Morphology and Lexicon

Chapter 3

• 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.

Morphology and Lexicon

• 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.

Words

• 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.

Word classes

• 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.

• Open-class words: LEXICAL WORDS or CONTENT WORDS

• Closed-class words: GRAMMATICAL WORDS or FUNCTION WORDS

Word classes

• 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

Pro-forms

• variable and invariable words

• Variable words can take inflectional endings.

• Work, works, working, worked

• Invariable words do not take inflectional endings.

Word Classes

• 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 .

Morpheme

• 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.

Types of Morphemes

• 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

• according to the rules of the grammar of a language.

• he works.

• I worked.

Inflection

• New words may be added to the vocabulary or lexicon of a language by:

• Compounding• Conversion• Derivation• other processes.

Word-Formation

• 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

Compounding

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

• Some English derivative prefixes are very productive.

• anti- (meaning "against", "the opposite of"):

• dis- (meaning "not", "undo the action of"):

Derivation

• A word can be converted from one word class into another without any morphological change.

• Work, air, elbow, dry, doubt

Conversion

• Another common way of making a word is to abbreviate, or shorten, a longer word.

• Clipping : taxicabtaxi, bicycle bike

• Initials: read letter by letter

• Acronyms: pronounced as independent words

Abbreviation

• 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

Word-Formation

• This word formation is also called "new coinage".

• Blog, google

Neologism

• 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.

Borrowing

• 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.

Lexicon

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

• 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.

lexicon

Thank you!