Knowing
a language means knowing the words of that language. When you know a word you
know both its form (sound) and its meaning; these are inseparable parts of the
linguistic sign. The relationship between the form and the meaning is
arbitrary. That is, by hearing the sounds (form) you cannot know the meaning of
those sounds without having learned it previously.
Each
word is stored in your mental lexicon with information on its pronunciation
(phonological representation), its meaning (semantic properties), and its
syntactic class or category specification. For literate speakers, its spelling
or orthography will also be given.
In
spoken language, words are not sperated by pauses (or spaces as in written
language.) One must know the language in order to segment the stream of speech
into separate words.
Words
are not the most elemental sound-meaning units; some words are structurally
complex. The most elemental grammatical units in a language are morphemes. Thus
moralisers is an English words composed of four morphemes : moral+ise+er+s.
The
study of word formation and the internal structure of words is called
morphology. Part of one’s linguistic competence includes knowledge of the
language’s morphology—the morphemes, words, their pronunciation, their meanings
and how they are combined. Morphemes combine according to the morphological
rule of the language. A word consist of one or more morphemes. Lexical content
morphemes that cannot be analysed into smaller parts are called root morphemes.
When a root morpheme is combined with affix morphemes it forms a steam. Other
affixes can be added to a stem to form a more complex stem.
Some
morpheme are bound in that they must be joined to other morphemes; they are
always parts of words and never word by themselves. Other morphemes are free in
that they need not be attached to other morphemes. Free, king, serf, and bore
are free morpheme. Affixes, that is, prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and
circum-fixes, are bound morphemes. Prefixes occur before, suffixes after,
infixes in the middle of, and circum-fixes around, stems.
Some
morphemes, such as logan in loganberry and –ceive in perceive or receive, have
consonant phonological form but meanings determined only by the words in which
they occur. They are thus also bound morphemes.
Lexical
content or root morphemes constitute the major words classes—nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs. These are open class items because their classes are
easily added to.
Morphemes
may be derivational or inflectional. Derivational morphological rules are
lexical rules of word formation. Derivational morphemes, when added to a root
or stem, may change the syntactic word class and/or the meaning of the word;
for example, adding –ish to the noun boy derives and adjective, and prefixing
un- to pleasant changes the meaning by adding a negative element. Inflectional
morpheme are determined by the rules of syntax. They are added to complete
words, simple monomorphemic words or complex polymorphemic words (that is,
words with more than one morpheme.) Inflectional morphemes never change the
syntactic category of the word.
Some
grammatical morphemes or function words, together with the bound inflectional
morphemes, constitute a closed class; they are inserted into sentences
according to the syntactic structure. The past tense morpheme, often written as
ed, is added as a suffix to a verb, and the future tense morpheme, will, is
inserted in a sentence according to the syntactic rules of the English.
The
grammars of sign languages also include a morphological component consisting of
root, derivational and infectional sign morphemes, and the rules for their
combination.
Grammars
also include ways of increasing the vocabulary, of adding new words and
morphemes to the lexicon. Words can be coined outright, limited only by the
coiner’s imagination and the phonetic constraints of the language’s word
formation. Compounds are also a source of new words. Morphological rules
combine two or more morphemes or words to form complex compounds, such as lamb
chop, deep-sea diver, and laptop, a new word spawned by the computer industry.
Frequently the meaning of compounds cannot be predicted from the meanings of
their individual morphemes.
Acronyms
and initialism are words derived from the initials of several words—for
example AWOL, which came into the language as the initial of ‘way without
leave’. Blends are similar to compounds but usually combine shortened forms of
two or more morphemes or words. Carpeteria is a store selling carpets and the
same derives from carpet plus the and of cafeteria. You sometimes see a
fruitshop labelled a fruitorium, where he name derives from fruit plus the and
of emporium, Eponyms (words taken from proper names), back-formations, and
abbreviations also add to the given stock of words.
While
the particular morphemes and the particular morphological rules are
language-dependent, the same general processes occur in all languages.
