Morphology and Lexicon

1. Morphology and Lexicon Lecture 3

2. 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.

3. Words and Word Classes • 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. The sound and the meaning of a word cannot be separated.

4. Words and Word Classes • Traditionally, people tend to think of a word as a meaningful group of letters printed or written horizontally across a piece of paper. • linguists are concerned primarily with the spoken word, not the written. • Some linguists tend to identify word as units that fall between pauses in speech.

5. Words and Word Classes • 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. • This definition works best for written English, where we conventionally leave a space on either side. But for languages like Chinese which normally leaves no space between words, this definition does not work at all.

6. Words and Word Classes • A problem arises as to whether they can be viewed as a single word or a group of two words. Another problem comes from the orthographic form of compound words. While seaside is usually written as a single word and sea-maiden is always hyphenated, sea level is conventionally written with a space between the two component elements.

7. Words and Word Classes • First of all, a word is a sound or combination of sounds which we produce voluntarily with our vocal equipment. Phonemes, which are the smallest working units of sound by themselves, build up into morphemes, which are the smallest working units of meaningful sound and which then build up into words.

8. Words and Word Classes • Second, a word is symbolic, i.e., it stands for something else, such as objects, happenings or ideas. The symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary; there is no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thing or idea and the actual thing or idea itself. The only exceptions for this rule are "onomatopoetic" or "echoic" words such as bang or cuckoo.

9. Words and Word Classes • Third, words are part of the large communication system we call language. A word is partly dependent for meaning upon its use in the larger context. A word receives some of its meaning as it fills grammatical slots in a sentence: as subject (The book is on the desk), as object (He placed the book on the desk), as predicate verb (He booked a double room for them). Some words, like prepositions, conjunctions and so on are almost impossible to assign any meaning to without considering their sentence functions.

10. Words and Word Classes • Lastly, words help human beings interact culturally with one another. In some situations, the act of speaking is more important than what we actually say. From the phatic function of language, we know that we say "How do you do?" without really concerning with the physical condition of the hearer; we say "It's a nice day, isn't it?" without really expecting a meteorological discussion. In this sense, words are the glue that holds a society together.

11. Word Classes • Words can be classified into word classes partly on account of their syntactic behavior, partly on the basis of their morphological form. • 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. • The two lesser categories are numerals and interjections.

12. Word Classes • According to their variability, words can also be classified into variable and invariable words. Variable words can take inflectional ending and thus have ordered and regular series of grammatically different word forms. • Invariable words do not take inflective endings.

13. Word Classes • According to where they denote lexical or grammatical meanings, words fall into two categories: lexical words and grammatical words. • The syntactic criteria fo r assigning words to lexical categories very often rely on specific types of grammatical function words.

14. What Is A Morpheme? • A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that carries grammatical and/or semantic meaning. This means that it cannot be further divided into smaller grammatical units. For example, the English word unacceptable can be segmented into three morphemes, un, accept, able, each of which carries a certain semantic meaning and cannot be further segmented.

15. What Is A 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.

16. What Is A 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 .

17. What Is A Morpheme? • Morphemes can be divided into free morphemes and bound morphemes according to whether they can be used independently as free forms or not. If a morpheme can constitute a word (free form) by itself, it is called a free morpheme, like "room", "bottle", "stand", "large". If a morpheme has meaning only when connected with at least another morpheme, it is bound, like un- in "unlucky", and the plural -s in "bags".

18. What Is A Morpheme? • Bound morphemes can be divided into two types according to whether they provide the lexical item to which they are added any further grammatical meaning and/or lexical meaning. An inflectional morpheme provides further grammatical information about an existing lexical item. English inflectional morphemes are largely in the form of suffix. Only in some few irregular plurals can we identify the existence of infixes. A derivative morpheme refers to one that creates an entirely new word. It may take the form of a prefix or a suffix.

19. Inflection and Word-Formation • Inflection refers to the process of adding an affix to a word or changing it in some other way according to the rules of the grammar of a language. In English, verbs are inflected for 3rd person singular by adding the suffix -(e)s: I work, he works and past tense by adding the suffix -ed: I worked.

20. Inflection and Word-Formation • Modern English is no longer an inflectional language, as Old English used to be. Instead, it is roughly an analytic language, which depends largely on the word order rather than the inflectional grammatical markers to express the grammatical meanings.

21. Inflection and Word-Formation • New words may be added to the vocabulary or lexicon of a language by compounding, conversion, derivation and a number of other processes.

22. 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 • When two or more free morphemes are combined into a compound, a new meaning arises, which is in most cases no longer a simple combination of the meanings of the component elements. A greenhouse is not necessarily green in color; instead, it refers to "a structure enclosed (as by glass) for the cultivation or protection of a tender plant".

23. Word-Formation • The word to which the affix is added is referred to in linguistics as a base or root. Some English derivative prefixes are very productive, i.e. many new words have been derived from them.

24. Word-Formation • A word can be converted from one word class into another without any morphological change. This method of word-formation is called conversion, or zero derivation. This is one of the major ways of word-formation in the English language. • Work, air, elbow,dry, doubt

25. Word-Formation • Another common way of making a word is to abbreviate, or shorten, a longer word. • Taxicab, bike • UN • Smog, brunch

26. Word-Formation • Back formation refers to the removal of an affix from an existing word to form a new word. • Donation, donate

27. lexicon • 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: speaks, speaks, speaking, spoken, spoken. • COLLOCATION refers to the acceptable combination between individual lexical items. From the syntagmatic point of view, collocation is an issue of co-occurrence, i.e. which lexical items are habitually used together with another.

28. lexicon • A lexeme may be a word or a phrase. However, no one is able to know the whole lexicon of a language, since most languages have specialized vocabulary that relate to particular fields of knowledge and there is a marked contrast between a speaker's use vocabulary and his recognition vocabulary. According to Webster'sThird New International Dictionary (1961), the English language has 450,000 words. Since then, the number has increased greatly.

29. lexicon • Phrasal lexemes which have relatively regular lexical meaning and restricted grammatical variation are referred to as IDIOMS. English idioms have two characteristics: (a) semantic unity and (b) structural stability. These two characteristics distinguish an idiom from a free phrase.

30. lexicon • Proverbs are normally in the form of a sentence. A proverb is often a short sentence that people often quote and use to give advice and state some general human life experience and problem. • Never offer to teach fish to swim.

31. Thank you!