Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

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541 Index for individual terms not in the Glossary

Glossary | 893

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Causative Refers to the meaning of making something happen. For instance, 

get

-pseudo-passives and have-pseudo-passives can be used to express causative

and non-causative meanings:

I think I’m going to 

get my ears pierced.

(causative: to make it happen) 

We 

had our house broken into while we were at the wedding. 

(non-causative: it was not our intention or aim)

Class (open class, closed class) Refers to a group of words which have similar

functions. Word classes are divided into open classes and closed classes. Open

classes include lexical words such as nouns (dinner, place, Francis), verbs

(meet, drive, go, pick), adjectives (old, angry, helpful), and adverbs (quickly,

carefully

, fast) which admit new words. Closed classes have limited

membership. They include function words such as pronouns (it, he, who,

anybody

, one), determiners (a, the, that, some, each, several), modal verbs

(may, could, must), auxiliary verbs (be, have, do), conjunctions (and, but, if,

unless

) and prepositions (in, at, of, by, with). They do not admit new words.

Clause A grammatical construction that expresses the relationship between

processes, participants and circumstances in actions, states or events. Clauses

are constituents of sentences. Most typically, a clause consists of a subject (

S

), a

verb (

V

), and any other required elements such as an object (

O

), a predicative

complement (

C

), or an adjunct (

A

):