MEETING 5
WORDS
A. THE OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE
The course is aimed to make you are able to know and understand about words and their
formation, and the various meaning of words
B. MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Words and morphemes
In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis. Grammarians classify words
according to their parts of speech and identify and list the forms that words can show up
in. Although the matter is really very complex, for the sake of simplicity we will begin
with the assumption that we are all generally able to distinguish words from other
linguistic units. It will be sufficient for our initial purposes if we assume that words are
the main units used for entries in dictionaries.
In a later section, we will briefly describe some of their distinctive characteristics. Words
are potentially complex units, composed of even more basic units, called morphemes. A
morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has grammatical function or meaning (NB
not the smallest unit of meaning); we will designate them in braces—{ }. For example,
sawed, sawn, sawing, and saws can all be analyzed into the morphemes {saw} + {-ed}, {-
n}, {-ing}, and {-s}, respectively. None of these last four can be further divided into
meaningful units and each occurs in many other words, such as looked, mown, coughing,
bakes. {Saw} can occur on its own as a word; it does not have to be attached to another
morpheme. It is a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just
above is free. Each must be affixed (attached) to some other unit; each can only occur as
a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached as word parts are said to be bound.
Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before or after the form to
which they are added. Prefixes are attached before and suffixes after. The bound
morphemes listed earlier are all suffixes; the {re-} of resaw is a prefix. Further examples
of prefixes and suffixes are presented in Appendix A at the end of this chapter. Root,
derivational, and inflectional morphemes Besides being bound or free, morphemes can
also be classified as root, derivational, or inflectional. A root morpheme is the basic form
to which other morphemes are attached. It provides the basic meaning of the word.The
morpheme {saw} is the root of sawers. Derivational morphemes are added to forms to
create separate words: {-er} is a derivational suffix whose addition turns a verb into a
noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb.
For example, {paint}+{-er} creates painter, one of whose meanings is “someone who
paints.” Inflectional morphemes do not create separate words. They merely modify the
word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical properties such as plurality, as
the {-s} of magazines does, or past tense, as the {ed} of babecued does.
English has eight inflectional morphemes, which we will describe below. We can regard
the root of a word as the morpheme left over when all the derivational and inflectional
morphemes have been removed. For example, in immovability, {im-}, {-abil}, and {-ity}
are all derivational morphemes, and when we remove them we are left with {move},
which cannot be further divided into meaningful pieces, and so must be the word’s root.
We must distinguish between a word’s root and the forms to which affixes are attached.
In moveable, {-able} is attached to {move}, which we’ve determined is the word’s root.
However, {im-} is attached to moveable, not to {move} (there is no word immove), but
moveable is not a root. Expressions to which affixes are attached are called bases. While
roots may be bases, bases are not always roots.
Words
Words are notoriously difficult entities to define, both in universal and in language
specific terms. Like most linguistic entities, they look in two directions—upward toward
larger units of which they are parts (toward phrases), and downward toward their
constituent morphemes. This, however, only helps us understand words if we already
understand how they are combined into larger units or divided into smaller ones, so so we
will briefly discuss sev- Delahunty and Garvey 126 eral other criteria that have been
proposed for identifying them.
One possible criterion is spelling: in written English text, we tend to regard as a word any
expression that has no spaces within it and is separated by spaces from other expressions.
While this is a very useful criterion, it does sometimes lead to inconsistent and
unsatisfactory results. For instance, cannot is spelled as one word but might not as two;
compounds (words composed of two or more words; see below) are inconsistently
divided (cf. influx, in-laws, goose flesh, low income vs. low-income).
Words tend to resist interruption; we cannot freely insert pieces into words as we do into
sentences. For example, we cannot separate the root o of a word from its inflectional
ending by inserting another word, as in *sockblue-s for blue socks. Sentences, in contrast,
can be interrupted. We can insert adverbials between subjects and predicates: John
quickly erased his fingerprints. By definition, we can also insert the traditional
interjections: We will, I believe, have rain later today.
In English, though by no means in all languages, the order of elements in words is quite
fixed. English inflections, for example, are suffixes and are added after any derivational
morphemes in a word. At higher levels in the language, different orders of elements can
differ in meaning: compare John kissed Mary with Mary kissed John. But we do not
contrast words with prefixed inflections with words with suffixed inflections. English
does not contrast, for example, piece + s with s + piece.
In English, too, it is specific individual words that select for certain inflections. Thus the
word child is pluralized by adding {-ren}, ox by adding {-en}. So if a form takes the {-
en} plural, it must be a word.
So words are units composed of one or more morphemes; they are also the units of which
phrases are composed.
English inflectional morphology
Inflectional morphemes, as we noted earlier, alter the form of a word in order to indicate
certain grammatical properties. English has only eight inflectional morphemes, listed in
Table 1, along with the properties they indicate.
