I say it just Begins to live That day.
-- Emily Dickinson, ― a word‖
What is a word? What do you know when you know a word? Suppose you hear someone say morpheme词素 and haven’t the slightest idea what it means, and you don’t know what the smallest unit of linguistic meaning is called. A particular string of sounds must be united with a meaning, a meaning must be united with specific sounds in order for the sounds or the meaning to a word in our mental dictionaries. Once you learn both the sounds and their meaning, you know the word. It became an entry in you mental lexicon, part of your linguistic knowledge.
Someone who doesn‘t know English would not know where one word begins or ends in an utterance like Thecatsatonthemat. A speaker of English has no difficulty in segmenting the stream of sounds into six individual words: the, cat, sat, on, the, and mat. Similarly, a speaker of the American Indian language knows that kwapmuknanuk ( which means ― they see us‖) is just one word.
The lack of pauses between words in speech has provided humorists and songwriters with much material. For instance, there was a song popular during World War II. Mairzy doats and dozy doats Mares eat oats and does eat oats And liddle lamzy divey and little lambs eat ivy A kiddley-divey too, a kid‘ll eat ivy too, Wouldn‘t you? Wouldn‘t you?
Similarly, the comical hosts of the show Cartalk, aired on National public Radio close the show by reading a list of credits that includes the following cast of characters. Copyeditor Adeline Moore Add a line more Accounts payable Ineeda Czech I need a check Pollution control Maury Missions More emissions Purchasing Lois Bidder Lowest bidder Statistician Marge Innovera Margin of error
Russian chauffeur Picov Andropov pick up and drop off
Legal firm Dewey, Cheethum and Howe Do we cheat them and how
This shows that in a particular language, the form( sounds and pronunciation) and the meaning of a word are like two sides of a coin. For instance, in English the sounds of the letters bear and bare
represent four homonyms ( here also called homophones), different words with the same sounds, as shown in the sentences: She can‘t bear children She can‘t bear children Bruin bear is the mascot
He stood there—bare and beautiful
Sometimes we think we know a word even though we don‘t know what it meanings. In an introductory linguistics class, most of the 400 students had heard the word antidisestablishmentarianism and
believed it to be the longest word in the English language. Yet, most of the students were unsure of its meaning.
Antidisestablishmentarianism originated in the context of the nineteenth century Church of England, where \state church of England. The movement succeeded in England, but failed in Ireland and Wales, with the Church of Ireland being disestablished in 1871 and the Church of Wales in 1920.
Antidisestablishmentarian members of the Free Church of Scotland delayed merger with the United
Presbyterian Church of Scotland in a dispute about the position of the Church of Scotland. The term has largely fallen into disuse, although the issue itself is still current
Both children and adults have to be told that antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest word in English or discover it through an analysis of entries in a dictionary. Actually, should they wish to research the question, they would find that the longest word in Webster‘s Seventh International Dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a disease of the lungs.
Since each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word stored in our mental lexicon must be listed with its unique phonological representation, which determines its pronunciation, and its meaning. Each word in your mental lexicon includes other information as well, such as whether it is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, and adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction. That is, its grammatical category, or syntactic class, is specified. You may not consciously know that a form like love is listed as both a verb and noun, but a speaker has such knowledge, as shown by the phrases I love you and you are the love of my life. If such information were not in the mental lexicon, we would not know how to form grammatical sentences, nor would we be able to distinguish grammatical from un-grammatical sentences. The
classes of words, the syntactic categories—such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and so on—and the semantic properties of words, which represent their meanings, will be discussed in later sections. 2. Content words and function (grammatical ) words实意词与功能词
The English language makes an important distinction between two kinds of words—content words and function words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs are the content words. These words denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes, and ideas that we can think about like children, purple, etc. Content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can and regularly do add new words to these classes. A new word, google, entered English with the internet developing. Verbs like disrespect and download entered the language quite recently, as have nouns like bytes and email.
