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The grammar of words, the study of Language chapters 5-7. (Chapter 7…

- - - - The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that we think of as the words that carry the “content” of the messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break.
      - The other category is functional morphemes. (Examples are: and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them.) This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a “closed” class of words.
    - - Derivational morphemes: We use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness. Derivational morphemes include suffixes, such as the -ish in foolish, the -ly in quickly, and the -ment in payment, and prefixes, such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-.
      - Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.
        English has only eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes, as shown here.
        Jim’s two sisters are really different. One likes to have fun and is always laughing. The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things seriously. One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse.
        Noun + -’ s, -s
        Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
        Adjective + -er, -est
      - An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. The -er inflection here (from Old English -ra) simply creates a different version of the adjective. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme -er (from Old English -ere).
        So, the suffix -er in Modern English can be an inflectional morpheme as part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun.
    - - There are a number of other morphological processes at work in a language like English, such as those involved in the range of allomorphs for the morpheme “past tense.” These include the common pattern in “walk + past tense” that produces walked or “help + past tense” for helped. There is also the special pattern that takes “go + past tense” and produces the “irregular” past form went or “be + past tense” to give us was and were.
- - - - Borrowing: taking over of words from other languages such as jewel (French), Ski (Norwegian), Piano (Italian), Yogurt (Turkish), etc.
        Other languages may also borrow words from English as well such as 'le weekend' in French (Weekends in English).
        
        Loan-translation: the direct translation of the elements of a word into the borrowing language.
        Ex. the German Wolkenkratzer (“ cloud scraper”), all of which were calques for the English 'skyscraper.'
      - Compounding: a joining of two separate words to produce a single form
        Ex. Bookmarks, Good-looking, sunburn, fingerprint, full-time etc.
      - Blending: the combination of the separate first word and last word into one word such as Smog (smoke/fog), motel (motor/hotel), telecast (television/broadcast)
      - Clipping : occurs when a word of more than one syllable (facsimile) is reduced to a shorter form (fax), usually beginning in casual speech. The term gasoline is still used, but most people talk about gas, using the clipped form.
        More examples: Condo (condominium), Aeroplane (plane),
      - Hypocorisms: the process, a longer word is reduced to a single syllable, then -y or -ie is added to the end. This is the process that results in "movie" (“ moving pictures”) and telly (“ television”).
      - Back-formation: a word of one type (usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of another type (usually a verb). A good example of backformation is the process whereby the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was created from it.
        Other examples: Donate (Donation), Enthuse (Enthusiasm), etc.
      - Conversion: A change in the function of a word, as for example when a noun (or verb) comes to be used as a verb (or a noun) (without any reduction), such as Framing (from a frame), to cheat (a cheat).
      - Coinage (uncommon in English): use trade names for commercial products that become general terms (usually without capital letters) for any version of that product.
        Such as granola, kleenex, Teflon, and Xerox (simply as a copy machine).
      - Acronyms: new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words. such as CD (Compact disc).
        These examples have kept their capital letters, but many acronyms simply become everyday terms such as laser (“ light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”), radar (“ radio detecting and ranging”), scuba (“ self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”) and zip (“ zone improvement plan”) code.
    - - Some affixes are added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-, mis-). These are called prefixes.Other affixes are added to the end of the word (e.g. -less, -ish) and are called suffixes.
      - Infixes: the term of an affix that is incorporated inside another word.
        It is possible to see the general principle at work in certain expressions, occasionally used in fortuitous or aggravating circumstances by emotionally aroused English speakers: Hallebloodylujah!, Absogoddamlutely! and Unfuckinbelievable!.
- - - - Captain's Kirk infinitive is using incorrectly, the phrase "To boldly go . . . " is an example of a split infinitive. Captain Kirk’s teacher might have expected him to say To go boldly or Boldly to go so that the adverb didn't split the infinitive.
        If it is a typical feature of the use of English that speakers and writers regularly produce forms such as to never ever get back together, then we may simply wish to note that there are structures in English that differ from those found in Latin, rather than think of the English forms as “bad” because they don't follow a rule of Latin grammar.