User blog:Granpa/language structure


 * See also: Part of speech, Morphology, Grammatical category, and Ontology

Verbs form the backbone of language and of reality itself (an event is an instance of a verb in the same way that "John" is an instance of "human").

Reality is made up of
 * Objects (nouns)
 * The attributes of an object are adjectives
 * Actions (verbs) which alter the attributes of objects
 * The attributes of an action are adverbs
 * Rules
 * Events cause other events according to precise rules.

Objects and actions with similar attributes belong to the same type. Sometimes a type is just a single property (solid, liqid, gas). Common attributes are:
 * Location
 * Velocity
 * Type of motion
 * Size
 * Shape
 * Composition
 * Color
 * What is it a part of
 * What objects are part of it
 * Who owns it

Objects are named for: Even adjectives are verbs in disguise: Adjectives are modified by adverbs: Attributes like length, shape, velocity are the subject of the science of geometry.
 * What action happened to it that caused it to exist
 * Sedimentary rocks: rocks created by an act of sedimentation
 * What action it does, or makes other things do, that makes it useful (and which is usually what caused it to exist)
 * screwdriver: tool created by someone that needed to drive screws
 * hungry: to hunger
 * exceedingly tall

In English we say "He is leaving" but the word "is" is completely unnecessary. In other languages it would simply be "he leaving" or even just "he leave".

Many words can be broken down into simpler words:

The obvious question, of course, is what is the simplest set of words that can form a language. What are the atoms of the language universe.

Structure words

 * See also: Function word

Determiner

 * See also: Determiner

Articles

 * a, an, the

Demonstratives

 * this, that, these, other, same
 * such,
 * next, previous

Possessive determiner
Possessive is not just used for buying and selling. For example: He possesses great courage. His great courage is an attribute that "belongs" to him.


 * of

Quantifiers

 * 1, 2, 3,
 * 4, 8, 12,
 * 16, 256,
 * all, every, most, some, no, (time, place, one, thing)
 * many, few, several,
 * much, little,
 * enough

Distributive determiners

 * each, any,
 * either, neither

Interrogative determiners

 * which, what, whose

Pronouns
Personal pronouns Possessive pronouns Reciprocal pronouns Misc
 * First person
 * I, me
 * Second person
 * you (you)
 * Third person
 * he, him, she, her, it (they, them)
 * First + Second person
 * we, us
 * First + third person
 * we, us
 * First + Second + Third person
 * we, us
 * First person
 * my
 * Second person
 * your
 * Third person
 * his, her, its
 * each other, one another
 * same
 * other

Prepositions

 * See also: Preposition

Besides their literal use to indicate direction prepositions are also used to create Phrasal verbs. The meaning of a phrasal verb often cannot be inferred from the meaning of the individual words.
 * Throw up
 * look after
 * pick on
 * take after
 * pass for
 * stand by

Idiom: An established expression whose meaning is not deducible from the literal meanings of its component words, often peculiar to a given language.

Directions

 * up, down
 * forward, back
 * right, left, sideways
 * north, south, east, west,
 * parallel

Top

 * above, over
 * atop, ontop
 * upon

Bottom

 * below
 * beneath
 * under, underneath

Front

 * before
 * opposite

Back

 * after,
 * behind
 * beyond
 * past

Side

 * beside

Middle

 * amid

Inside

 * among
 * between
 * in, inside, into
 * within

Outside

 * around
 * out, outside
 * without

Near

 * about
 * at
 * by
 * near

Touching

 * across
 * against
 * along
 * on, onto
 * off

Misc

 * for
 * as, like
 * of
 * than
 * with

Conjunctions

 * See also: Conjunction


 * Coordinating
 * For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So
 * Correlative
 * either...or
 * not only...but (also)
 * neither...nor
 * both...and
 * whether...or
 * just as...so
 * the...the
 * as...as
 * as much...as
 * no sooner...than
 * rather...than
 * Subordinating
 * after, although, as, as far as, as if, as long as, as soon as, as though, because, before, even if, even though, every time, if, in order that, since, so, so that, than, though, unless, until, when, whenever, where, whereas, wherever

Auxiliary verbs

 * start, begin,
 * continue, persist
 * stop, finish, end,


 * intend,
 * dare,
 * tend,
 * try,
 * seem,
 * choose,
 * help

Sentence words

 * ouch,
 * wow,
 * damn,
 * hey, hi
 * bye,
 * okay,
 * oh,
 * m-hm,
 * huh,
 * uh, *er, *um
 * yes, no
 * okay,
 * please,

