Grammar and structure of sentences

Speech is a continuous stream of sound without a clear division into units, but it can be analyzed into meaningful elements which recur and combine according to rules. In writing, such an analysis is expressed through the division into words and sentences. Far more distinctions are needed, however, for a proper grammatical description.
Grammatical terms and categories: The essence of grammatical units is that they are meaningful and combine with each other in systematic ways. We may distinguish hierarchy of units as shown below:
 

(sentence)

clause

phrase

word

morpheme - phoneme/grapheme.

More typically, a unit consists of one or more elements:
Clause consists of one or more phrases, a phrase consists of one or more words, a word of one or more morphemes, etc.
The grammatical units, from morpheme to sentence, form a system connecting sound/writing, and discourse.

At each level, grammatical units can be characterized in four ways:

Structure: Units can be characterized in terms of their internal structure, e.g. words in terms of bases and affixes, phrases in terms of head and modifiers, and clauses in terms of clause elements/

Syntactic role: Units can be described in terms of their syntactic role, i.e. their role in building up larger syntactic units. There is no one-to-one correspondence between structure and syntactic role. Note, in particular, that each phrase type characteristically has a number of different syntactic roles.

Meaning: Units can be described in terms of meaning. Although it is often possible to establish broad correspondences, there is no simple relationship between structure and meaning, or between syntactic role and meaning. Note, in particular, that elements of the clause may correspond to a range of semantic roles and that independent clauses may have different speech act functions.

Distribution and discourse function: In this grammar, grammatical units are further characterized with respect to their distribution. A great deal of emphasis is placed on patterns of selection and use, especially in different register, and on the interpretation of distributional differences in terms of discourse function.

The three major word classes
Words can be broadly grouped into three classes according to their main function and their grammatical behaviour: lexical words, function words, and inserts.

Lexical words: Lexical words are the main carriers of meaning in a text. In speech they are generally stressed. They are characteristically the words that remain in the information-dense language of telegramds, lecture notes, headlines, etc.; arriving tomorrow (telegram) Family killed in fire (newspaper headline). Lexical words are numerous and are members of open classes. They often have a complex internal structure, and they can be the heads of phrases. There are four main clauses of lexical words: nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs.

Function words: While lexical words are the main building blocks of texts, function words provide the mortar which binds the text together. Function words have a wide range of meanings and serve two major roles: indicating relationships between lexical words or larger units, or indicating the way in which a lexical word or larger unit is to be interpreted.
Function words are members of closed systems. They are characteristically short and lack internal structure. In speech they are generally unstressed. They are frequent and tend to occur in any text, whereas the occurrence of individual nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs varies greatly in frequency and is bound to the topic of the text. However, there is also a great deal of variation in the frequency of function words depending upon the type of text.

Typical difference between lexical words and function words:

Frequency:  Lexical words Low      function words    high

head of phrase  yes       no

length      long              short

lexical meaning   yes      no

morphology variable    invariable

openness   open        closed

number      large        small

stress       strong         weak

Newmark (1988a, 1988b) points out that in order to b able to translate a text, one has to understand it and analyse it first. For this reason, translation theories should have a criteria to be followed by the translator. The intention of text -the translator has to forget about his/her own views about a subject and translate it following the author's intention and never alter it. The intention of the translator -whether s/he is trying to reproduce the emotiveness of the original, or whether s/he is trying to combine the cultural sense of the SL.

Categories of anaphora include pronouns, demonstratives, relative pronouns, and interrogative pronoun type adverbs. They further refer to three main tasks in this process, namely, determining the elements of a sentence that are anaphors, allocating the antecedent candidates of a given anaphora, and deciding which phrase or simple word of the possible candidate list is the antecedent of the given anaphora. In this vein, it is worth differentiating between anaphoric and cataphoric relations. Anaphora refers to the kind of relationship when a pronoun, as a grammatical substitute, is used to refer to a preceding noun phrase. Cataphoric reference, on the other hand, is the use of pro-forms or other grammatical fors to refer to a following noun phrase. These two types of relation are referred to as retrospective and anticipatory anaphora.

A simple rule of Arabic rhetoric is that a noun indicates continuity and permanence while use of a verb signifies occurrence and generation of an act. In the first sentence a verb is used while recurring word is a possessive phrase signifying that it refers to a principle.