Except for {-en}, the forms we list in Table 1 are the regular English inflections. They
are regular because they are the inflections added to the vast majority of verbs, nouns,
adjectives, and adverbs to indicate grammatical properties such as tense, number, and
degree.
They are also the inflections we typically add to new words coming into the language, for
example, we add {-s} to the noun throughput to make it plural. When we borrow words
from other languages, in most cases we add the regular English inflections to them rather
than borrow the inflections they had in their home languages; for example, we pluralize
operetta as operettas rather than as operette as Italian does; similarly, we sing oratorios
rather than oratori. [Thanks to Paula Malpezzi-Price for help with these examples.] The
regular inflections are the default inflections that learners tend to use when they don’t
know the correct ones (for example, growed rather than grew).
nouns: {-s} plural (the birds)
noun phrases: {-s}
genitive/possessive (the bird’s song)
adjectives/adverbs: {-er} comparative (faster) {-est} superlative (fastest)
verbs: {-s} 3rd person singular present tense (proves)
{-ed} past tense (proved)
{-ing} progressive/present participle (is proving)
{-en} past participle (has proven) (was proven)
the eight english inflectional morphemes [Note: the regular past participle morpheme is
{-ed}, identical to the past tense form {-ed}. We use the irregular past participle form {-
en} to distinguish the two.]
However, because of its long and complex history, English (like all languages) has many
irregular forms, which may be irregular in a variety of ways. First, irregular words may
use different inflections than regular ones: for example, the modern past participle
inflection of a regular verb is {-ed}, but the past participle of freeze is frozen and the past
participle of break is broken. Second, irregular forms may involve internal vowel
changes, as in man/men, woman/women, grow/grew, ring/rang/rung. Third, some forms
derive from historically unrelated forms: went, the past tense of go, historically was the
past tense of a different verb, wend. This sort of realignment is known as suppletion.
Other examples of suppletion include good, better, and best, and bad, worse, and worst.
(As an exercise, you might look up be, am, and is in a dictionary that provides
etymological information, such as the American Heritage.) Fourth, some words show no
inflectional change: sheep is both singular and plural; hit is both present and past tense, as
well as past participle. Fifth, many borrowed words, especially nouns, have irregular
inflected forms: alumnae and cherubim are the plurals of alumna and Delahunty and
Garvey 128 cherub, respectively. Irregular forms demonstrate the abstract status of
morphemes. Thus the word men realizes (represents, makes real) the two morphemes
{man} and {plural}; women realizes {woman} and {plural}; went realizes {go} and
{past tense}. Most grammar and writing textbooks contain long lists of these exceptions.
As a final issue here we must note that different groups of English speakers use different
inflected forms of words, especially of verbs.
When this is the case, the standard variety of the language typically selects one and
rejects the others as non-standard, or, illogically, as “not English,” or worse. For
example, many English speakers use a single form of be in the past tense (was) regardless
of what the subject of its clause is. So they will say, We was there yesterday. This is an
uncontroversial issue: was in instances like this is universally regarded as non-standard.
Other forms are more controversial. For example, what is the past tense of dive—dived or
dove? How are lie and lay to be used? How does your dictionary deal with such usage
issues?
C. EXERCISES
1. Identify the free morphemes in the following words: kissed, freedom, stronger, follow,
awe, goodness, talkative, teacher, actor.
2. Use the words above (and any other words that you think are relevant) to answer the
following questions:
a. Can a morpheme be represented by a single phoneme? Give examples. By more than
one phoneme? Give examples.
b. Can a free morpheme be more than one syllable in length? Give examples. Can a
bound morpheme? Give examples.
c. Does the same letter or phoneme—or sequence of letters or phonemes—always
represent the same morphe me? Why or why not? (Hint: you must refer to the definition
of morpheme to be able to answer this.)
d. Can the same morpheme be spelled differently? Give examples. e. Can different
morphemes be pronounced identically? Give examples. f. A morpheme is basically the
same as: i. a letter ii. a sound iii. a group of sounds iv. none of the above
3. The words district and discipline show that the sequence of letters d-i-s does not
always constitute a morpheme. (Analogous examples are mission, missile, begin, and
retrofit.) List five more sequences of letters that are sometimes a morpheme and
sometimes not.
4. Just for fun, find some other pairs like disgruntled / *gruntled and disgusted / *gusted,
where one member of the pair is an actual English word and the other should be a word,
but isn’t. Affixes are classified according to whether they are attached before
D. REFERENCES
Lieber, Rochelle.2009. Introducing Morphology.NewYork; Cambridge University Press
CarStairs, Andrew & Mccarthy.2002.An Introduction to English Morphology. London:
Edinburgh University Press
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/sound/chapter5.pdf
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