Curs 1

(words and morphemes)

(1)

sings vs. sing - variants of ‘sing’

students vs. student – variants of ‘student’

As the examples in (1) indicate, inflectional operations do not cause a word to change its lexical category.
In other words, inflectional operations, such as adding the plural -s or the present simple 3rd person -s,
do not create new lexemes, but new word-forms, i.e. grammatical words.

(2)

teach + er = teacher (a noun with the meaning of agent)

animate + ation = animation (a noun with abstract meaning)

In the examples in (2), suffixes are added to the stem, having as a result the derivation of new words. In
(2a), the agentive suffix -er is added to the verb ‘teach’, yielding the noun ‘teacher’; in (2b), the
nominalizing suffix -ation is added to the verb ‘animate’, a process which derives the nominalization
‘animation’.

Derivation Inflexion
Worker (she) works
Useless (the) workers
Untruthfulness (is) colonializing
Interview (we) picked
Curiosity (the) children
Passivize John’s (house)
Terrorism Emily’s (job)
(4)

The process of derivation exhibits semantic opacity. For example, the meaning of the word ‘interview’ in
(3a) is not related to the meanings of ‘inter-’ and ‘view’. One cannot infer the meaning of the whole
based on the sum of the meanings of constituent parts, in other words, the meaning is opaque or non-
transparent.

(11)

Properties of words:

a. Words are entities having a part of speech specification

b. Words are syntactic atoms

c. Words (usually) have one main stress

d. Words (usually) are indivisible units

(15)

A simple sign is defined as a sign which is not analysable into two or more smaller constituent signs:

Chair, neighbour, matter, brow, great, promise, discuss

The words in (15) cannot be decomposed into more meaningful components. They are called
monomorphemic simple signs.

(16)

A complex sign is defined as a sign which is formed of and analysable into at least two smaller
constituent signs:

a. Employee, inventor, inability, meaningless, suddenness, unhappy, decolonialization

b. Apartment building, greenhouse, team manager, truck driver, blackboard, son-in-law, pickpocket
The examples in (16) contain morphologically complex words: ‘employee’ is analysable as ‘employ’ + ‘ee’,
‘inventor’ is analysable as ‘invent’ +’or’, etc. These words can be decomposed into their smallest
meaningful units, which are called morphemes.

(17)

Some morphemes can occur on their own; they do not need to attach to a base, nor do they need an
affix. Such morphemes are called free morphemes:

Employ, invent, chair

(18)

Some morphemes can never occur on their own; they always need to attach to a base. Such morphemes
are called bound morphemes:

-ity, -ive, -ly

Some bound morphemes must always attach before the base (such as -un). They are called prefixes.
Some bound morphemes must always attach after the base (such as -ity, -ize, etc). They are called
suffixes. The term affix covers both suffixes and prefixes.

(22)

Compounding is a process that combines two bases, without the need for affixes:

Water-lily, school-boy

(24)

Truncation or clipping deletes a part of the base. It can be found with proper or common nouns:
Aaron - Ron

Elizabeth - Liz

laboratory - lab

discotheque - disco

(26)

Blends are amalgamations of parts of different words:

Smoke + fog = smog

Breakfast + lunch = brunch

(27)

Acronyms combine the initial letters of compounds or phrases into a pronounceable new word:

NATO, UNESCO