The Words of Language
What is a word? What do we know when we know a word?
The mental lexicon (Greek for dictionary)
the component of grammar that contains speakers’ knowledge of words
►sounds
►meaning
►orthography
►grammatical
category (syntactic class)
● nouns - children, bear
● verbs – bear, stand
● adjectives - noisy, bare
● adverbs - there
I can’t bear noisy children.
She can’t bear children.
Bruin bear is the mascot of UCLA.
He stood there – bare and beautiful.
►homonyms
(homophones)
two words have the same phonemic shape (sound the same), but
different meanings
bare – bear n – bear v
►synonyms
two words have the same meaning, but different phonemic shape
(sound different)
bear v – tolerate
bare – unclad, naked
children – kids
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Grammatical categories (Parts of speech)
►Nouns
book
►Verbs
buy
– refer to (name) people and things
car patience camp tolerance
– describe actions
drive lose go
have
support
peace
live
London
Christmas
spend
– describe attributes and properties of nouns (people & things)
yellow long smart new creative technical
►Adjectives
big
– specify actions denoted by verbs (place, time, frequency, manner,
reason, etc.)
easily perfectly slowly there often politely
►Adverbs
►Prepositions
on
at
and postpositions
during throughout
in
along
across
from
to
►Determiners
 definite and indefinite articles: a, an, the
 demonstratives: this, these, that, those
 possessives: my, hi, hers, theirs
 interrogatives: who, what, which, whose, when
►Pronouns
personal: I, you, she, they
demonstrative: this, these, that, those
interrogative: who, what, which, whose, when
relative: who, that, which
indefinite: someone, anyone, everyone, no one
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Classes of words
Languages make an important distinction between two kinds of words:
1. Content words
 denote concepts such as things, actions, attributes, ideas – have clear lexical
meaning
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
 open class of words – new words can be added
steganography – the art of hiding information in electronic text
byte, email, download, upload
2. Function words
 have no clear lexical meaning or obvious concepts associated with them
prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions
 have a grammatical function
the articles indicate whether a noun is definite or indefinite
the boy a boy
‘of’ indicates possession
a friend of mine
the leg of the table
 closed class of words – no new words are added
A test
Count the number of F’s in the following text:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE
RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
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Word sets
phone
phonetic
phonetician
phonetics
phonology
phonologist
phonological
phonic
phoneme
phonemic
allophone
telephone
telephonic
euphonious
desirable
likely
inspired
happy
developed
sophisticated
undesirable
unlikely
uninspired
unhappy
undeveloped
unsophisticated
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