ABSTRACT
Learning a language involves much more than knowing how to refer to people, things, concepts, qualities, actions and the like (i.e. words or vocabulary items). Learners must also know how to put words together in order to produce grammatical and meaningful sentences. In Chapter 4, it was pointed out that words co-occur with one another. For instance, words in word class X (e.g. that or my) co-occur with words in word class Y (e.g. woman or sister). Words do not co-occur in a random order; they co-occur in a particular order (this order is, not surprisingly, known as word order). For instance, words in word class X precede words in word class Y or, conversely, words in word class Y follow words in word class X (e.g. That woman is my sister versus *Woman that is sister my). There may also be words or grammatical elements that ‘connect’ words or phrases within sentences. For example, the word on in The cat slept on the sofa is used to relate the sofa to slept in a meaningful way. It describes the connection between the cat’s sleeping and the sofa by identifying the latter as the location of the former. Words such as on are then said to have the function of connecting words or phrases in sentences. This kind of function, depending on languages, can also be performed by elements smaller than words; such elements may be part of words or attach directly to words. In languages like Turkish, for example, words bear different endings, depending on their roles within a sentence (e.g. adam-ι ‘man’ if occurring in sentences like Ali adam-ι öl-dür-dü ‘Ali killed the man’ but adam-a, if occurring in sentences like Mehmet adam-a elma-lar-ι ver-di ‘Mehmet gave the apples to the man’).
