contrast between words which have the same base but differ in the number and nature of their derivational affixes
   

One more thing must be mentioned here. According to the morphological classification English is one of the flexional languages. But the flexional languages fall under synthetical and analytical ones. The synthetical-flexional languages are rich in grammatical inflections and the words in sentences are mostly connected with each-other by means of these inflections though functional words and other grammatical means also participate in this. But the grammatical inflections are of primary importance. The slavonic languages (Russian, Ukraine…) are of this type.
The flectional-analytical languages like English and French in order to connect words to sentences make wide use of the order of words and functional words due to the limited number of grammatical flexions. The grammatical means - order of words – is of primary importance for this type of languages.

Lexical and Grammatical Meaning

In the next chapter we shall come to know that some morphemes are independent and directly associated with some object of reality while others are depended and are connected with the world of reality only indirectly. Examples:
desk-s; bag-s; work-ed; lie-d …
The first elements of these words are not dependent as the second elements. Morphemes of the 1^st type we’ll call lexical and meanings they express are lexical.
The elements like -s, -ed, -d are called grammatical morphemes and meanings they express are grammatical.
Thus, lexical meaning is characteristic to lexical morphemes, while grammatical meanings are characteristic to grammatical morphemes.
Grammatical meanings are expressed not only by forms of word – changing, i.e. by affixation but by free morphemes that are used to form analytical word-form, e.g.
He will study, I shall go.
The meaning of shall, will considered to be grammatical since comparing the relations of invite - invited - shall invite we can see that the function of shall is similar to that of grammatical morphemes -s,
-ed.