LIN 2300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Morpheme, Word Formation, Phoneme
4 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Every language has a unique set of sounds, its phonemes, that are used to build its words: contrastive sounds: they differentiate between words. Phonemes are mental representations of the way sound is stored in the mind. Not so easy to attach words to form and meaning: dog vs. dogma, dog vs. doggy bag, dog vs. doggy or dogs. Do these share only form with the word dog or do they share meaning or vice versa. Defining words is a very complicated task. What is a word: difficult to decide for each language, cannot be generalized across languages, cannot incorporate writing, must incorporate phonological information, therefore, we do not talk about words, we talk about morphology. The mental system involved in word formation. Greek root morph denotes structure and/or form. We look inside words for recognizable chunks, because we know about prefixes, suffixes, stems, and roots. We can grasp morphologically complex deviants: for example; lunchables.