There are other classes of words that do not have clear lexical meaning or obvious concepts
associated with them, including conjunctions连接词 such as and, or, and but; prepositions介词 such as in and of; the articles the, an/ a, and pronouns such as it and he. These kinds of words are called
functions words because they have a grammatical function. For example, the articles indicate whether a noun is definite—the boy or a boy. The preposition of indicates possession as in the book of yours. But this word indicates many other kinds of relations too.
Function words are sometimes called closed class words. It is difficult to think of new conjunctions, prepositions, or pronouns that have recently entered the language. The small set of personal pronouns such as I, me, mine, he, she, and so on are part of this class. With the growth of the feminist movement, some proposals have been made for adding a neutral singular pronoun that would be neither masculine nor feminine and that could be used as the general form. If such a pronoun existed, it might have prevented the department chairperson in a large university from making the incongruous statement: ― We will hire the best person for the job regardless of his sex‖.
The difference between content and function words is illustrated by the following test that circulated recently over the Internet:
Please count the number of F‘s in the following text: FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
What this little test illustrates is that the brain treats content and function words differently. The two classes of words also seem to function differently in slips of tongue produced by normal
individuals. In the early stage of development, children often omit function words from their speech, for example ― doggie barking‖. What is more, these two classes of words have different functions in language. Content words have semantic meaning, function words play a grammatical role.
3. Morphemes: The minimal units of Meaning
― They gave me‖ Humpty Dumpty continued, ― for an un-birthday present‖ ― I beg your pardon?‖ Alice said with a puzzled air. ― I am not offended,‖ said Humpty Dumpty. ― I mean, what is an un-birthday present‖
― A present given when it isn‘t your birthday, of course‖
Lewis carroll, Through the Looking-glass
In the dialogue above, Humpty Dumpty is well aware that the prefix un-means not as further shown in the following pairs of words: Desirable undesirable Likely unlikely Inspired uninspired Happy unhappy
Developed undeveloped Sophisticated unsophisticated
Webster‘s Third New International Dictionary lists about 2700 adjectives beginning with un.
Words have internal structure, which is rule-governed. Uneaten, unadmired, and ungrammatical are words in English, but eatenun, admiredun, and grammaticalun are not, because we do not form a negative meaning of a word by suffixing un buy by prefixing it.
The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed is
morphology. This word itself consists of two morphemes, morph +ology. The suffix –ology means ―science of or branch of knowledge concerning‖. Thus, the meaning of morphology is the science of word forms.
Part of knowing a language is knowing its morphology. Like most linguistic knowledge, this is generally unconscious knowledge.
A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes: One morpheme boy , desire
Two morphemes boy+ ish, desire+ able
Three morphemes boy+ish+ness, desire+able+ity Four morphemes gentle+man+li+ness
More than four morphemes anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism
What is a morpheme? A morpheme, the minimal linguistic unit, is thus an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning that cannot be further analyzed. Therefore, every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes. However, There is a common view that words are the basic meaningful elements of a language, which may be reflected when Samuel Goldwyn, the pioneer moviemaker, once,
announced ― in two words: im-possible‖. Linguistically speaking, Goldwyn should have said: ― in two morphemes: im-possible”.
3.1 Bound and free morphemes
We can make a broad distinction between two types of morphemes. Free morphemes and Bound morphemes. Free morphemes refer to the morphemes which can stand by themselves as single words, e.g. open and door. Bound morphemes refer to those which cannot normally stand alone, but which are typically attached to another form, e.g. re-, -ist, ist, -s.
The free morphemes can be generally considered as the set of separate English word-forms. When they are used with bound morphemes, the basic word-form involved is technically known as the stem. For example:
Undressed carelessness Un- dress ed care less ness Prefix stem suffix stem suffix suffix Bound free bound free bound bound
What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the words which carry the content of
messages we convey, these free morphemes are called lexical morphemes, e.g. boy, man, house, tiger, long, yellow, sincere, open.
