Morphology
The words of language
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A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
Emily Dickinson, 1924.
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What do we know when we know
a word
• A word is a sound-meaning unit.
• We know how to segment the stream
of sounds into separate words)
• Joke: the same sounds can be
interpreted differently.
I scream vs. ice cream
아버지가방에들어가신다.
weblog vs. we blog
3
Sound-meaning mapping is not
one-to-one.
 Different sounds-same meaning
couch vs. sofa
kingly-loyal-regal
 Same sounds-different meaning (homonyms,
homophones)
I can’t bear children.
bear box
He stood there– bare and beautiful.
경기가 좋다. 삶은 계란이다.
빌리는 사람 vs. ‘빌리’는 사람
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The longest word in English?
• antidisestablishmentarianism
n. 1. the doctrine or political position that
opposes the withdrawal of state recognition of
an established church; - used especially
concerning the Anglican Church in England.
Opposed to disestablishmentarianism.
• pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
n. kind of a lung disease
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DICTIONARIES
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Dictionaries and lexicography
• Samuel Johnson. 1755. Dictionary of the
English Language.
• Noah Webster. 1828. An American
Dictionary of the English Language.
• The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
• Collins COBUILD Dictionary
the computational corpus-based approach
• Specialty dictionaries
• Online dictionaries
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Mental lexicon
• A word is stored in our mental
lexicon (= dictionary).
• phonological representation
• (orthography)
• grammatical category / syntactic
category
• semantic properties (=meaning)
8
CONTENT WORDS VS.
FUNCTION WORDS
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Types of words:
Content words, function words
• Content words denote concepts and ideas.
- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
- semantic content (meaning)
- open class words
• Function words have a grammatical
function.
- conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
auxiliary verbs, pronouns.
- closed class words
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MORPHEMES: THE SMALLEST
UNITS OF MEANING
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Morphemes: the smallest units of
meaning
• How many morphemes are there?
강 강산
강산에
늦잠
송아지 배불뚝이
boy
boyish
boyishness
desire desirable undesirable
antidisestablishmentarianism
cat
cats
sing
singing
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Recognizing a morpheme: -er?
The meaning of a morpheme has to be
consistent.
• singer
• painter
• worker
• nicer
• prettier
• taller
• father
• water
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Morphological knowledge
= Knowledge of individual morphemes +
knowledge of the rules to combine them.
14
free morphemes and bound
morphemes
• Free morphemes:
boy, happy, kill, well, to, do
• Bound morphemes:
-s, -ian, -ity, -er, in-, dis• happily, friendliness, kingdom, dishonest,
prejudge, bisexual, unhappy
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Root, stem, affixes
• Affix
prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix
• Word
|
stem + affix
|
root + affix
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huckle-, -ceive, and the definition
of a morpheme
• cranberry, lukewarm
• strawberry, blackberry, blueberry
cf. straw hats, black bird, blue house
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Latinate bound roots
-ceive ‘to seize’
(from Lat. capere‘)
-mit ‘to send’
(from Lat. ‘mittere’)
receive
conceive
perceive
deceive
remit
commit
permit
submit
admit, transmit
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