Chapter 1: form-class words
Form-class words are open-ended, not limited in the number of their members, as new words are being invented all the time. New inventions, observations, sciences, sports, ideas, etc. require us to constantly create new form-class words. In this respect, as a category, form-class words usually have lexical meaning, or a dictionary definition.
Most all form-class words can take inflection in order to create a variant form of the word and signal grammatical information without changing its meaning. For example, the word smell can become smelly, smelliest, or smelled. Likewise, many form-class words can take derivations that will allow them to change forms, such as ideal to idealize or to idealistic or to ideally. Finally, as we will discuss, many form-class words can be identified as more than one form: smell can be identified as a noun (and take the noun inflections), or it can be identified as a verb (and take the verb inflections). As always, when identifying the form-class of a word, be sure to always analyze in context.
There are four sets of FORM-CLASS words described in this section:
We will do our best to use the color code displayed here throughout the textbook to represent both the form or function of a word, phrase, or clause. Red = Noun/Nominal; Green = Verb; Blue = Adjective/Adjectival; Orange = Adverb/Adverbial