This page collects together material focussing on English at the level of morphemes, words, and phrases. (Morphemes are irreducible linguistic units of meaning, which may be whole words or parts of a word such as the plural marker -s.) For morphemes we look at such things as prefixes and suffixes, which modify the meaning of a root (e.g. preclude, exclude, include); verbs with Latin roots (such as claudere ‘to shut’) are as a rule preferred in academic writing over phrasal verbs, and commonly appear with a number of prefixes giving words with closely related meanings in English. For words, there are synonyms and antonyms (on a syntagmatic axis, i.e. vertical substitution), hypernyms and hyponyms, and for phrases there are collocations and phrasal verbs (on a paradigmatic axis, i.e. horizontal juxtaposition). On this page the reader may also find links to material on verb tenses, definite and indefinite articles, and usage of everyday words, set phrases and idioms in academic writing.

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