1.1 Word vs. Morpheme: Definitions, Subcategorizations
A word is the smallest free form found in any language. As a free form, words are elements that
do not have to occur in a fixed position with respect to neighboring elements. Words can even appear in
isolation. Linguistically, words have phonological forms and lexical content (meaning). Some words do
not normally occur in isolation, but they are still considered free forms because of their shiftable
position, e.g., am, are, is.
Like syllables and sentences, words have an internal structure consisting of smaller units arranged
with respect to each other in a particular way. These smaller units are morphemes. A morpheme is the
smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning and/or function. For example, the
English word ‘builder’ consists of two morphemes: ‘build’ + ‘–er.’ Build is a free morpheme because it
can be a word by itself since ‘build’ is a verb meaning ‘to construct.’ The suffix ‘–er’ is a bound
morpheme because it must be attached to another element; in ‘builder,’ the ‘–er’ signifies that the entire
word is now a noun that means ‘one who builds.’
Since words are made up of morphemes, the number of morphemes determines the category of
that word. Simple words consist of a single morpheme, like in the English word ‘simple.’ Even though
there are two syllables, ‘simple’ cannot be split into two separate morphemes. The above example of
‘builder’ is a complex word because it contains two morphemes (‘build’ + ‘–er’). Concepts that are
expressed by free morphemes in English do not necessarily have the same status in other languages.
Conversely, there are some bound forms in English whose counterparts in other languages are free
morphemes. For example, English terms for body parts are free morphemes, but in Hare (a native
Canadian language), they must be attached to a morpheme designating a possessor. Similarly, the
English notion of past or completed tense is marked with the suffix –ed, a bound morpheme, but in Thai,
it’s represented by the free morpheme [lɛɛw].
1.2. Compounding: Spelling, Pronunciation, Subclassification
Compounding is the combination of two already existing words into a new word. Compound
words can be nouns, as in caveman (cave + man), pantsuit (pants + suit), and attorney general (attorney
+ general); verbs, as in overlook (preposition over + verb look) and babysit (noun baby + verb sit); and
adjectives, as in nationwide (noun nation + adjective wide) and ice-cold (noun ice + adjective cold). It’s
possible that prepositions could be created as compounds, but in English, they are a closed class.
However, the prepositions ‘into’ and ‘upon’ appear to be compounds of the existing prepositions in + to
and up + on.
In English, there are three basic ways to spell compounds: as a solid (one word) form, as in
blackboard and snowman; as a hyphenated form, as in spoon-fed and no-good; and as separate words, as
in language arts and roller coaster. Unfortunately, having three different but equally acceptable ways of
creating compounds means that English compounds can be spelled in multiple ways. For example,
English accepts all three ways of spelling the compound of flower + pot: flowerpot, flower-pot, and
flower pot.
Compounds can be divided into two subcategories: endocentric and exocentric. Endocentric
compounds are words with the meaning denoted by the head of the compound form; the head is the
morpheme that determines the compound’s lexical category. For example, ‘swordsman’ is a compound
of swords + man and means ‘a man who is skilled at fighting with swords.’ The head of a compound is
typically the rightmost word, but this is not always the case. In both ‘passerby’ and ‘son-in-law,’ the
head is the leftmost word. Exocentric compounds are words with the meaning of the compound not
related to the elements. The word ‘walkman’ does not refer to ‘a man who walks;’ instead, it refers to a
type of electronic device used to listen to music.
Plural and tense markers are normally attached to the final element in compounds: snowstorms
(plural) and drop-kicked (tense). This is not always the case, though, because some compounds put the
plural marker in other places depending on the compound’s head, as in attorneys general and passersby.
In contrast to spelling, the pronunciation of compounds in English is highly systematic. The main stress
is always placed on the first element. This helps differentiate a greenhouse (a place for growing plants
indoors) from a green house (a house that’s painted green). Finally, the tendency in English is for
endocentric forms to have irregular plurals (postman becomes postmen) and for exocentric forms to be
regular (walkman becomes walkmen).
1.3 Inflection vs. Derivation: Similarities, Dissimilarities
Inflection is modification of a word’s form meant to render grammatical contrast, such as the
difference between singular and plural forms and the difference between past and nonpast forms. Most
inflectional changes are affixational – created by adding a prefix at the beginning of the word, a suffix at
the end of the word, or an infix in the middle of the word – but inflection can be marked by internal
change (sg. mouse → pl. mice) or suppletion (present go → past went).
