新编简明英语语言学教程 何兆熊 第三章笔记和习题

Chapter 3 Morphology

⏹Lexicon is the collection of all the words of a language. It is synonymous with “vocabulary”.

Words are the focus of the study of lexicon, so the emphasis of this chapter falls upon words, i.e., the analysis and creation of words.

Linguists define the word as the smallest free form found in language. The features of word

Word is meaningful; word is a grammatical unit; word can be used independently; word is relatively stable and uninterruptible.

⏹Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.

⏹The total number of words stored in the brain is called the lexicon.

⏹Words are the smallest free units of language that unite sounds with meaning.

Morphology is a branch of linguistics, whereas lexicon is a component of language instead of a branch of linguistics.

Open class word and closed class word

⏹Open class words----content words of a language to which we can regularly add new words, such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, e.g. beatnik(a member of the Beat Generation), hacker, email, internet, “做秀，时装秀…” in Chinese.

⏹Closed class words----grammatical or functional words, such as conjunction, articles, preposition and pronouns. Morpheme--the minimal unit of meaning. The smallest meaningful unit of language is called a morpheme.

---Words are composed of morphemes. Words may consist of one morpheme or more morphemes, e.g.

⏹1-morpheme boy, desire

⏹2-morpheme boy+ish, desir(e)+ble

⏹3-morpheme boy+ish+ness, desir(e)+bl(e)+ity

⏹4-morpheme gentle+man+li+ness, un+desir(e)+abl(e)+ity

⏹5-morpheme un+gentle+man+li+ness

⏹7-morpheme anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism

⏹Morph: when people wish to distinguish the sound of a morpheme from the entire morpheme, they may sued

the term.It is the phonetic realization of a morpheme

⏹Allomorph: A morpheme may be represented by different forms, called allomorphs. It is the phonetic

variant of a morpheme.

⏹Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, such as “dog, bark, cat”,etc. In other instances, there may be some variation, that is, a morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms. They are said to be the allomorphs of the morpheme, the plural morpheme may be represented by:

⏹map----maps [s]

⏹dog----dogs [z]

⏹watch----watches [iz]

⏹mouse----mice [ai]

⏹ox----oxen [n]

⏹tooth----teeth

⏹sheep----sheep

⏹Each of the underlined part is called an allomorph of plural morpheme.

⏹

Affix

⏹Prefix ---- morphemes that occur only before others, e.g.

un-, dis, anti-, ir-, etc.

⏹Suffix ---- morphemes that occur only after others, e.g.