Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

structure (function) words such as articles ‘the’ and ‘a’ exist to form part of
phrases and structures and so have meanings that are difficult to capture in
the dictionary
morpheme: the smallest unit of grammar, consisting either of a word (‘toast’)
or part of a word (‘’s’ in ‘John’s’)
morphology and syntax: morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals
with the structure of morphemes; syntax is the branch that deals with the
structure of phrases above the level of the word
grammatical morphemes are morphemes such as ‘-ing’ and ‘the’ that play a
greater part in structure than content words such as ‘horse’ (lexical mor-
phemes)
order of difficulty: the scale of difficulty for particular aspects of grammar for L2
learners
sequence of acquisition: the order in which L2 learners acquire the grammar,
pronunciation, and so on of the language
Keywords

---

The same sentence with made-up structure words might have read:
So kel Mars, dom trelk decisions kel trelk fate mert trelk miserable slaves hiv
polst formulated, deer still grazed, jumped kosp survived.
Only the first version is comprehensible in some form, even if we have no idea
how you fardle and funt.
Content words have meanings that can be looked up in a dictionary and they
are numbered in many thousands. ‘Beer’ or ‘palimpsest’ are content words refer-
ring to definable things. A new content word can be invented easily; advertisers
try to do it all the time – ‘Contains the magic new ingredient kryptonite’.
Structure words, on the other hand, are limited in number, consisting of words
like ‘the’, ‘to’ and ‘yet’. A computer program for teaching English needs about 220
structure words; the ten most common words in the British National Corpus 100
million sample are all structure words, as we see in Chapter 3. Structure words are
described in grammar books rather than dictionaries. The meaning of ‘the’ or ‘of’
depends on the grammatical rules of the language, not on dictionary definitions.
It is virtually impossible to invent a new structure word because it would mean
changing the grammatical rules of the language, which are fairly rigid, rather than
adding an item to the stock of words of the language, which can easily take a few
more. Science fiction novelists, for example, have a good time inventing new
words for aliens, ranging from ‘Alaree’ to ‘Vatch’; new nouns for new scientific
ideas, ranging from ‘noocyte’ (artificially created intelligent cells) to ‘iahklu’ (the
Aldebaranian ability to influence the world through dreams). Where Lewis Carroll
once coined nouns like ‘chortle’, William Gibson now contributes ‘cyberpunk’ to
the language. But no writer dares invent new structure words. The only exception
perhaps is Marge Piercy’s non-sexist pronoun ‘per’ for ‘he/she’ in the novel
Woman on the Edge of Time, first coined by the psychologist Donald McKay.
Table 2.1 shows the main differences between content and structure words. As
can be seen, the distinction is quite powerful, affecting everything from the
spelling to speech production. Nevertheless, this simplistic division needs to be
made far more complicated to catch the complexities of a language like English,
as we shall see.
As well as words, most linguists’ grammars use a unit called the morpheme,
defined as the smallest element that has meaning. Some words consist of a single
morpheme – ‘to’, ‘book’, ‘like’ or ‘black’. Some words can have morphemes added to
show their grammatical role in the sentence, say ‘books’ (book
s) or ‘blacker’
(black
er). Other words can be split into several morphemes: ‘mini-supermarket’
might be ‘mini-super-market’; ‘hamburger’ is seen as ‘ham-burger’ rather than
‘Hamburg-er’. When the phrase structure of a sentence is shown in tree diagrams, the
whole sentence is at the top and the morphemes are at the bottom: the morpheme is
the last possible grammatical fragment at the bottom of the tree. The structure and
behaviour of morphemes are dealt with in the area of grammar called morphology.
In some SLA research, grammatical inflections like ‘-ing’ are grouped together
with structure words like ‘to’ as ‘grammatical morphemes’. In the 1970s Heidi
Dulay and Marina Burt (1973) decided to see how these grammatical morphemes
were learnt by L2 learners. They made Spanish-speaking children learning English
describe pictures and checked how often they supplied eight grammatical mor-
phemes in the appropriate places in the sentence. Suppose that at a low level, L2
Structure words, morphemes and sequences of acquisition 25

---

learners say sentences with two content words, like ‘Girl go’. How do they expand
this rudimentary sentence into its full form?