Grammar Basics: Words (2)

Everything happens for a reason see past gram mar

Caxton

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Sentences are made up of different kinds of words, and it makes it easier to refer to them if we give them names depending on what they do. Many of us may have been taught at school that words are divided into groups known as parts of speech. That is an incomplete description and is no longer much used. Linguists speak instead of word classes. These can be listed as nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs, on the one hand, and determiners, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, adverbial particles, prepositions and coordinating and subordinatingconjunctions on the other. Those in the first group are called lexical words. They carry the meaning of a sentence. Those in the second group are called function words and, among other things, they help relate one lexical word to another. Function words are members of a closed class of words, that…

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