Content words and function words

1. Content words and function words • Content words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, (most) adverbs • denote objects, actions, attributes, ideas e.g. children, anarchism, sour, purple, run, liberty • open class : new words regularly added e.g. download, byte, email,

2. Content words and function words • Function words: conjunctions (and, or, …), prepositions (in, of, …), articles (a, the), pronouns (it, he, …) • No clear lexical meaning • No obvious concepts associated with them • Closed class • Grammatical role [sometimes called lexical vs grammatical words]

3. Psycholinguistic evidence • Slips of the tongue typically involve content words • “the journal of the editor” instead of “the editor of the journal” • In early speech children tend to omit function words • “doggie barking” • Data from aphasia studies

4. Broca’s aphasia • “Yes — ah — Monday ah — Dad — and Dad — ah — Hospital — and ah — Wednesday — Wednesday — nine o’clock and ah Thursday — ten o’clock ah doctors — two — two — ah doctors and — ah — teeth — yah. And a doctor — ah girl — and gums, and I.” (FR&H, p.45)

5. Broca’s Aphasia • Broca (1865) described patients who displayed halting, agrammatic speech • Content words were well preserved • Function words (i.e., prepositions, articles) impaired • Typically left inferior prefrontal lobe of the cortex is affected

6. Wernicke’s aphasia • Wernicke (1874) described patients whose speech is fluent, but has little or no informational value • “I felt worse because I can no longer keep in mind from the mind of the minds to keep me from mind and up to the ear which can be to find among ourselves.”

7. Wernicke’s aphasia • Neologisms • Speech appears to have no information content • “fluent nonsense” • Preserved function words, impaired content words • Comprehension impaired • Even simple sentences not well understood • Associated with left temporal lobe damage

8. Broca and Wernicke’s areas

9. desirable likely inspired happy developed sophisticated ADJECTIVE undesirable unlikely uninspired unhappy undeveloped unsophisticated UN- + ADJECTIVE Morphemes

10. Phone Phonetic Phonetics Phonetician Phonic Phonology Phonologist Phonological Telephone Telephonic Phoneme Phonemic Allophone Euphonious Symphony Morphemes

11. Morphemes • Basic meaningful items • Many words contain several morphemes • 1 morpheme: boy, desire • 2 morphemes: boy+ish, desire+able • 3 morphemes: boy+ish+ness, desire+able+ity • 4 morphemes: un+ desire+able+ity

12. Morphemes • The morpheme is the locus of arbitrariness • A multimorphemic word is typically non arbitrary • Writable CD, Rewritable CD, Unrewritable CD • Discreteness • Creativity

13. Bound and Free Morphemes • Free morphemes: make a word by themselves • boy, desire, gentle, man • Bound morphemes: do not make a word by themselves • -ish, -ness, -ly, dis-, trans-, un- • Prefixes and suffixes (affixes)

14. Derivation vs. Inflection • Derivation • Adding an affix to a stem creates a new word • un- + true untrue • true and untrue are different words

15. Derivation vs. Inflection • Inflection • Adding an affix (suffix in English) to a stem creates a new form of the same word • talk + -ing  talking • talk + -ed  talked • talking and talked are different forms of the same word

16. Lexemes and word-forms • Ambiguity in the use of the word “word”. • boy and boys are the same word • boy and boys are different words • Notion of “lexeme” • boy and boys are different word-forms of the same lexeme • boy and boyish are different lexemes • Lexeme = lexical word; function words (and, in, the, etc.) are not lexemes.

17. Derivation vs. Inflection • Derivation creates new lexemes • Inflection creates word forms of a given lexeme

18. Roots, stems and lexemes • boy+ish+ness • boy = root and stem and lexeme • The suffix –ish is added to the stem boy giving the lexeme boyish • boyish can serve as a stem for further suffixation though it is not a root • The suffix –ness is added to the stem boyish giving the lexeme boyishness • “stem” = “base”

19. Rules of word (lexeme) formation • Derivation : stem + affix • boyish + -ness • Compounding : stem1 + stem2 • black + berry • Conversion (zero-derivation) : stem  stem • loveV  loveN