LIN101H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Part Of Speech, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Allomorph
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LIN101H5 Full Course Notes
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Unlike phonemes and syllables, which are simply elements of sounds, words carry meaning. Unlike sentences, words are permanently stored in a speaker"s mental dictionary or lexicon; they"re the fundamental building blocks of communication. Linguists use the term morphology to refer to the part of the grammar that is concerned with words and word formation. The study of morphology offers important insights into how language works, revealing the need for different categories of words, the presence of word-internal structure and the existence of operations that create and modify words. Some words, such as are normally do not occur in isolation, however, they"re still free forms, as their positioning with respect to neighbouring words is not entirely fixed. Words have an internal structure consisting of smaller units organized with respect to each other in a particular way. The most important component of word structure is the morpheme, the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.
