LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Part Of Speech, Affix, Hela

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 100
• Professor: Charlotte Reinholtz

Document Summary

Morphemes = the smallest meaningful units of language. Cannot be decomposed into smaller parts (without a loss of meaning). How do they combine to form meaningful words" Can be pronounced with a pause before and after: e. g. Alice || saw || a || bird ||. Free morphemes: can occur in isolation and can be pronounced with a pause before and after: they are morphologically simplex words (e. g. bird, perch, the branch) Bound morphemes: cannot occur in isolation and must form part of a larger word: e. g. jump-ed, un-tie, dinosaur-s. Complex words typically consist of a root morpheme and one or more affixes. Root = determines the core meaning of the work. The noun cats breaks down into the noun cat and the affix -s. The verb lengthen breaks down into the noun length and the affix -en. The noun worker breaks down into the verb work and affix -er.