LIN200H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Polynesian Languages, Khoekhoe Language, Phoneme
Document Summary
As we have learned from phonology, words are made up of identiiable units that can be recombined to make other words. For example, the phonemes of cat /k t/ can be rearranged to make the words tack /t k/ and act / kt/. However, not all pieces of words work this way; some do have an identiiable meaning. In cats, there are two morphemes: the root cat feline animal" and the aix -s plural". Roots are the most basic kind of morpheme. hey can oten appear as independent words (such as cat) and typically determine the category of more complex words that contain them (e. g. cat and cats are both nouns). Aixes attach to roots or more complex words. In english, it"s possible to construct arbitrarily large words with the right morphemes, though these do start getting very hard to process if they get too complex: organ organ-ize re-organize reorganiz-ation reorganization-al reorganizational-ize reorganizationaliz-ation reorganizationalization-al reorganizationalizational-ize etc.
