英语词汇学总结(细致)

Chapter 1Word-Structure

1. The definition of morpheme

1.1 What is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language?- morpheme

What are words composed of? - Words are formed by morphemes. A word is the smallest unit that stands alone to communicate meaning.

1.2 What are the Chinese equivalents对应词of morpheme? 语素词素-形位

2.1 Morphemes may be classified into free and bound.

Free morphemes, also called content morphemes, may constitute words by themselves. These morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences. So we may say that free morphemes are free roots.

Bound morphemes = Bound root + affixes, known as grammatical morphemes, must appear with at least one other morpheme, either free or bound. Bound morphemes are chiefly found in derived words, e.g. recollection, idealistic, ex-prisoner

2.2 Morphemes may also be classified into roots (or root morphemes) and affixes (or affixational morphemes).

Task:

(1) Read the following words and find the root in each word.

heart, hearten, dishearten, heartless, hearty, heartiness,

sweetheart, heartbroken, kind-hearted, whole-heartedly.

(2) What is your definition of root?

A root is the part of the word-form which remains when all the affixes have been removed.

(3) Is a root necessarily a free morpheme? Why?

2.2.1 Two types of roots

- Free root

In English, many roots are free morphemes, such as black in black, blackboard, blacksmith.

- Bound root

However, there are quite a number of roots which cannot exist on their own and thus belong to the class of bound morphemes. For example, ceive in receive, conceive, perceive, deceive; mit in permit, commit, submit; tain in retain, contain, maintain; cur in recur, occur, incur, etc.

these roots cannot be used to form new words.

2.2.2 Two types of affixes

Affix is a collective term for the type of formative (构词成分) that can be used only when added to another morpheme.

- Inflectional affixes (or inflectional morphemes) serve to express

the following meanings:

(1) plurality: e.g. -s in chairs, pens; -es in boxes, tomatoes;

en in oxen.

(2) the genitive case: e.g. ’s in boy’s, children’s.

(3) the verbal endings: for example,

a. -(e)s in words like eats, teaches shows the third person

singular present tense.

b. -ing in words like eating, teaching shows the present

participle or gerund.

c. -(e)d in words like worked, saved shows the past tense or past

participle.

(4) the comparative and superlative degrees:

e.g. -er in words like smaller, harder; -est in words like smallest,

hardest.

- Derivational affixes (or derivational morphemes)can be further divided into prefixes and suffixes.

•(1) Prefixes are affixes before the root, e.g: unjust, rewrite.

As a rule, most prefixes modify the meaning of roots, but not their parts of speech.