Âu Hữu Bằng - 0018412511

1. What is a word?

- The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication materially
representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical
employment and characterised by formal and semantic unity.

- The word is fundamental unit of language posessing both sound form àn

content(meaning)

- The word may be defined as dialectical unity form and content, independent unit of
language capable to form a sentence bt itself.

2. What is a root word?

- Words which have only a root morpheme in its structure.

e.g: phone, teach, work,…

3. What is a derived word?

- Derived words are extremely numerous in the English vocabulary.

E.g sadness, unacceptable,….

4 . What is a compound word?

- Another wide-spread word-structure is a compound word consisting of two or more

stems.

- Words of this structural type are produced by the wordbuilding process called
composition.

e.g : word-building, dancing-hall, dancing-partner, mother-in-law,

5 . What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph?

Morpheme:

- Small units of the word

- Don’t occur as free form but only as constituents of words

- Posseses meanings of their own.

=> the smallest grammatical meaningful units

- All morphemes are subdivided into two large classes:

+ roots morpheme (freemorpheme or boundmorpheme)

+ affixes (prefixes and suffixes).

Derivational morpheme(prefix, suffix)

 Inflectional morpheme(suffix)

e.g Teacher

teach/er/s

free-root/boundmor-(Derivational mor/boundmor-Inflectional mor)

Affixational morpheme

, worker,…

Allomorph: any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme

6. What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?

The difference between free and bound morpheme.

- Free morpheme: can stand alone to function as words.

- Bound morpheme: can only be attached to another part of a word (can not stand alone in the
language).

- Difference: it is free morpheme can stand alone but bound morpheme can not.

7. What is a root morpheme? What is a stem?

What is the difference between roots and stems?

- A root morpheme is the basic form to which other morphemes can be attached, and most of
it are free morpheme.

- A stem: + is also form to which other morphemes can be attached.

+ is sometimes created by the juxtaposition of two roots in a compound.

- Difference: + stem may be made up of more than one morphemes.

+ all roots are stems but many stems are not roots (but contain them).

+ These stem-forming element are not morphemes.

8. What is the difference between derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes?

+ Inflectional morphems study the way in which words vary (or inflect) in order to express
grammartical contrasts in sentences, such as singular/plural or past/present tense.
+ Derivational morphemes study the principles governing the construction of new words,
without reference to the specific grammartical role a word might play in the sentence.