Introduction
Tuesday 21st November 2023
To introduce and explain linguistic
terminology and theoretical apparatus.
To enable the students to engage in analyses
of English complex words.
To be able to apply word formation processes.
To be familiar with the necessary and most
recent methodological tools to obtain relevant
data and systematically analyze them.
To define the word linguistics and consider the
subfields within the study.
To define the term morphology.
To consider the two types of morphology,
inflectional and derivational
What’s Linguistics?
What are the main branches of Linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
It involves the analysis of the many different
aspects such as the meaning, form and
context of language.
Studying linguistics will make you familiar
with the different components that make up a
language.
Phonetics: The study of sounds in speech in
physical terms
Syntax: The study of formation and structure
of sentences
Semantics: The study of meanings
Morphology: The study of the formation of
words
Phonology: The sounds in speech in cognitive
terms
Pragmatics: The study of the use of
language(s), the context in which it is used.
It refers to that branch of language study that
deals with what morphemes are and how they
operate in the structure of words.
Morpheme is the smallest unit of language
that has its own meaning.
More specifically, it deals with the internal
structure of complex words, i.e. words that
are composed of more than one meaningful
element.
E.g. meaningful, teacher, player, classic,
decolonialization, etc.
The average speaker knows thousands of
words, and new words enter our minds and
our language on a daily basis.
It has been estimated that average speakers
of a language know from 45,000 to 60,000
words. This means that we as speakers must
have stored these words somewhere in our
heads, our so-called mental lexicon. But what
exactly is it that we have stored? What do we
mean when we speak of ‘words’?
Words are entities having a part of speech
specification
Words are syntactic atoms
Words (usually) have one main stress
Words (usually) are indivisible units
We can define a word as one or more morphemes
that can stand alone in a language.
Words that consist of only one morpheme are
known as simple, e.g. just, can, oops
Words that are made up of more than one
morpheme are called complex, e.g. prewash,
opposition, reread
My friend and I walk to class together, because our
classes are in the same building and we dislike walking
alone.
Consider the above sentence to define the following:
Word tokens = is counting every instance in which a
word occurs in a sentence, regardless of whether that
word has occurred before or not (21 word tokens).
Word types = is counting a word once, no matter how
many times it occurs in a sentence, the two tokens of
the word and count as one type (20 word types).
Lexemes = are families of words that differ only in their
grammatical endings or grammatical forms; singular
and plural forms of a noun (class, classes), present,
past, and participle forms of verbs (walk, walks, walked,
walking), different forms of a pronoun (I, me, my, mine)
each represent a single lexeme, which can be defined as
words with the same dictionary entry (16 lexemes).
We come to understand new words even if they
are not in the dictionary (e.g. cot potato or crib
potato) because of two factors:
Our mental lexicon, a sort of internalized
dictionary that contains an enormous number
of words that we can produce, or at least
understand when we hear them.
We also have a set of word formation rules
which allows us to create new words and
understand new words when we encounter
them.
lexeme formation= to form new lexemes from old
ones. Lexeme formation can do one of three things:
1. Category-changing lexeme formation: rules that
change the part of speech (or category) of a word.
V — N: amuse -» amusement
V — A: impress -» impressive
N — A: monster -» monstrous
2. Meaning-changing lexeme formation: rules that add
new meanings.
A -» A ‘negative A’ happy -» unhappy
N -» N ‘place where N lives’ orphan -» orphanage
V -» V ‘repeat action’ wash -» rewash
3. Both category and meaning changing lexeme
formation: rules changing category and add substantial
new meaning:
V -» A ‘able to be Ved’ wash -» washable
N -» V ‘remove N from’ louse -» delouse
Inflectional word formation = is word formation that
expresses grammatical distinctions like:
1. number (singular vs. plural) e.g. wombat, wombats
2. tense (present vs. past) e.g. sing, sang, singing, sung
3. person (first, second, or third) e.g. she sings
4. case (subject, object, possessive) e.g. the wombat’s eyes
It changes the grammatical form of lexemes to fit into
different grammatical contexts.
English has relatively little inflection. We create different
forms of nouns according to number , we mark the
possessive form of a noun with -’s or -s’ . We have different
forms of verbs for present and past and for present and past
participles and we use a suffix -s to mark the third person
singular of a verb.
To sum up, we have two branches of
morphology:
1. Inflection Morphology: how words change
their form to indicate number, person, tense,
etc.
2. Derivation Morphology: how morphemes are
combined to form new words.
Answer questions 1 to 5 in your book on
page 9.
Due date is Monday 27th of November.
Thank you
