Morphology and Lexicon

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Morphology and Lexicon

• Lecture 3

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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

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Word-Formation

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

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Word-Formation

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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• Thank you!