LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Igorot People, Preposition And Postposition, English Plurals
Monday, September 25th, 2017
Morphology:
Morphology, the subfield of linguistics studies the internal structure of words and the
relationships among words.
Morphology • Questions morphologists are interested in
• What are words? 
• What are the basic building blocks in the formation of complex words? 
• How are more complex words built up from simpler parts? 
• How is the meaning of a complex word related to the meaning of its par ts? 
• How are individual words of a language related to other words in that language 
Knowing a word
• When we know a word, we know at least the following information
- Phonological info – we know that words pronunciation- Lexical structure info – we know the
internal structure of the word - Syntactic info – we know how to use that word in sentences-
Semantic info – we have learned a meaning or several meanings.
- Pragmatic info – a how to use it in the context of discourse or conversation.
Knowing a word
• How many words does a speaker of a language know
• According to Pinker (1999)- children entering school know ~13,000 - high school graduates
know ~60,000
find more resources at oneclass.com
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• The list of words for any language is referred to as its lexicon.
What’s a word?
• This is a slippery question• As a native speaker of a language, you have intuitions about
where to
place word boundaries (beginning/end of a word)
• But a speech signal is continuous, with no breaks between words

- not a trivial task- need to
know the properties of words in a given language to do it.
What’s a word?
• First try – an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
male sibling
English
What’s a word?
• First try – an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
male sibling
frère

French
What’s a word?
• First try – an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
male sibling
otooto

Japanese
What’s a word?
• First try – an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Morphology, the subfield of linguistics studies the internal structure of words and the relationships among words. Knowing a word: when we know a word, we know at least the following information. Phonological info we know that words pronunciation - lexical structure info we know the internal structure of the word - syntactic info we know how to use that word in sentences - Semantic info we have learned a meaning or several meanings. Pragmatic info a how to use it in the context of discourse or conversation. What"s a word: first try an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning male sibling fr re french. What"s a word: first try an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning male sibling otooto japanese. What"s a word: first try an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning male sibling. What"s a word: first try an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning reasons not to use this definition.
