basic units of language
1. Phonemes: the units of sound that distinguish one word from another. E.g. kill, kiss. Indivisible units of sound.
2. Morphemes: sequences of sound that produce the smallest unit of meaning in a language. The smallest linguistic unit withing a word that can carry meaning. Un/break/able.
3. Lexeme: the set of all the inflected forms of a single word. Run. runs, ran running. Would all be under one entry in the dictionary.
4. Syntax: the set of rules by which a person constructs full sentences
5. Context: how everything in a language works together to convey a particular meaning
In English they correspond to letters of the alphabet or sounds. About 45 phonemes in English
Free morphemes: exist on their own, can't be divided into smaller parts. E.g. cat, water.
Bound morphemes: must be attached to other morphemes. E.g prefixes and suffixes
Content words: carry most of the content of a senntece
Function words: grammatical role, little meaning of their own
Derivational morphemes: create new words. change the meaning or part of speech of a word when they are used together.
E.g. sad -> sadness. adjective -> noun.
Action -> reaction. Change of meaning
Inflectional morphemes: Changes existing words. Modify the tense of a verb or the number values or a noun.
walk -> walked
cat -> cats
Blunder: I'm bored, I'm boring.
Not so bad: I walking to school.
Smallest forms of a sentence:
- Noun phrase: can be just a noun or pronoun
- Verb phrase: can be a single verb
Word order is important in English.
The baby ate the carrot. The carrot ate the baby.
Tone of voice
body languge
words being used
Compound words. teapot, strarlight, careworn
-ise, -able, -ism, -ing, -ful, ist, -ive, -ly, -hood
dis-, un-, pre-, bi-, in-, co-
Nouns: s (plural), 's (possession)
Verbs: -ed (tense), [she] wants (person)
Adjectives and adverbs: -er (comparative), -est (superlative)
Kinds of word formation
Prefixation. disobey
Suffixation. kindness
Compounding. blackbird
Conversion. Not derivational. Word changes class without change of form. The pet (n), to pet (v)
Word classes (parts of speech)
Closed word classes: relatively small no. of items, no new words can be normally added.
Open word classes: Contain vast number of items, open to new words being introduced.
Determiner
Pronoun
Preposition
Conjunction
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
A, the, any, my, those, which
In, across, at, by, near, within
And, but, if, or, while, unless
She, him, it, them, who, that, himself