Beyond the Dictionary

Study Notes

The Limitations of Dictionaries in Defining Words

Dictionaries contain words labeled as 'nonce', which are words found only once, often in the writing of someone important, but don't seem to occur anywhere else.
Some words listed in dictionaries occur only once and in contexts that don't illuminate their meaning, making it difficult to determine whether they are real words or not.
Dictionaries sometimes contain words that they identify as mistakes, such as ambassady, which may be a mistake for the word ambassade.
Some dictionaries include 'mountweazels', which are phony words inserted to identify lexicographic piracy and should not be considered real words.
Dictionaries don't need to include every word, and every language has ways of forming new words that are so active and transparent that putting all the words formed that way into the dictionary would be a waste of space.
For example, any verb in English can have a present progressive form made with the suffix -ing, and any adjective can be made into a noun by adding the suffix -ness.
Dictionaries don't list all the words of any language, including derivatives with living prefixes and suffixes, technical, scientific, regional, or slang words.
Dictionaries reflect the words that native speakers use and encode them in the mental lexicon, the sum total of word knowledge that native speakers carry around in their heads.
Therefore, dictionaries do not fix or codify the words of a language.
To determine whether a word is a word, we must look more closely at what is in the mental lexicon.
The mental lexicon includes all the words that native speakers know and use, including those that may not be listed in a dictionary.
Ultimately, the authority to determine whether a word is a word lies not with dictionaries but with the speakers of the language themselves.

Types of Morphemes: Bound and Free Morphemes, Affixes, and Bound Bases

Morphemes are the minimal meaningful units used to form words.
Free morphemes can stand alone as words, while bound morphemes cannot.
Bound morphemes include prefixes and suffixes, which together are called affixes.
Affixes are used to form derived words through the process of derivation.
The base is the semantic core of the word to which prefixes and suffixes attach.
Bound bases are morphemes that cannot stand alone as words, but are not prefixes or suffixes.
Bound bases can occur either before or after another bound base, and have more substantial meanings than affixes.
Bound bases can form the core of a word, just like free morphemes.
Prefixes and suffixes tend to occur more freely than bound bases.
The criterion of 'semantic robustness' is used to distinguish between bound bases and affixes.
In some languages, there is no such thing as a free base, and all words need inflectional endings.
The distinction between root and stem is useful in analyzing languages with more inflection than English.