Understanding Words: Structure, Types, and Morphology
Unit 2: Problems with the Term “Word”
The term word is central to lexicology and linguistic studies in general.
Words in Writing
The orthographic criterion defines words as sequences of letters that are preceded and followed by blank spaces. There are some words that are not a single word but two orthographic words which appear together. We call them “compounds” (a word formation process whereby a new word is formed by combining two or more simple words) because a hyphen makes clear its status as a single item. The use of hyphens to indicate the lexical status of compounds is variable because in some cases hyphenation is absent.
Words in Speech
Another argument which endorses words as linguistic units comes from their phonological realization: Linguists do not have a written tradition to work with their phonology. It’s possible to make a pause between words. A second phonological criterion is that of stress. This has been found relevant in the case of English compounds. They can be usefully distinguished from ordinary phrases which contain the same elements because the latter are typically stressed on their final element.
Meaning of Words
There are some words that have no meaning; “take” doesn’t mean anything, it’s a light verb, devoid of meaning and which takes it from the noun. But, there are some units smaller than words that carry meaning: consider-reconsider.
Formal Features of Words
Syntactic representations of language have words as central elements. For a start, sentences are considered to be the basic units of any syntactic analysis. Sentences contain smaller constituents that we call clauses. Clauses can be split up into smaller immediate constituents that we call phrases. Words are said to be the ultimate constituents of sentences. Words in themselves appear to have a syntactic role assigned to them such as determiners, nouns, etc., that we call word classes or lexical categories. The lexical integrity principle states that words are uninterruptible units; the internal structure of words cannot be modified by syntactic elements. That implies that when new segments are added, they cannot be inserted within the word. English contains some significant exceptions to this rule; counterexamples are irregular verbs like sing-sang-sung, where a vowel change called ablaut (vowel graduation or vowel alternation) modifies the word internally to indicate the preterite and the past participle. A related formal criterion is that of internal stability. The underlying argument is that the order of elements inside a word is fixed.
Unit 3: Different Types of Words
“Word” lends itself to different interpretations. For instance, when considering the syntactic role of words, it’s advisable to distinguish between word-forms and grammatical words. Lexicologists also introduce the term “lexeme” to refer to words as carriers of meanings. Lexicographers and corpus linguists often talk about lemmas.
Lexemes, Word Forms, and Grammatical Words
The full system of word forms realizing this single abstract known as lexeme (a word in an abstract sense, a minimal unit of vocabulary) constitutes its paradigm. The concept of word form relates words to inflectional morphology (a form realizing a word in speech). It is to be noted that a single word form may represent two different lexemes. This can be illustrated with the word to lift, which is a verb broadly equivalent to the verb raise. Lexemes are like dictionary words and it’s our training in the use of dictionaries that tells us that a single entry word is representative of all of its various word forms. When a single word-form like talked is used to realize more than one grammatical word, linguists refer to it as a syncretic form (it refers to the merging of forms through loss of inflections).
Lexemes, Lemmas, and Headwords
Lemma is used in corpus research and psycholinguistic studies as quasi-synonymous with lexeme (lemma: a word that is paraphrased or glossed). A lemmatized list consists of lemmas and an unlemmatized word list contains all individual word forms. Dictionary headwords tend to give the impression that languages consist of individual words; hence lexemes which are made up of more than one element, multiword lexemes like take off, as a matter of fact, turn a blind eye or the early bird catches the worm are as a rule lumped together in simple word entries like take, matter, eye, and bird.
Word Classes
Also known as parts of speech which is a classification of words. Another distinction which needs to be made is that which pays attention to the specific function that words have in phrases and sentences. Word class constraints limitations have been complied with.
Function Words vs. Lexical Words
- Function Words (FW): A word with little or no lexical meaning which performs a mainly grammatical role.
- Lexical Words (LW): It refers to a word which has lexical meaning.
Nouns like girl, cart, verbs like run are redundantly referred to as lexical words or content words because they have a more readily identifiable meaning.
Closed Classes and Open Classes
Closed members are recognized because:
- They belong to a closed list, only exceptionally extended by the creation of additional members. For instance, speakers very rarely invent or import a new article or pronoun.
- They are limited in number.
- Their job is to signal the organization of sentences.
By contrast, open class are identifiable because:
- They belong to an open list. New items are constantly coming into the language.
- They are unlimited in number: it’s virtually impossible to compile an exhaustive inventory of its members.
- As lexical words, they are the most informative and carry the main meaning of a sentence.
Unit 4: Morphology and Morphemes
Morpheme Concept
Central to the study of words is the linguistic discipline called morphology. This is the branch of linguistics that deals with the way words are built and describes how they are organized internally. Morphology and syntax are viewed as the two complementary branches of grammar. The central units of morphology are morphemes (the smallest morphological unit in a language. It’s a distinctive unit of meaning or function. A morpheme cannot be decomposed into smaller units which are either meaningful by themselves or mark a grammatical function like singular or plural number in the noun. A morpheme may constitute a word, as in cake, but, run or to be part of it as in happy-ly. We say that the meaning of morphemes is invariant. There are linguistic units smaller than morphemes. No doubt phonemes are definitely smaller, but they don’t have identifiable meaning. Morphologists are interested in polymorphemic words because they are decomposable, they have more than one morpheme as in emotion-al. They are interested in the structure of the words. Lexicology takes into account all kinds of words, simple and complex. However, due to its interest in vocabulary, lexicology focuses more on lexical morphemes, as they contribute to vocabulary growth.
Classification
- Simple lexemes: Only one morpheme as in book.
- Complex lexemes: More than one morpheme:
- Derivatives: Obtained through affixation – unwilling.
- Compounds: Lexemes obtained by joining two or more words – letter box.
Bound vs. Free Morphemes
- Bound: A morpheme unit which cannot stand alone and has to be attached to another morpheme (school-ing).
- Free morphemes: They can constitute English words in themselves without the help of any other morpheme (late in late-ly).
Each of these four lexemes consists of two elements. They are roots that cannot appear as separate words; hence they qualify as bound morphemes. Such bound roots have been called combining forms because they are found in combination with other combining forms.
A very general classification of English morphemes would be:
- Free morphemes (they are often identified with roots. This is because of free morphemes contain the core meaning of a lexeme when various constituents are present):
- Free roots: lead, drop.
- Free non-roots (they cannot be identified with roots): this, a.
- Bound morphemes:
- Bound roots: morph(o)-.
- Affixes: -a, -ing.