Chapter II – Morphology: The Words of Language (詞法：語(yǔ)言的詞匯)

1. Content words and function words:

a) Content Words (or open class words, 實(shí)詞): denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes, and ideas that we can think about.

b) Function Words (or closed class words, 虛詞): specify grammatical relations and have little or no semantic content.

2. Morpheme (詞素): the minimal unit of meaning, the linguistic term for the most elemental unit of grammatical form.

3. Free and bound morphemes:

a) Free morphemes (自由語(yǔ)素): morphemes that can stand alone and may constitute words by themselves, like boy, desire, gentle, and man.

b) Bound morphemes (綁定語(yǔ)素): morphemes that must be attached to a base morphemes and are always parts of words, like -ish, -ness, -ly, pre-, trans-, and un-.

4. Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes:

a) Prefixes (前綴): the morphemes occur only before others, like un-, pre-, and bi-.

b) Suffixes (后綴): the morphemes occur only after others, like -ing, -er, -ly, and -ist.

c) Infixes (中綴): the morphemes inserted into other morphemes, like -um- (meaning “to be”) in Bontoc, spoken in the Philippines. The only infixes in English are full-word obscenities, usually inserted into adjectives or adverbs, like -fuckin- in America English in re-fuckin-diculous.

d) Circumfixes (discontinuous morphemes, 外接符): the morphemes attached to a base morpheme both initially and finally, like ge- + -t (meaning the past participle of regular verbs) in German.

5. Roots, stems, bases, and bound roots:

a) Morphologically complex words consist of a morpheme root (詞根) and one or more affixes. A root may or may not stand alone as a word.

b) When a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem (詞干). Other affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem.

c) Linguists sometimes use the word base (詞基) to mean any root or stem to which an affix is attached.

d) Bound roots (綁定詞根) do not occur in isolation and they acquire meaning only in combination with other morphemes. For example, -ceive in receive is a common root, but for modern English speakers, it has no independent meaning (while it had clear meaning to the original Latin speakers).

6. Derivational Morphemes (派生語(yǔ)素): bound morphemes such as -ify, -cation, and -arian are called derivational morphemes. When they are added to a base, a new word with a new meaning is derived. The form that results from the addition of a derivational morphemes is called a derived word (派生詞). For example, pure-purify-purification.

7. Inflectional Morphemes (屈折語(yǔ)素): morphemes that have a strictly grammatical function, making such as tense, number, person and so forth. They never change the grammatical category of the stems to which they are attached. -s, -ed, -ing, and so on, are all inflectional morphemes.

8. Case (格): The grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence is called the case of the noun. When case is marked by inflectional morphemes, the process is referred to as case morphology. Modern English case is limited to the one possessive (所有格, -’s, and pronouns like I, me, my, mine), while Russian have a rich case morphology like some other languages.

9. Classification of English morphemes:

10. The Hierarchical Structure of Words: the tree diagrams to represent the hierarchical organization of words. Take “unsystematic” as an example:

It contains following rules:

a) Noun + -atic → Adjective

b) un- + Adjective → Adjective

c) Adjective + -al → Adjective

d) Adjective + -ly → Adverb

11. Suppletion (異干互補(bǔ)): The morphological rules of different forms of words do not apply to all words. The exceptional forms from regular forms are called suppletions, like men (not mans), went (not goed), and so on.

12. Lexical Gap / Accidental Gap (詞匯空缺 / 偶然空缺): “words” that conform to the rules of word formation but are not truly part of the vocabulary. They are well-formed but non-existing words. For example, the word “disobvious” is not a true word in English, though it is formed from the rules of word formation.

13. Back-Formation (逆序造詞): A new world may enter the language because of an incorrect morphological analysis, called back-formation. For example, the word “peddle” was derived from “peddler” on the mistaken assumption that the -er was the agentive suffix (actually not), which the word “pea” was derived from “pease” by speakers who thought pease was a plural (actually not, either).

14. Compound (復(fù)合詞):

a) Two or more words may be joined to form new, compound words, like the very new ones Facebook, e-commerce, and robocall.

b) Head (中心詞): in English, the rightmost word in a compound is the head of the compound, such as “watch” in “smartwatch”, “walk” in “sleepwalk”, and “man” in “policeman”.

c) The head of a compound transmits not only its meaning and syntactic category to the compound, but also whatever irregular morphological form it takes, like policemen (not policemans), while the plural of flatfoot is flatfoots instead of flatfeet (because it is not a kind of foor, and in fact, this word is unheaded, similar examples like walkmans, sabertooths, and lowlifes).?

d) Most of English compound words are right-headed, but there do be some left-headed words. Attorney-general is not a general but an attorney, a mother-in-law is a kind of mother, and a passer-by is a person who passes. Many of these left-headed compounds are legal or military terms, and they were borrowed into English from French (a language in which adjectives follow nouns) during the Norman occupation (諾曼征服) of English when French was used for legal, military, and other affairs of state.

15. Malapropism (誤用): A malapropism is the confusion of a word through misinterpretation of its morphemes, usually with a humorous effect.

16. Morphological Analysis (詞法分析): the process of identifying form-meaning units in a language, taking into account small differences in pronunciation.

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2023.07.16