ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the individual words and word classes, and shows the grammar with which words appear. It introduces the study of morphology, defining morphemes as the smallest meaningful units in language. The chapter expresses different grammatical categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives, introducing the concepts of inflection and derivation. It focuses on morphemes which constitute a way to divide words up according to the different elements that have specific meanings. Another way that you may be more familiar with is the division of words into rhythmic units, namely syllables. While the division into rhythmic units is important in poetry, music and phonology, it does not tell us much about the overall grammatical forms of the different word-parts. In English, modality is mainly expressed through auxiliaries. Yet, since languages differ in the ways in which they express these categories, mood and modality are usually treated under the same heading.
