Grammatical category

A grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:The bird can sing.The birds can sing.The sheep is running.The sheep are running.The bird is singing.The birds are singing.The sheep can run. A grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include: Although the use of terms varies from author to author, a distinction should be made between grammatical categories and lexical categories. Lexical categories (considered syntactic categories) largely correspond to the parts of speech of traditional grammar, and refer to nouns, adjectives, etc. A phonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending that marks 'number' on a noun) is sometimes called an exponent. Grammatical relations define relationships between words and phrases with certain parts of speech, depending on their position in the syntactic tree. Traditional relations include subject, object, and indirect object. A given constituent of an expression can normally take only one value in each category. For example, a noun or noun phrase cannot be both singular and plural, since these are both values of the 'number' category. It can, however, be both plural and feminine, since these represent different categories (number and gender). Categories may be described and named with regard to the type of meanings that they are used to express. For example, the category of tense usually expresses the time of occurrence (e.g. past, present or future). However, purely grammatical features do not always correspond simply or consistently to elements of meaning, and different authors may take significantly different approaches in their terminology and analysis. For example, the meanings associated with the categories of tense, aspect and mood are often bound up in verb conjugation patterns that do not have separate grammatical elements corresponding to each of the three categories; see Tense–aspect–mood. Categories may be marked on words by means of inflection. In English, for example, the number of a noun is usually marked by leaving the noun uninflected if it is singular, and by adding the suffix -s if it is plural (although some nouns have irregular plural forms). On other occasions, a category may not be marked overtly on the item to which it pertains, being manifested only through other grammatical features of the sentence, often by way of grammatical agreement.