LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Principle Of Compositionality

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Jon Gajewski

Document Summary

Words are (at least) a pairing of sound and meaning. Morphology is the study of the structure of words driven by puzzles about the relationship between the meaning and structure of words. They are similar because they use similar parts. I. e. unlockable can mean can be unlocked and can"t be locked depending on context. For simple words, pairing between sound and meaning is arbitrary (no real logical reason) If word meanings are built from their parts, then the similarities between these words can be explained: Some words are clearly one piece, can"t be broken up into separate parts. Words made up of smaller pieces however: the pieces seem to have regular meanings. Morpheme- the smallest unit of language that carries a distinct meaning. S is a morpheme, pre- is also a morpheme, and the rest of the word is a morpheme. Bound morphemes are sometimes called affixes because they must be affixed to a free morpheme.