Words and morphemes

Summary

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Takeaways

• 😀 The lecture introduces the concept of morphology and questions the definition of a word.
• 🔤 The orthographic definition of a word is challenged by examples like 'bobs', 'linguistics professor', and 'do-it-yourself'.
• 📚 The prosodic definition, which relies on stress patterns, is also problematic for function words and clitics.
• 📝 The integrity definition considers words as indivisible units, with exceptions like 'kangaroo' with expletives.
• 💡 The semantic definition views words as units expressing unified ideas, but it fails to account for abstract concepts without a single word.
• 🔑 The syntactic definition is the most robust, seeing words as the building blocks of sentences with specific syntactic categories.
• 🔍 The lecture differentiates between simplex words, which are single parts, and complex words, which consist of multiple parts or morphemes.
• 🔗 Free morphemes can stand alone as words, while bound morphemes depend on a base to form words.
• 🔄 Derivational morphemes create new words and can change word classes, often affecting the meaning.
• 📏 Inflectional morphemes mark grammatical distinctions like tense, number, and case, but do not change word classes or central meanings.
• 🍒 Cranberry morphemes are bound morphemes that are not affixes and have unique forms like 'crayon', 'huckle', and 'sieve'.

Q & A

What is the main topic of session three in the introduction to English linguistics?

The main topic of session three is morphology, focusing on the question 'What is a word and what parts of words are there?'

How many ways are there to count words in the given sentence according to the transcript?

There are multiple ways to count words in the given sentence, with the transcript suggesting at least three different solutions.

What is the orthographic definition of a word mentioned in the transcript?

The orthographic definition of a word is that it is anything that has a space to the left and right or is followed by a punctuation mark.

What are some problems with using the orthographic definition for identifying words?

Problems with the orthographic definition include dealing with compound words, contracted forms, and hyphenated words, as well as the fact that many languages are not written, which would imply they don't have words.

What is the prosodic definition of a word and what are its limitations?

The prosodic definition states that words have one main stress and longer words may have secondary stresses. Its limitations include function words that don't carry stress and contracted forms or clitics which may not be considered words under this definition.

What is the integrity definition of a word and what exceptions does it have?

The integrity definition states that words are units into which no intervening material can be inserted. Exceptions mostly involve words like 'kangaroo' where an expletive can be inserted.

How is the semantic definition of a word different from the syntactic definition?

The semantic definition views words as units that describe a unified idea or concept, whereas the syntactic definition sees words as the syntactic building blocks of sentences with a specific syntactic category.

What are morphemes and what is their role in morphology?

Morphemes are the smallest linguistic units that carry meaning. They are the basic building blocks of words in morphology, allowing for the formation of complex words through processes like derivation and inflection.

What is the difference between free and bound morphemes?

Free morphemes can occur independently as words, while bound morphemes only occur as parts of larger words and cannot stand alone.

What are derivational morphemes and how do they differ from inflectional morphemes?

Derivational morphemes are bound morphemes used to create new words and can change the word class and meaning. Inflectional morphemes, on the other hand, mark grammatical distinctions and do not change the word class or central meaning of the word.

What are cranberry morphemes and how are they different from other bound morphemes?

Cranberry morphemes are bound morphemes that are not affixes and do not change the word's meaning or grammatical properties. Examples include 'cran' in 'cranberry' and 'mid' in 'commit'.