Word Structure

Richard Coates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415206310
• eBook ISBN: 9781134625208
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Word Structure, provides a complete introduction to morphology, the study of the structure of words. Word Structure:
* examines how words work as part of the language system
* encourages readers to take an objective and analytic approach
* refers to a wealth of languages, including Turkish and Latin, to illustrate points raised
* provides clear and succinct summaries at the end of each unit.

DIVIDING WORDS UP
1

An exploration of what it means for words to have parts.

Quite a lot of the material in this book assumes that you have some knowledge of the way the words of a language fall into groups, i.e. the traditional ‘parts of speech’ or LEXICAL CATEGORIES, such as noun, verb, adjective, preposition and so on. If you don’t have this knowledge, some of the data presented in this Unit will introduce you gently to the idea that there are different types of word, and to the names that have been applied to these types. Lexical categories

ONE-PIECE WORDS

Many words in many languages are complete as they are. They don’t obviously consist of smaller pieces. We’ll start with English data (which will loom large in this book) and work on to other languages afterwards, where appropriate. Here are some English examples of one-piece words.

Nouns: tea machine pilchard shoulder duty kangaroo syllabus

Verbs: steal exist possess harass develop astonish

Adjectives: small bright new straight serene

Adverbs: fast here soon ever often

Prepositions: in with to about

Pronouns: me them it you

Conjunctions: and but or that while

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Discussion

Counting how many pieces a word has isn’t the same as checking how many syllables a word has. The ones in the list above have anything from one to three syllables, and you can find some even longer words that seem complete in themselves:

didgeridoo	mulligatawny	abracadabra
millennium	rhododendron

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But we’ll look later on at the question of whether some such words really do have constituent parts after all.

STRUCTURE

On the other hand, lots of words in all of these classes do evidently consist of smaller pieces—they have STRUCTURE. Each of the elements that you can divide a word into is technically called a MORPHEME, for reasons that I’ll explain below. Here are some words with more than one of them. Morpheme

Nouns: teapot software flatfish tomcat placement breathlessness normality

Verbs: revalue dispossess threaten overdevelop autodestruct

Adjectives: dreadful streetwise carefree messy downcast

Adverbs: strongly sometimes yesterday hereabouts

Prepositions: into onto around upon

Pronouns: anyone yourself nobody yous or youall (for speakers of some dialects)

Conjunctions: however whereas unless

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Discussion

Most of these are quite obvious. Perhaps you had to think a bit about threaten and around, but if we were to write threat-en and a-round, with the BOUNDARY marked in as a hyphen, the point would be clear. The words are related to threat and round, and were coined out of them at some remote time in the past. Did you notice those ones with three morphemes? (Breathlessness, normality, sometimes, hereabouts.) Boundary

EXERCISE

1.1 Divide these words up into their constituent parts (morphemes):

thickset	bookshelf	thinkable	outbid	nowhere	legless
quickly	rooms	outer	preview	thinking	unsafe

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Discussion

That was easy in itself, and I won’t spell out the answers. But the results are different in the two sets of words. Notice that when you divide up the words in the first line, on the face of it you get two pieces which are both in themselves

English words: thick and set, book and shelf, and so on. When you divide up the words in the second line, you get an English word—quick, room, out, etc.—plus a bit that is clearly English but not a word ly, -s, -er, etc. These pieces cannot stand by themselves, and independence is one of the criteria for calling an element a word. Those elements that can stand by themselves as words are called FREE MORPHEMES; those that can’t stand alone, but need the support of other morphemes, are called BOUND MORPHEMES. But the overwhelming majority of morphemes, free or bound, have one or more meanings of their own. Typical morphemes are meaningful. That is part of the definition of the term for some analysts, though in due course we shall see some morphemes that don’t have any meaning. Free morphemes Bound morphemes

Notice that if you identify an element as a morpheme, in doing so you identify a position in a word into which other material—other morphemes—can be substituted: start with out-bid, and you can progress to out-face, -sell, -do, -play, -smart, -live and so on. In such constructions, the combinations of morphemes will often have similar types of meanings—here, all are verbs meaning roughly ‘do something more or better than someone else’. There is not just a pattern, but a meaningful pattern.

Thinkable and legless deserve another look: notice that -able and -less aren’t actually pronounced exactly like the ordinary words able and less. In fact, they don’t mean the same either. Able doesn’t have the same range of meanings as - able; people are able, but things can be X-able, as in That i...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• IN THE SAME SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• USING THIS BOOK
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: DIVIDING WORDS UP
• 2: WORDS AND PARADIGMS
• 3: LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MORPHOLOGY
• 4: ROOTS, BASES, STEMS AND OTHER STRUCTURAL THINGS
• 5: COMPOUND AND COMPLEX BASES
• 6: IDENTIFYING GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES
• 7: WHERE TO FIX AFFIXES
• 8: WORD-FORMATION BY REDUCTION
• 9: ALLOMORPHY: BOOKS WITH MORE THAN ONE COVER
• 10: ALLOMORPHY IN OTHER LANGUAGES
• WHERE NEXT?
• ANSWERS TO EXERCISES