Morphology Ch 2 PDF

An Introduction to English Morphology: Ch 2: Words, Sentences, and Dictionaries  Words as meaningful building-blocks of language Words as meaningful building-blocks of language Words as types and words as tokens Words with predictable meanings Non-word with...

An Introduction to English Morphology: Ch 2: Words, Sentences, and Dictionaries  Words as meaningful building-blocks of language Words as meaningful building-blocks of language Words as types and words as tokens Words with predictable meanings Non-word with unpredictable meanings Conclusion : words versus lexical items  Words as meaningful building-blocks of language We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to speak, the way the excited mother reports what has happened is: ‘Sally has said her first word!’ A sentence must not always consist of more than one word. One-word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’ are common in English. There is a clear sense in which words seem to be the building-blocks of language.  There are quite a few circumstances in which we use single words outside the context of any actual or reconstructable sentence. Here are some examples: Warning shouts, such as ‘Fire!’ Conventional commands, such as ‘Lights!’, Camera!’, ‘Action!’ Items on shopping lists, such as ‘carrots’, ‘cheese’, ‘eggs’.  a dictionary entry basically consists of: an association of a word, alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means, and perhaps also some information about grammar (the word class or part of speech that the word belongs to) and its pronunciation. Here is an example of a dictionary entry for the word month:  month noun. Any of twelve portions into which the year is divided.  Words are units of language which are basic in two senses: 1. in that they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed in dictionaries 2. in that they are the building-blocks out of which phrases and sentences are formed. Words as types and words as tokens How many words are there in the following sentence? 1. Mary goes to Edinburgh next week, and she intends going to Washington next month. The answer seems to be fourteen. But there is also a sense in which there are fewer than fourteen words in the sentence, because two of them (the words to and next) are repeated. In this sense, the third word is the same as the eleventh, and the fifth word is the same as the thirteenth, so there are only twelve words in the sentence.  The third and the eleventh word of the sentence at (1) are distinct tokens of a single type, and likewise the fifth and thirteenth word. (Just like two copies of the same book, are distinct tokens of one type.) Words as listed in dictionaries entries are, at one level, types, not tokens – even though, at another level, one may talk of distinct tokens of the same dictionary entry, inasmuch as the entry for month in one copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary is a different token from the entry for month in another copy. Words with predictable meanings Do any words have meanings that are predictable – that is, meanings that can be worked out on the basis of the sounds or combinations of sounds that make them up? The answer is certainly ‘yes’ There are some words whose sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly directly. These include so-called onomatopoeic words, such as words for animal cries: bow-wow, miaow, cheep, cock-a-doodle-doo. Words with predictable meanings There are also sets of words in which some similarity in sound seems to reflect a vague similarity in meaning, such as smoothness or wetness or both in the set of words slip, slop, slurp, slide, slither, sleek, slick, slaver, slug. A technical term for this situation is sound symbolism. But in sound symbolism, quite apart from the role of convention, the sound–meaning relationship is even less direct than in onomatopoeia. The fact that a word begins with sl- does not guarantee that it has anything to do with smoothness or wetness (For example: slave, slit, slow)  In every language, the associations between most words and their meanings are purely conventional (e.g.: the words ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ in English).  What kinds of word do have predictable meanings, then? The answer is: any words that are composed of independently identifiable parts, where the meaning of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of the whole word. For example: Most readers of this book have probably never encountered the word dioecious (also spelled diecious), a botanical term meaning ‘having male and female flowers on separate plants’. (It contrasts with monoecious, meaning ‘having male and female flowers, or unisexual flowers, on the same plant’.)  Consider now sentence (2): 2. Ginkgo trees reproduce dioeciously. To work out what this sentence means, do you now need to look up dioeciously in a dictionary? knowing the meaning of dioecious, you will agree that a dictionary is unnecessary You can confidently predict that (2) means ‘Ginkgo trees reproduce by means of male and female flowers on separate plants’. Your confidence is based on the fact that you know that the suffix -ly has a consistent meaning, so that Xly means ‘in an X fashion’, for any adjective X.  