The IC analysis splits a sentence into phrases that is groups of words connected together. The same groups are found in sentences if we use other types of syntactical analysis. The logical connections of words in such groups we already described, they are subordination and co-ordination. Grammarians also indicate to the semantic relations of words in phrases which are determined by the function of elements in the sentence. These functions coincide with the set of members in the sentence. So we find predicative, objective, attributive, and adverbial relations. All these relations should be formally indicated.
There are two classes of formal indication of word relations: positional and morphological. Their names show which technique is employed to bind words together.
Morphological indicators use forms of words in two ways. The forms of two or more words may coincide and if the form of one has to be changed it brings above the necessity of appropriate changing of the forms of other words in the group. This type of word connection is called agreement. In English agreement is used very seldom. We can find it in two occasions. Agreement is employed for forming predicative relations of some forms of the verb. The subject predicate agreement is based on coincidence of the person and/or number features of the subject and the verb in the position of the predicate. The other case of agreement is found between the demonstrative pronouns and a noun. This time only the number of both words should coincide.
The other type of morphological indication of syntactical connection of words can be described as follows: one of the words demands that another word should be in a specific form which does not change if the leading word is changed. This type of connection is known as government. Government in English is also employed very seldom, and again we can find only two cases of government. We may find government if a personal pronoun is used in any other function but the subject. The other occasion of government is the use of the Possessive Case.
There are three other occasions where we can find features similar to agreement and government. Two of them are used to form relations of clauses. One of them is known as Sequence of Tenses in English. But as we shall see in the section of the temporal categories the use of tense forms here is determined not by the syntactical relations of clauses but by other factors. The other occasion might be treated as government because lexical elements in the main clause demand special forms of mood in the subordinate clause. The actual distribution of the forms will be summarised in the section on modality. The third occasion of this type concerns the use of the forms of the possessive pronoun. As we know the possessive pronouns have different forms depending on the syntactical function they perform. When they are used as predicatives or objects or prepositional attributes they are in a specific form known as the objective form. If they are used as prepositioned attributes (determiners) they are in their attributive form.
The employment of position to indicate syntactical relations the words is called adjoinment. Adjoinment is the main technique of combining words in English and indicating their function. It is used to connect together all members of the sentence including the subject and the predicate in the majority of their forms. It results in a very strict order of words in English which in its turn brings above fixation of those remnants of morphological elements not only within a word, but also within a sentence. As a result we may say that in English not only words are fixed in sentences, but also morphemes indicating morphological categories of words. For example, the indicator of number of nouns can appear in English only as the final element of the first and the third groups: Cats are hissing at the dogs Or the same sound s, but indicating third person singular present indefinite can appear only at the end of the second phrase in the sentence: A cat looks at the Queen. This feature of English inflections made I.P.Ivanova oppose them to inflections of other languages as external inflections, the other languages having, obviously, internal inflections. This idea helps us understand why there are so many problems in qualifying the grammatical features of words belonging to close groups, such as articles, prepositions, modal verbs. The words belonging to these groups appear in positions in which we may expect or actually find auxiliaries, that is detached morphemes. It makes it very difficult sometimes to differentiate between detached morphemes of analytical forms because the only real difference between the two classes of elements is that the former (auxiliaries) belong to the form of a word, while the latter (formal words) belong to the whole group.
Phrases should also be classified according to their composition and, first of all, according to the leading, dominating word if the phrase has any. These classes were already mentioned above (see Ch
§§ 5-7).