LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Word Formation, Preposition And Postposition

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 200
• Professor: Alan Clinton Bale

Document Summary

Morphology: rule-governed, arbitrary sound-meaning pairs + rules = creativity, able to , make new morphemes, combine new morphemes with old ones, combine existing ones in new ways and be understood. Combine new morphemes with old ones: googl-ing, google-able. Combine existing ones in new ways and be understood: un-google-able. Allomorphy process: store morphemes in the lexicon, recombine morphemes, outputs are generated by rules. Do not need to store output of these rules since they can be regularly formed via the rule itself. Morpheme: smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function, underlying form. Allomorph: variant of a morpheme, surface form. Allmorph is to morpheme as allophone is to phoneme. Allomorphy results when morphemes are combined together: depends on the phonological environment. Types of words: simple words (mono-morphemic): words that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts, complex words (multi-morphemic): words that can be broken down into smaller meaningful parts.