The other group of free morphemes are called functional morphemes, like and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, etc. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
The set of affixes which fall into the bound category can also be divided into two types. One is derivational morphemes. These are used to make new words in the language. A list of derivational morphemes will include suffixes such as the ish in foolish, the –ly in badly and the –ment in payment. It will also include prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, dis-, un- and so forth.
The second set of bound morphemes contains what are called inflectional morphemes. These are not used to produce new words in the English language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. Examples are jumped, boys, sitting, she is smaller, the smallest, Jerry‘s friend. To put is simply, they are –ing, -s, -er,-est, -ed, -?s. At the present stage of English history, there are a total of eight bound inflectional affixes. It should be noted that in English, all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes.
English inflectional morphemes Examples
-s the third person singular present She waits at home -ed past tens She waited at home -ing progressive she is eating the donut -en past participle Mary has eaten the donuts -s plural She ate the nonuts -?s possessive Disa‘s hair curly
-er comparative Disa has shorter hair that karin -est superlative Disa has the shortest hair
Armed with all these terms for the different types of morphemes, we can now take most sentences of English apart and list the elements. As an example, the English sentence The boy‘s wildness shocked the teachers contains the following elements.
The boy ?s wild ness shock ed the teach er -s
Functional lexical inflectional lexical derivational lexical inflectional functional lexical derivational, inflectional
As a useful way to remember the different categories of morphemes, the following chart can be used: lexical
free
functional Morphemes
derivational
Bound
Inflectional
Students often ask for definitions of derivational morphemes as opposed to inflectional morphemes. There is no easy answer. Perhaps the simplest answer is that derivational morphemes are affixes that are not inflectional. Inflectional morphemes signal grammatical relations and are required by the rule of sentence formation. Derivational morphemes, when affixed to roots and stems, change the
grammatical words classes and the basic meaning of the word, which may then be inflected as to number, tense, and so on. 3.2 English word formation
Word formation refers to the formation of longer, more complex words from shorter, simpler words. It is worth mentioning that there are some main common processes of word formation in English, like affixation, coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms. Affixation: Affixation includes prefixation and suffixation. Affixation is the morphological process whereby grammatical or lexical information is added to the base.
Affixation has played an active part in the course of the development of the English language. It is not only an age-old, but a productive method in English word-building as well, which will be further discussed in the next chapter.
Word coinage: one of the least common processes of word-formation in English is coinage, that is the invention of totally new terms. We have seen that new words may be added to the vocabulary of a language by derivational processes. New words also enter a language in a variety of other ways. Some are created outright to fit some purpose. The advertising industry has added many words to English, such as kodak, nylon. Specific brand names such as Xeron.
Greek roots borrowed into English have also provided a means for coining new words. Thermos ― hot‖ plus metron ― measure‖ gives us thermometer. From akros ― topmost‖ and phobia ―fear‖, we get
acrophobia, ― dread of heights‖. To avoid going out Friday the thirteenth, you may say that you have triskaidekapobia, a profound fear of the number 13. An ingenious cartoonist, Robert Osborn, has invented some phobias, to each of which he gives an appropriate name: Logizomechanophobia fear of reckoning machines Pornphobia fear of prostitutes
Borrowing: one of the most common sources of new words in English is the process simply labeled borrowing, that is, the taking over of words from other languages. Throughout its history, the English language has adopted a vast number of loan-words from other languages.
Compounding: In some examples we have just considered, there is a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. This combing process, technically, known as compounding, is very common in languages like German and English. Obvious English examples would be bookcase, fingerprint, sunburn, wallpaper, textbook, wastebasket, etc.
Blending: The combining of two separate forms to produce a single new term is also present in the process called blending. However, blending is typically accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of the other word. If you wish to refer to the combined effects of smoke and fog, there is the term smog. Some other commonly used examples of blending are brunch ( breakfast/lunch ), motel ( motor/hotel ) and telecast ( television/broadcast ), etc.
Clipping: the element of reduction which is noticeable in blending is even ore apparent in the process described as clipping. This occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form, often in casual speech. The term gasoline is still in use, but occurs much less frequently than gas, the