Chapter 7: Combining Words

In this chapter, we start observing how words behave so that we can group them into categories. Syntactic categories, which you might think of as “parts of speech”, group words that behave similarly into similar categories. Once we’ve figured out what category a word belongs to, we can predict how it will interact with other words from other categories, for example in compound words (Unit 7.2), and in phrases and sentences (Unit 8.4).

When you’ve completed this chapter, you will be able to:

• categorize words into the three open class categories: nouns, verbs and adjectives,
• identify whether a compound word has a head, and which part of the compound it is,
• categorize function words into closed-class categories.