Inflection does not change either the grammatical category or the type of meaning found in the
word to which it applies. Some languages are heavily inflected, but others exhibit few or no inflectional
affixes. English, for example, has only eight inflectional affixes.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
plural –s (cards, boxes, dogs)
possessive –’s (Mary’s blouse, Tom’s house)
third person nonpast singular –s (Jane sings beautifully.)
present participle –ing (Jack is sleeping.)
past tense –ed (Mary studied hard for her exams.)
past (–en) participle (She had never studied so hard before.)
comparative –er (She studied harder than they did.)
superlative –est (This exam will be the toughest one yet.)
Most inflection in English is regular, but inflectional contrasts can be irregular, which means they
must be memorized. Irregular singular/plural pairs include mouse/mice, datum/data, and ox/oxen;
irregular past tense forms include eat/ate, drive/drove, and go/went; and irregular adjective forms
include bad/worse for the comparative and bad/worst for the superlative.
Unlike inflection, derivation changes the category and/or the type of meaning of the form to which
it applies. Instead of making a form plural or possessive, for instance, derivation creates an entirely new
word with a different meaning and/or category that is distinct from that of its base. The newly derived
word becomes part of the lexicon (a speaker’s mental dictionary). In English, the most commonly used
derivational affix is the suffix –er. When combined with a verb, –er creates a new noun that means ‘one
who does (meaning of the verb).’ For example, adding an –er to the verb ‘drive’ creates ‘driver,’ one
who drives. This use of –er is distinct from using –er to create a comparative adjective, which is an
inflectional change. ‘Driver’ is a derivation because ‘driver’ is a noun created from a verb + the suffix
–er. Words formed by derivation include a base of a particular type, which is combined with a prefix or
suffix (or both) to form a new word with a different meaning from the base. Once formed, derived words
become independent lexical items that receive their own entry in a speaker’s lexicon. As time goes by,
they often take on special sense that are not predictable from the component morphemes. For example,
‘writer’ originally meant ‘one who writes,’ but the extended meaning is ‘one who writes for a living; a
profession or a career,’ and ‘comparable’ originally meant ‘able to be compared’ but the extended
meaning is ‘similar.’
1.4. Clippings, Acronyms, and Abbreviations: Similarities, Dissimilarities, Subclassification
Clipping is the shortening of a multi-syllable word by deleting one or more syllables. There are
three categories of clipping: aphaeresis, apocope, and syncope. Aphaeresis is the deletion of the wordinitial segment. In English, the word ‘burger’ is clipped from ‘hamburger,’ and ‘blog’ is clipped from
‘web blog.’ Apocope, the most used form of clipping in English, is the deletion of a word-final segment.
The multi-syllable words ‘professional’ and ‘condominium’ have both been clipped to the shorter forms
‘pro’ and ‘condo.’ Finally, syncope is the deletion of a mid-segment. This is rarer in English but found
in words like ‘mart’ (market) and ‘ma’am’ (madam). Syncope is also found in the poetic forms of over
‘o’er’ and never ‘ne’er.’ The tendency is for apocopes to typically start as slang terms that either become
mainstream or die out from lack of use.
Acronyms are also shortened forms, but these are generated from longer, multi-word phrases.
Acronyms are created by taking the initial letters of some or all of the words in a phrase. They are
similar to abbreviations (initialisms), but acronyms are actually pronounced as a word. The phrase North
Atlantic Treaty Organization is shortened to the acronym NATO and is pronounced [nej'tow], for
example.
Abbreviations also shorten longer phrases by taking the initial letters of some or all of the words in
a phrase, but they are still pronounced as the individual letters, not as a whole word. Winston-Salem
State University, for example, is abbreviated WSSU but not pronounced *[wes'esju].
1.5 Syntactic Categories: Word-Level Categories and How to Establish Them
Words can be divided into syntactic categories in terms of (1) the meanings expressed, (2) affixes
accepted, and (3) the structures occurring within the word. There are two major word-level categories:
lexical and functional. The lexical category includes nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs.
The functional category includes determiners, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and degree words. Words
can fall into two or more categories. For example, ‘switch’ is used as first a lexical verb and then a noun
in the following sentence: ‘I meant to switch off the light, but I couldn’t find the switch.’
Only verbs can be lexical or nonlexical; other words are identified by their category name. There
are three things to consider when establishing the category of a word. First, what is the meaning of the
word? For example, nouns identify entities, verbs detail actions or states, adjectives describe attributes
of a noun, and adverbs describe attributes of verbs. Second, are there inflectional markers (affixes)?