Here are three sentences containing words that had never been used by anyone before my use of them today, in the year 2000: 3. Vice-President Gore is likely to use deliberately un-Clintonish electioneering tactics. 4. It will be interesting to see how quickly President Putin de- Yeltsinises the Russian government. 5. The current emphasis on rehabilitative goals in judicial punishment may give rise to an antirehabilitationist reaction among people who place more weight on retribution and deterrence.  Un-Clintonish tactics are tactics unlike those that President Clinton would use A de-Yeltsinised government is one purged of the influence of Boris Yeltsin. The meaning of the word antirehabilitationist is likewise clear. Non-words with unpredictable meanings Something that is clearly larger than a word (being composed of two or more words) may nevertheless have a meaning that is not entirely predictable from the meanings of the words that compose it. Consider these two sentences from the point of view of a learner of English who is familiar with the usual meanings of the words expenditure, note and tab: 6. I keep notes on all my expenditure. 7. I keep tabs on all my expenditure. Non-words with unpredictable meanings Will the learner be able to interpret both these sentences accurately? The answer, surely, is no. Sentence (6) presents no problem; the learner should be able to interpret it correctly as meaning ‘I write down a record of everything I spend’. But faced with sentence (7), on the basis of the usual meaning of tab, the learner is likely to be puzzled.  Native speakers of English, however, will have no difficulty with (7). They will instinctively interpret keep tabs on as a single unit, meaning ‘pay close attention to’ or ‘monitor carefully’. Thus, keep tabs on, although it consists of three words, functions as a single unit semantically, its meaning not being predictable from that of these three words individually. keep tabs on is an idiom. Even though it is not a word, it will appear in any dictionary that takes seriously the task of listing semantic idiosyncrasies, probably under the headword tab.  Idioms are various in length, structure and function. Keep tabs on behaves rather like a verb, as do take a shine to ‘become attracted to’, raise Cain ‘create a disturbance’, have a chip on one’s shoulder ‘be resentful’, and kick the bucket ‘die’. Many idioms behave more like nouns, as the following pair of sentences illustrates: 8. The interrogation took a long time because the suspect kept introducing irrelevant arguments. 9. The interrogation took a long time because the suspect kept introducing red herrings. Again, a learner of English might be puzzled by (9). A native speaker, however, will know that red herring is an idiom meaning ‘irrelevant argument’,  Akin to idioms, but distinguishable from them, are phrases in which individual words have collocationally restricted meanings. Consider the following phrases: 14. white wine 15. white coffee 16. white noise 17. white man  Semantically, these phrases denote a kind of wine, coffee, noise and man, respectively. Nevertheless, in a broad sense they may count as idiomatic, because the meaning that white has in them is not its usual meaning; rather, when collocated with wine, coffee, noise and man respectively, it has the meanings ‘yellow’, ‘brown (with milk)’, ‘containing many frequencies with about equal amplitude’, and ‘belonging to an ethnic group whose members’ skin color is typically pinkish or pale brown’.  Are there linguistic items with unpredictable meanings that are larger than phrases – specifically, that constitute whole sentences? The answer is yes: many proverbs fall into this category. A proverb is a traditional saying, syntactically a sentence, whose conventional interpretation differs from what is suggested by the literal meaning of the words it contains. Examples are: 18. Too many cooks spoil the broth. ‘Having too may people involved in a task makes it harder to complete.’ 19. A stitch in time saves nine. ‘Anticipating a future problem and taking care to avoid it is less troublesome in the long run than responding to the problem after it has arisen.’ 20. It’s no use crying over spilt milk. ‘After an accident one should look to the future, rather than waste time wishing the accident had not happened.’  If idioms are listed in dictionaries (usually via one of the words that they contain), should proverbs be listed too? As it happens, ordinary dictionaries do not usually list proverbs, because they are conventionally regarded as belonging not to the vocabulary of a language but to its usage (a rather vague term for kinds of linguistic convention that lie outside grammar). For present purposes, what is important about proverbs is that they constitute a further example of a linguistic unit whose use and meaning are in some degree unpredictable, but which is larger than a word.  Is the traditional view of words as things that are (or should be) listed in dictionaries entirely wrong? Not really. Although many words have meanings that are predictable, there is a tendency for these meanings to lose motivation over time. Thus a word which does not start out as a lexical item may in due course become one. Conversely, many of the lexical items that are phrases or sentences (idioms or proverbs) have meanings which can be seen as metaphorical extensions of a literal meaning