Morphology and Lexicon Chapter 3

Morphology and Lexicon Morphology studies morphemes and their different forms and the way they combine in word formation. Lexicon refers to the set of all the words and idioms of any language.

Words Every speaker of a language knows thousands, even tens of thousands, of words. From the nature of language, we know that knowing a word means knowing both its sound and its meaning. What is a word? How are words classified?

Words Traditionally, people tend to think of a word as a meaningful group of letters printed or written horizontally across a piece of paper. Some linguists tend to identify word as units that fall between pauses in speech. The best known definition of word is given by Bloomfield, who defines a word as “a minimum free form”, that is, the smallest form that can occur by itself.

Words A problem arises from the orthographic form of compound words. seaside sea-maiden sea level

Words Characteristics of a word First of all, a word is a sound or combination of sounds which we produce voluntarily with our vocal equipment. Second, a word is symbolic. The only exceptions for this rule are "onomatopoetic" or "echoic" words such as bang or cuckoo.

Words Third, words are part of language. A word is partly dependent for meaning upon its use in the larger context. Lastly, words help us interact culturally with one another.

Word Classes English words can be classified into closed class, open class and two lesser categories and words of unique function. The two lesser categories are numerals and interjections.

Word classes Closed classes include prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, modal verbs, and primary verbs. Open classes include nouns, full verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. Cybernation, clone, biodestructible, weatherwise , salewise The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, "closed". There are hardly new pronouns, determiners, conjunctions or prepositions.

Word classes Open-class words: LEXICAL WORDS or CONTENT WORDS Closed-class words: GRAMMATICAL WORDS or FUNCTION WORDS

Pro-forms A pro-form is a word or expression used as a substitute for another form. In English, there are many types of pro-forms. Do, so, not

Word Classes variable and invariable words Variable words can take inflectional endings. Work, works, working, worked Invariable words do not take inflectional endings.

Morpheme A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that carries grammatical and/or semantic meaning. It cannot be further divided into smaller grammatical units. Unacceptable: un, accept, able

Morpheme A morpheme may be a complete word (e.g. boy, scout, accept) or an affix (e.g. -s, un-, -able, -hood). A word of one morpheme is called one-morpheme word and a word of two two-morpheme word. The word boy contains one morpheme and the word boys contains two morphemes.

Morpheme However, a morpheme may undergo certain phonetic changes when combining with the base word. For example, the plural morpheme {s} is pronounced [z] in dogs, [s] in pests, and [iz] in houses. The different variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs .

Types of Morphemes free morphemes and bound morphemes eye, big, book, drink. un-, -s

Types of Morphemes Bound morphemes can be divided into two types. inflectional morpheme: suffix, infix derivative morpheme: prefix, suffix.

A bound morpheme is also called an AFFIX. The morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix is added is called a STEM . ROOT

Inflection Inflection according to the rules of the grammar of a language. he works. I worked.

Word-Formation New words may be added to the vocabulary or lexicon of a language by: Compounding Conversion Derivation other processes.

Compounding Compounding refers to the process of conjoining two or more free morphemes to form a new word. The new word form is called a compound. greenhouse

Compound nouns Free noun phrases a `blackbird a black `bird a `darkroom a dark `room

v + n  n.: cut-throat, breakwater n + -ed participle  adj.: home-made, book-learned adj + -ed participle  adj.: new-born, deep-laid

Derivation Some English derivative prefixes are very productive. anti- (meaning "against", "the opposite of"): dis- (meaning "not", "undo the action of"):

Conversion A word can be converted from one word class into another without any morphological change. Work, air, elbow, dry, doubt

Abbreviation Another common way of making a word is to abbreviate, or shorten, a longer word. Clipping : taxicabtaxi, bicycle  bike Initials: read letter by letter Acronyms: pronounced as independent words

Word-Formation A blend is a combination of parts of two words to form a third word which contains some of the meaning of each part. smog, brunch Back formation refers to the removal of an affix from an existing word to form a new word. Donation, donate

Neologism This word formation is also called "new coinage". Blog, google

Borrowing A borrowing refers to a word or phrase which has been taken from one language and used in another language. Loan words: directly borrowed from another language, such as dimsum, kowtow. Loan blends: imported words that are made not felt to be aliens, like companionship. Translation loans: words translated literally from another language, like paper tiger.

Lexicon Lexicon deals with the analysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. A lexeme is an abstract unit and thus may occur in many different forms in actual spoken or written texts. For example, the verb lexeme speak may take five forms: speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken.

Collocation is an issue of co-occurrence, i. e Collocation is an issue of co-occurrence, i.e. a lexical item is habitually used together with another.

lexicon A lexeme may be a word or a phrase. According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), the English language has 450,000 words. Since then, the number has increased greatly.

lexicon Phrasal lexemes: IDIOMS (a) semantic unity (b) structural stability

lexicon Proverbs are normally in the form of a sentence. Never offer to teach fish to swim.

Thank you!