LIN 1300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Part Of Speech, Inflection, Minimal Pair
9 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Subfield of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. Internal structure of words (how are words formed out of smaller, meaningful pieces and other words?) Phonologist: might tell you that do you want to" is a phonological word if pronounced as d"yer wanna". Morphologist: might tell you that washing machine" is a compound word; Syntactician: cares more about the elements that syntactic structures are built from (which needn"t be words) In english, and many other western languages, the safest definition is a string of characters between two spaces . We have fairly clear intuitions about what a word is, though, and the the notion is used throughout linguistics in this intuitive way. Morphemes : the smallest linguistic unit with meaning or a grammatical function. Compare: cat (smallest meaningful unit: cat) vs catalogue (smallest meaningful unit: catalogue) *catalogue is a minimal pair on it"s own. Free morpheme : can stand alone as an independent word (base, not)