Nouns can take a plural –s or a possessive –’s,; verbs can use –ed for the past tense or past participle,
–ing for the progressive, and –s for the third person singular; and adjectives can use either –er for the
comparative and –est for superlative. Third, what is the distribution of the word; in other words, what
category or categories does the word collocate with? Determiners only collocate with nouns, auxiliaries
only collocate with verbs, and degree words only collocate with adjectives and adverbs. For example,
‘the’ only appears before nouns, as in ‘the cat;’ ‘am’ only appears before verbs, as in ‘am going;’ and
degree words only appear with adjectives or adverbs, as in ‘very tall.’
1.6. Phrase Structure: Specifier, Head, Complement, Phrase-Structure Tests
A phrase is a syntactic unit that is intermediate between a word and
XP
a sentence. A phrase is a sequence of words (constituents) taken as a
whole and is a combination of two or more words that “go together” to
Specifier
X'
convey meaning. Generally, all phrases are perceived as being organized
as a tree structure. There are three parts of a typical phrase: specifier,
Head Complement
head, and complement. All phrases must have a head, which is the
nucleus of a phrase – either a noun or a verb. Where present, by definition, the complement follows the
head and is situated on the same level in a tree structure as the head. Similarly, the specifier precedes the
head and attaches straight off the XP level of the tree.
These three parts of a phrase are always in the same order. Specifiers precede heads, and heads
precede complements. Also, the structure of a phrase mirrors the structure of a syllable and the structure
of an inflection phrase in that they all have three major parts that can be drawn using a tree structure.
Heads can possibly be the only element in a phrase. The sentence, ‘Dogs are cute,’ contains a noun
phrase that consists of a single word – dogs. Functionally, specifiers can be either syntactic or semantic.
Syntactic specifiers mark the phrase boundary, and semantic specifiers specify the meaning of a head,
i.e., they make the head more precise. In the sentence, ‘Our dogs are cute,’ the specifier ‘our’ helps
clarify which dogs are considered cute.
Complements also help complete the meaning of a phrase head. They provide extra information
about the head and can be phrasal rather than a single word. For example, in the sentence, ‘Our dogs are
cute when they chase each other,’ the adverbial ‘when they chase each other’ functions as a complement
to ‘dogs.’ In summary, phrases can be made up of (1) a head only, (2) a specifier and a head, (3) a head
and a complement, or (4) a specifier, head, and a complement.
There are several tests to determine if a group of words is a phrase. The first is substitution. If the
group of words can be replaced by a one-word element, then it’s a phrase. For example, the phrase ‘my
parents’ in the following sentence can be replaced with a pronoun, in this example, ‘they’: ‘My parents
told me they were going to buy me a new car.’
The second test uses the Move operation. If the sequence of words can be moved to a different
part of the sentence and still retain its meaning, then it’s a phrase. The sentence, ‘On Tuesdays, they go
to the mall,’ can easily be rearranged as, ‘They go to the mall on Tuesdays,’ and the sentence keeps the
same overall meaning. Since the words ‘on Tuesdays’ can be moved, they are part of a phrase. There is a
slight differentiation of meaning, though, in that the first example tends to emphasize the action of the
verb (what they are doing), and the second example tends to emphasize the time the action of the verb
occurs (when they are doing the action).
The third test is coordination. If the sequence of words can be joined to another sequence of words
with a conjunction, then they are both phrases. For example, ‘John walked into the classroom and went
to the board,’ contains two verb phrases: ‘walked into the classroom’ and ‘went to the board.’ Since they
are conjoined with the conjunction ‘and,’ they are both identifiable as phrases.
1.7. Coordination: Definition, Features
Coordination is a syntactic function that joins together two or more units that belong to the same
category, which creates a compound sentence. The category of coordinate structure is identical to the
category of the elements making them up. For example, two noun phrases joined together are
categorized as a noun phrase, as in ‘salt and pepper.’ Two prepositional phrases joined together are
considered a prepositional phrase, as in ‘over the river and through the woods.’ Finally, a unit of any
level can undergo coordination. Words can be joined together, as in the above ‘salt and pepper’
example; phrases can be joined together, as in the above prepositional phrases; and clauses can be joined
together, as in ‘came into the room and walked to his desk.’
Coordination is created by using the conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. The equality of
the clauses conjoined by coordinators can also be called parallelism. However, sentences joined at the
level of the paragraph are conjoined with conjunctive adverbs instead of the coordinating conjunctions.
Conjunctive adverbs can be additive (provide additional information), illustrative (provide an extra
example), contrastive (provide a different, contrasting example), or resultative (show the effect of
something). There are also correlative coordinators, which combine words, phrases, and clauses using
two or more words. For example, ‘both… and….’ and ‘either… or…’ are correlative coordinators.