Grammatical category

Grammatical category

A grammatical category or functional category is a linguistic term encompassing, among other things:
*Grammatical aspect
*Grammatical case
*Grammatical mood
*Definiteness
*Specificity
*Animacy
*Evidentiality
*Noun class
*Grammatical gender
*Grammatical number
*Grammatical polarity
*Grammatical tense
*Transitivity
*Grammatical voice
*Grammatical person
* Countability (count noun vs. mass noun)

A grammatical category is a set of features which express related conceptual distinctions of grammatical function. The features in the same category are mutually exclusive, often expressed in a formally similar way, and may be subject to agreement constraints.

For example, in English, the grammatical number of a noun such as "bird" in:

* The bird sing-s.
* The bird-s sing.

is either singular or plural, which is expressed overtly by the absence or presence of the suffix "-s", and is constrained by the grammatical number in "sing-s" singular and "sing" plural.

The list of all overtly expressed categories in a language constitute the functional items of that language, as opposed to its lexical items.

References

* [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOflinguisticTerms/WhatIsAGrammaticalCategory.htm What is a grammatical category?] - SIL.org

See also

* Grammatical function
* Agreement
* Inflection
* Syntax


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать реферат

Look at other dictionaries:

  • grammatical category — noun (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical properties • Syn: ↑syntactic category • Topics: ↑grammar • Hypernyms: ↑class, ↑category, ↑family …   Useful english dictionary

  • Grammatical number — Grammatical categories Animacy Aspect Case Clusivity Definiteness Degree of comparison Evidentiality Focus …   Wikipedia

  • Grammatical polarity — Grammatical categories Animacy Aspect Case Clusivity Definiteness Degree of comparison Evidentiality Focus …   Wikipedia

  • Transitivity (grammatical category) — In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects. It is closely related to valency.Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between transitive verbs such as throw , injure , kiss… …   Wikipedia

  • grammatical gender — noun a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness • Syn: ↑gender… …   Useful english dictionary

  • grammatical meaning — noun the meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with inflectional form • Hypernyms: ↑meaning, ↑significance, ↑signification, ↑import • Part Holonyms: ↑function word, ↑closed class word * * * …   Useful english dictionary

  • Grammatical relation — In linguistics, grammatical functions or (grammatical relations) refer to syntactic relationships between parts of speech such as subject , object , adjunct , complement . These are distinct from the semantic notions of agent and patient, as… …   Wikipedia

  • grammatical case — noun nouns or pronouns or adjectives (often marked by inflection) related in some way to other words in a sentence • Syn: ↑case • Hypernyms: ↑grammatical category, ↑syntactic category • Hyponyms: ↑nominative, ↑nominative case, ↑ …   Useful english dictionary

  • Grammatical mood — Grammatical categories Animacy Aspect Case Clusivity Definiteness Degree of comparison Evidentiality Focus …   Wikipedia

  • Grammatical person — Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language s set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs,… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”