The purpose of this book is to arouse curiosity about English words and about the nature of language in general, especially among students who do not intend to specialize in linguistics. This book evolved from a course on English words that I have taught at Lancaster over the past few years. Finally, in the closing chapter we marvel at the ability you and I have to store tens of thousands of words in our minds and to instantly retrieve the right words in conversation.
Another feature of the book is that it is primarily a descriptive study of words in the English language. It is my pleasure to thank many people who have helped me in various ways during the preparation of this book. In addition, I would like to thank the editorial and design staff at Routledge, especially Beth Humphries and Emma Cotter for their advice and assistance in the preparation of this book.
Introduction
Morphological theory provides a general theory of word structure in all languages of the world. Its task is to characterize the kinds of things that speakers need to know about the word structure of their language in order to be able to use it to produce and understand speech. Second, speakers must be able to process the meanings of newly constructed words using the word elements and standard word-building rules of the language.
At the outset, we must establish the nature of the subject we are going to investigate. First, in Chapter 9, we look at the ways in which speakers, using the language's internal resources, are able to produce an infinite number of words. Most of the space in this book is devoted to an investigation of the structure of English words.
What is a word?
This can be seen in the pronunciation of the l sound in standard British English (RP) in different positions in a word. Which of the word forms in italics in the following sentences belong to the same lexeme. The part of the word that is not italicized can function as an independent word in the grammar.
Indeed, each of the non-summary parts is a word (ie vocabulary item) that is listed as such in the dictionary. In the following subsections we will consider examples of different morphological types in turn. Word structure in the world's languages is divided into four broad types: isolating, agglutinating, inflectional and polysynthetic.
Building words
In English, the head is usually the element on the right side of a compound. A non-header element in a folder more narrowly defines some characteristics of the head. Compare the stress pattern of compound nouns in [4.23a] and in noun phrases containing the same words in [4.
A large part of the system of rules in grammar consists of RULES OF PHRASE STRUCTURE whose task is to define COMPONENT STRUCTURE. In the case of regular English plurals, /z/ is the allomorph that occurs in the widest range of environments. But that /z/ appears in surface representation as /s/, /IZ/ or /z/. depending on the phonetic properties of the final sound of the stem to which the suffix is affixed:.
In [5.2] the final sound of the noun stem ending in /f/ shows two opposite behaviors when it is suffixed /-z/. As we have already seen, in the case of the noun /-z/ in the plural and the endings of the third person verbs, the derivation includes two rules: The lexicon is not simply a list of idiosyncratic syntactic properties of morphemes and lexical items.
In the remainder of the chapter, we will elaborate on the relationship between phonological and morphological rules in the lexicon. The latter cause various changes in the vowels, consonants or stress of the bases to which they are applied. In the course of the discussion, we re-examined the role of the morpheme as the minimal unit used to indicate meaning.
This is deliberately highlighted as the point of the rhyme is to teach children the alphabet. But it is not my intention to provide an exhaustive overview of the relationship between English spelling and pronunciation. Looking at language in the life of the individual, the same pattern is observed: speech is acquired before writing.
Word manufacture
You see all this and think to yourself, "The neighborhood is undergoing a rejuvenation." You regret the transformation and long for the good old days. They do not need to be listed in the lexicon, since their meaning can be worked out by anyone who knows the meaning of their constituent elements. Just because it's not in the dictionary doesn't mean it's not in the language.
Although the omission is attested here in the work of a major English poet, it is not recorded in the OED. It's the culture that anything goes as long as you can get away with it, and it's as prevalent in the corridors of Whitehall as it is in the riding ghettos. We have seen that simple words should be listed in the lexicon, because their meanings are not compositional.
As you can see in [8.3], the structure of idioms is similar to the structure of ordinary syntactic phrases. It is clear that knowing the grammatical structure and the meaning of the words in the idiomatic expressions in [8.3] does not help to understand what the idioms mean. The fact that the 's genitive is not necessarily a marker of possession is even clearer in the rest of the examples in [8.7b] and [8.7c].
From a semantic point of view, the farmer's tractor can be paraphrased as "the tractor that is owned by the farmer". All word formation, regardless of whether it is done by inflection or derivation, has a place in the dictionary. Many lexical items also need to be listed in the dictionary, because their meaning is not deducible from the elements of which they are composed.
Should the words environment, fantastic and modernism be listed in the dictionary or are they semantically transparent enough that they are unnecessary.
Words galore
But in the US it is said to have originated from one of the inventions of Elijah McCoy (1843–. We only come across the word 'spinning-jenny' in books about the history of the industrial revolution. More commonly we have FORE-CLIPPING , where the front of the the word is trimmed, as in [9.11].
Or again, occasionally it can be a combination of the two, as in Lizzie from (E)liz(abeth). Double-talk is very common in the language of armies of all colors – even the good guys. In practice, most loanwords belong to open lexical classes (ie nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs).
The adoption of foreign names with their inflectional morphemes resulted in the acquisition of a considerable number of allomorphs of the plural morpheme. Adding a new word can upset the balance of words already in the language, causing semantic narrowing, for example. In the second part of the section, we will focus on borrowing that took place in modern times.
Latin was used (at least in official writings) by the most urbane and erudite members of the intelligentsia, especially the clergy. During the period of French domination after the Norman Conquest, a great many words were adopted from Norman French into English. The adoption of French words that followed the Norman Conquest continued unabated.
France is perceived as the land of the arts in the broadest sense – encompassing literature, music, architecture, ballet, painting and sculpture. There are many words borrowed from Indian languages in various areas of the English lexicon. Most of the most common and basic words in use today are of Anglo-Saxon origin.
The mental lexicon
Our starting assumption is that words are stored in the mind in a very orderly manner. Furthermore, most of the entries would necessarily be complex, and would therefore take up considerable storage space in the human brain. For example, to identify the first two sounds in the word, the listener turns. detect, among other things, the turbulence of the fricative [s] and the fact that it is followed by a stop.
Looking up each word in the mental lexicon as it is heard is not a reliable strategy. This results in the selection of the wrong word, which has a meaning that is related to the intended meaning but is different in pronunciation. To summarize, all these errors show that meaning plays a very important role in the retrieval system of the mental lexicon.
The phonetic feature [± nasal] is present in the word, but always appears as part of the wrong segment. It is clear that content words differ from function words in the way they are processed in the mind. In short, slips of the tongue occurring in normal speech are an important source of evidence regarding words in the mind.
Different types of aphasia are distinguished based on the part of the brain that is damaged, as shown in the illustration on p. Psychologists developed the spreading activation model to explain the way words are represented in the mental lexicon. An example of a simplified presentation of the meanings of cow and turtle in the mental lexicon is given in the picture on p.
And remember, at any time, the speaker can look back at aspects of a word's rendering and revise it in the light of new information.