Verbs

 * From Wikipedia:Appendix:Basic English word list


 * Change: behave, act


 * Graph theory (see also: Line graph): connect
 * Number theory: extend, add, count, increase, number,
 * Geometry:


 * Time: wait,
 * Space: cover (over), come, go, send, put,
 * Move: distribute, drop, fall, flow, fly, gather, move, roll, scatter, transport, meet,


 * Substance: boil, exist, freeze, melt, burn, heat, cook,
 * Interact: affect, cause, compare, depend, react, relate,
 * Phenomena: wave
 * Physics: blow, expand, hang, lift, measure, rub, shake, shock, slip, support, touch, turn, twist,
 * Force: attract, pull, push,


 * Structure: contain (within), fold, join, stretch, wash,
 * Destruct: break, crush, cut, divide, smash,
 * Life: die, grow, live, reproduce,
 * Body:
 * bite, cough, drink, kiss, smile, talk, voice, whistle,
 * breathe, sneeze,
 * cry, laugh,
 * digest,
 * grip,
 * jump, kick, run, step, walk,
 * rest, sleep,
 * swim,
 * Sense:
 * feel,
 * hear,
 * look, observe, see, view,
 * smell, taste,


 * Mind: amuse, believe, care, deceive, decide, discover, desire, doubt, enjoy, experience, fear, hate, hope, know, love, opine, play, reason, regret, respect, surprise, think, trick,
 * Signs: represent, signal, sign language
 * Words: agree, answer, argue, discuss, point, question, request, say, sing, state, suggest,
 * Educate: learning, teaching,
 * Write: read, record,
 * Drawing: draw, mark, print, write,
 * Organize: approve, control, direct, govern, guide, judge, lead, protest, rule, serve,
 * Punish: attack, fight, wound,
 * Commerce: get, give, have, keep, lose, offer, take,
 * Money: exchange, own, pay, reward, trade, value,
 * Business: contract, demand, insure, manage(r), marry, supply, waste,
 * Make: develop, invent, produce, work, fix,
 * Transportation: journey,
 * Tools: adjust, drive, operate, use,

compete, copy, select, sort, stitch, test,

Nouns

 * From Wikipedia:Appendix:Basic English word list

Quantification: Number, amount Time: Space: Substance: Phenomena: Structure: Life: Plant: Animal: body, food, clothing, shelter, senses, locomotion (slide, crawl, wiggle) Human: Words: education, knowledge, writing, math, science Civilization: authority, law, judge, police, punishment, religion, society Money: occupation, buy, sell, business, profit, value Transportation: vehicle Tools:

Time
time
 * hour, minute, second
 * day, night, morning, evening
 * week, month, year, decade, century
 * spring, summer, autumn, winter

Space

 * distance, position, place, size, velocity,
 * slope, angle, direction
 * ball, circle, curve, form, line, square, ring, round, shape,
 * front, middle, back, edge,

Phenomena

 * color, event, light, process, wave,

Substance
substance: elements, mass, material, weight,
 * gas: air, steam
 * liquid: water, oil, ink, paint
 * jelly:
 * solid: ice, glass, stone, chalk, salt, coal
 * powder: dust, sand
 * metal: brass, copper, gold, iron, silver, steel, tin,
 * life: cotton, wood, wool, leather, linen, paper, silk, wax, sugar, cork,

Nature

 * sky: sun, moon, star, planet
 * weather: cloud, thunder, rain, snow, wind
 * earth: country, field, land, mountain
 * life: forest, garden
 * water: sea, harbour, island, river

Structure

 * container: bag, basin, basket, bottle, box, bucket, cup, kettle, pot, part
 * fasten: screw, nail, hook, knot
 * break:
 * parts: board, brick, frame

Reproduction
family
 * parent: father, mother
 * child: son, daughter
 * sibling: brother, sister

Plants

 * plant: grass, herb, tree, vine

Plant parts

 * branch, stem, stick
 * root: potato
 * leaf
 * grain: rice, seed, nut

Animals
animals:
 * fish:
 * bird: fowl
 * pet: cat, dog
 * insect: ant, bee
 * farm: cow, goat, horse, pig, sheep
 * reptile: snake
 * other: monkey, rat, worm
 * egg

Animal parts
body:
 * upper part: head, eyes, mouth, ear, chin, face, nose, neck, throat, tongue, lip
 * front part: chest
 * back part: back, tail
 * extremities: arm, finger, hand, thumb, wing
 * lower part: leg, foot, knee, toe
 * exterior: skin, hair, feather, horn, tooth,
 * interior: muscle, blood, bone, nerve, heart, stomach, brain

