Lecture 3
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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".
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.
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".
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.
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
Word-Formation
Another common way of making a word is to abbreviate, or shorten, a longer word. Taxicab, bike UN Smog, brunch
Word-Formation
Back formation refers to the removal of an affix from an existing word to form a new word. Donation, donate
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.
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's Third New International Dictionary (1961), the English language has 450,000 words. Since then, the number has increased greatly.
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.
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.
Thank you!