LIN204H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Skate It, Adjective Phrase, Good Words
Document Summary
You will notice that these definitions link the category of a word to its meaning. Many of you learned these formulas in elementary school, but they are actually quite dangerous. If we understand a verb to denote an action or a state, then we might identify action, fighter, blow as verbs, but in fact, they are nouns. Meaning alone is not sufficient to identify a word"s category. Consider a word in two ways: it form (derivational and inflectional morphology, function ( how it can function with other categories in a phrase or sentence) Our knowledge of morphology tells us that words ending in ion and ity are nouns and that words occurring with possessive s are also nouns: - action, scarcity, fish"s. It also tells us that the prefix en- creates verbs, and that words occurring with the suffixes ing and ed are also verbs: encircle, booking, mothered. Many words can take in more than one category.