Food
food: meal
 * bread, cake
 * dairy: butter, cheese, milk,
 * fruit: apple, berry, orange,
 * meat:
 * soup:
 * wine:

Clothing
cloth:
 * head: hat
 * torso: shirt, coat,
 * waist: trousers, dress, skirt
 * hand: glove
 * foot: sock, shoe, boot, stocking
 * part: collar, pocket, thread

Shelter
structure
 * building: door, floor, room, roof, window, wall, arch

Locomotion

 * Move: Walk, run, fly, swim

Humans
person
 * baby
 * child: boy, girl
 * adult: man, woman

acquaintance: friend, enemy

Mind
mind: attention, comfort, disgust, humour, idea, interest, memory, mind, music, pain, pleasure, purpose, shame, surprise,

Writing

 * book, pen, pencil, letter, page, note, prose, story, verse, word, language, news

Science
science: theory

Authority
authority, law, nation, peace, society, war,

Religion
religion:

Money
money: business, company, credit, debt, industry, market, money, price, profit, property, receipt, secretary, tax,

Places

 * church: place of worship
 * farm: place of agriculture
 * hospital: place of healing
 * house: place of residing
 * library: place of reading
 * school: place of learning
 * store: place of buying
 * town: place of living
 * prison: place of imprisonment
 * office: place of officiating

Tools
Time: Space: Structure: Animal:
 * watch, clock
 * brake, spring
 * sewing, needle
 * spoon, fork, plate, tray


 * hammer: hammer
 * cut:knife, blade, scissors
 * dig:spade
 * farm: plough
 * brush: brush
 * comb: comb
 * pump: pump
 * catch: net
 * threaten: whip, gun, army
 * rain: umbrella
 * lock: lock, key
 * sound: band, bell,
 * ornament: jewel

Furniture
bath, bed, clock, curtain, drawer, oven, shelf, table, chair

Transportation
Vehicle:
 * water: boat, ship
 * air: plane
 * rail: train
 * road: carriage, cart,

Vehicle parts

 * engine, sail, wheel

Infrastructure
structure
 * path: road, bridge, rail

Other

 * bulb, button,
 * camera, card, chain, cord, cushion,
 * drain,
 * flag,
 * hole
 * map, match,
 * parcel, picture, pin, pipe,
 * rod,
 * sponge, stamp, station,
 * ticket,
 * wire,


 * account, advertisement, apparatus, art,
 * balance, base, birth, bit, burst,
 * canvas, chance, colour, committee, condition, connection, cough, crack, crime, current,
 * damage, danger, degree, design, detail, disease,
 * error, example, expert,
 * fact, fiction, flower,
 * group,
 * harmony, history,
 * impulse, instrument,
 * level, limit, list,
 * machine, mine, mist,
 * name, noise,
 * order, ornament,
 * paste, poison, porter, power,
 * quality,
 * range, rate, ray, rhythm,
 * scale, seat, self, sense, sex, shade, sign, size, smoke, soap, sound, space, stage, system,
 * thing, trouble,
 * unit,
 * way, weight,

Adjectives

 * From Wikipedia:Appendix:Basic English word list

able, acid, alike, angry, automatic beautiful cheap, chemical, chief, clear, common, conscious elastic, electric, equal fat, fertile, flat, free, frequent general, great healthy, hollow important medical, military natural, necessary, normal physical, political, possible, present, probable quick ready, regular, responsible separate, serious, sticky, stiff, sudden thick, tired violent young

Numbers
number:
 * first, second, third, fourth (item number one, item number two...)

Colors

 * blue, green, yellow, orange, red
 * white, grey, black
 * brown

Adverbs

 * near, far
 * upward, downward
 * forward, backward
 * northward, southward, eastward, westward
 * then
 * there
 * so
 * very
 * quite
 * well
 * almost
 * even
 * not
 * only
 * again
 * ever
 * still
 * together

Proper nouns vs common nouns

 * John vs human

Countable and uncountable nouns

 * Chair vs furniture (many vs much)

Collective nouns

 * committee

Concrete nouns and abstract nouns

 * Rock vs justice

Noun Declension
The word "sheep" is its own plural. To indicate more than one sheep we would say "multiple sheep". In some languages all the words are their own plurals.


 * From Declension:

number case gender
 * singular
 * dual
 * plural
 * nominative case
 * accusative case
 * genitive case
 * dative case
 * masculine
 * neuter
 * feminine

Verb types

 * From Verb:

Intransitive verbs
Does not have a direct object
 * The boy wept.

