Grammatical Forms

Descriptive Structuralism is frequently referred to as Binarist. This orientation is its strength and weakness.

Stable States

Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme.

Basic and Modified Meaning

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.

Sentence Types

Order can imply (but is not exhausted by) position, which can be functional; a form alone is in absolute position, with another, in included position. Sentences relate through order, position, and, within a sentence, are distinguished by modulation, pratactic arrangement, and features of selection.
Languages show full and minor sentence types distinguished by taxemes of selection.

Words

Since the word is a free form, freedom of occurrence largely determines our attitude towards parts of a language. But even with our typographic conventions, we are inconsistent in distinguishing words and phrases, and in other languages, it is difficult to keep them apart.

Syntax

Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which noone of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.

Forms resultant from Free Forms

Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

Grammatical forms