01:615:201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Suppletion, Circumfix
4 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Subfield of linguistics interested in the internal structure of words. Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function. Lexicon: mental dictionary of the morphemes in one"s language; not concerned with spelling, only the meaning. Each entry is a morpheme and its. Intuition indicates that cat and dog are distinct words but cat seems related to catty. Each entry is a morpheme, but cat and dog only share their lexical category. Derivation is the process of creating words from other words. Ing (in gerund form) can make a verb into a noun. Affix is the category that encompasses suffixes, prefixes, infixes, circumfixes. Derivational affixes change the meaning from the root word. Derivations: roots and affixes are affixes which derive new words. Other morphemes need to attach to roots. You can make new words and add to the language. Creating a new grammatical form (plurality, tense, aspect) is not a derivation but an inflection. Lexical category doesn"t change with inflectional affixes.