Transitive verbs
Has a direct object
 * My friend read the newspaper

Ditransitive verbs
Has a direct object and an indirect object
 * The players gave their teammates high fives

Double transitive verbs
Has a direct object and a complement
 * The young couple considers the neighbors wealthy people

Linking verbs
Can't be followed by an adverb or end a sentence, but instead must be followed by a noun or adjective
 * Josh remained a reliable friend

Verb conjugation

 * From Grammatical conjugation:

person number gender tense aspect mood voice case possession definiteness politeness causativity clusivity interrogativity transitivity valency polarity telicity volition mirativity evidentiality animacy associativity pluractionality reciprocity Frequentative
 * I, you, he
 * single, plural
 * male, female
 * past, present, and future
 * completed, in progress
 * indicative,
 * subjunctive, Conditional, optative, imperative, Jussive, potential, hypothetical, Inferential,
 * interrogative, injunctive,
 * active, passive, self
 * nominative, accusative, dative and genitive
 * possessor, possessed
 * a, the
 * tu, vos
 * causation (rise → raise)
 * inclusive "we", exclusive "we"
 * question
 * direct objects
 * impersonal, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, tritransitive
 * affirmation, negation
 * complete, incomplete (John built a house in a month vs John built houses for a month)
 * intentional, unintentional
 * surprise
 * hearsay, personal observation
 * how sentient or alive the referent is.
 * group associated with X
 * Plural
 * each other
 * routine habit

Language types

 * See also: Morphological typology
 * From Isolating language

Although historically, languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), the traditional morphological types can be categorized by two distinct parameters:
 * morpheme per word ratio (how many morphemes there are per word)
 * degree of fusion between morphemes (how separable words' inflectional morphemes are according to units of meaning represented)

The English term "rice" is a single word consisting of only one morpheme (rice). In contrast, "handshakes" is a single word consisting of three morphemes (hand, shake, -s).
 * This word has a 1:1 morpheme per word ratio.
 * This word has a 3:1 morpheme per word ratio.

The Russian word vídyat/видят 'they see' has a morpheme per word ratio of 2:1, having two morphemes: Effectively, it has four units of meaning in one inseparable morpheme
 * the root vid-/вид-, which conveys the imperfective aspect meaning,
 * the inflectional morpheme -yat/-ят which inflects for four units of meaning (3rd person subject, plural subject, present/future tense, indicative mood).

From Morpheme:

Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense, aspect, mood, person, or number, or a noun's, pronoun's or adjective's number, gender or case, without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech).
 * happiness: changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness).
 * waited: changes to past tense without changing the meaning of "wait".

Analytic language

 * From Analytic language

An analytic language is a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections. An analytic language can lack inflectional morphemes yet still have derivational morphemes.

Isolating language

 * From Isolating language

An isolating language is a type of language with a very low morpheme per word ratio and no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme.

Synthetic language

 * From Synthetic language

A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence

Agglutinative language

 * From Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions.

Fusional language

 * From Fusional language

Fusional languages or inflected languages (or inflectional or flectional in older terminology) are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

Polysynthetic language

 * From Polysynthetic language

Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words"

Oligosynthetic language

 * From Oligosynthetic language

An oligosynthetic language (from the Greek ὀλίγος, meaning "few" or "little") is any language using very few morphemes, perhaps only a hundred, which combine synthetically to form statements. Oligosynthesis is almost entirely theoretical and would depend heavily on the creation of lengthy compound words, to an extent far exceeding that of natural polysynthetic languages

Word frequency

 * See also: Most common words in English


 * From Brown Corpus:

One interesting result is that even for quite large samples, graphing words in order of decreasing frequency of occurrence shows a hyperbola: the frequency of the n-th most frequent word is roughly proportional to 1/n. Thus "the" constitutes nearly 7% of the Brown Corpus, "to" and "of" more than another 3% each; while about half the total vocabulary of about 50,000 words are hapax legomena: words that occur only once in the corpus.

This simple rank-vs.-frequency relationship was noted for an extraordinary variety of phenomena by George Kingsley Zipf, and is known as Zipf's law.

The word "the" forms 0.07 of the words in an average text. 1/0.07 = 14.2857142857

Most common words in English
A list of 25 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus.

By parts of speech
The following is the list of most common written words subdivided by part of speech.

Phonology
Typical speech is about 10 phonemes per second. English averages about 4 syllables per second.

Consonants

 * From Wikipedia:Template:IPA pulmonic consonants:

Vowels

 * From English_phonology:

Tones
Tones can be used to express: