Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
The word class of the compound is determined by the category of the last
element.
Any root + Noun Noun Compound
Noun + Noun (modifier + head) eg. textbook
Verb + Noun (verb + object) eg. pick-pocket
Adjective + Noun (modifier + head) eg. blackbird
Adverb + Noun (not syntactic) eg. after-thought
Any root + Verb Verb Compound
Noun + Verb (object + verb) eg. brain-wash
Verb + Verb (co-ordinate) eg. drop-kick
Adjective + Verb (not syntactic) eg. dry-clean
Any root + Adjective Adjective Compound
Noun + Adjective (not syntactic) eg. earth-bound
Adjective + Adjective (co-ordinate) eg. blue-green
Adverb + Adjective (modifier + head) eg. near-sighted
Verb + Adverb Noun Compound
AFFIXATIONS
-
BLENDINGS
-
WORD COINAGE
1. Brand names are used for something that has been accustomed (eg. xerex,
cleenex, frigdaire, brillo, vaseline, paloma, nylon, kodac)
2. Conversion is a word belonging to one word class that is transferred to
another word class without any change of form either in pronunciation or
spelling. It is a highly productive source for the production of new words
because there is no restriction of the form that can undergo conversion in
English.
Noun Verb eg. to bottle, to commission, to network, to download, to copy
Verb Noun eg. a call, a command, a guess, a spy
Adjective Verb eg. to better, to worse, to empty, to wrong
Adjective Noun eg. the poor, the rich, a daily, a double
3. Shortenings and clippings are type of word formation in which only part of
the stem is retained (eg. lab- laboratory, plane- airplane, phone- telephone)
4. Back formation is making new word from an older word which is mistakenly
assumed to be its derivative
5. Initialisms are an extreme kind of clippings as only the initials letter of
words or initials symbols are put together and are used as words
- Alphabetisms, where initials are pronounced with the names of the letters
of the alphabet. (eg. AI- Amnesty International, Artificial Intelligence, BPBritish Petroleum, Beautiful People)
- Acronym is an initialism pronounced like individual lexical item (eg. LASERLight wave Application by Simulated Emission of Radiation, SCUBA Self
Contained Under Water Breathing Apparatus, NATO - North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, UNESCO - United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural
Organization)
6. Aphetic form is a special form of shortening characterized by the omissions
of the main syllable (eg. fender-defender, fence- defense)
7. Abbreviation is a short form, clipping used as a whole word (eg. narcnarcotics, telly-television, tec-detective, professor-prof, gymnasium-gym)
8.
Words from Names (eg. sandwich fourth Earl of Sandwich, robotmechanical creatures, dumbo- big elephant, denim- material for overall
carpeting )
INFLECTIONAL LANGUAGES
1.
2.
3.
4.
Sometimes one or two morphemes which have the same meaning are in a
complementary distribution. This means that the two can never occur in
precisely the same environment or context and between them they exhaust
the possible context in which the morpheme can appear. There are two are
two morphs in English which can be characterized as indefinite article a and
an.
A morpheme like the lexeme and the phoneme is realized in a different way.
Morphemes are abstract units (like lexemes and phonemes). Morphs which
realize a particular morpheme and which are conditioned (whether
phonetically, lexically or grammatically) are allomorphs of that morpheme.
Every allomorph is a morph. Allomorphs are more informative than morphs.
Criteria 1: New lexeme or a form of an old lexeme. This means this criterion is
not enough to make a distinction.
Criteria 2: Derivation may cause a change of category.
Generally, affixes can change category.
Criteria 3: Inflectional affixes can have regular meaning. Not all derivational
affixes do have. Difficulty is that many derivational affixes have perfectly
regular meaning productive suffixation er and - able show regular
meaning.
The suffix ette brings three different meanings when attached to a word:
1. Small kitchenette
2. Feminisan brunette
3. Material beaverette
Inflection is productive; Derivation is semi-productive.
NOUNS
-
The part of speech that is used to name a person, place or thing is a noun.
Nouns can be simple and compound.
Compound nouns can be:
1. Closed -written together
2. Open consist of separate words
3. Hyphened - written with a hyphen
ADJECTIVES
-
Adjectives are important class of word and serve as the descriptors of the
language. They provide information about nouns and pronouns. Very often
adjective can be named modifiers or adjectival modifiers. They are narrowing
down the qualities and properties of the nouns or pronouns to which they
refer.
Syntactically, adjective is a word whose main syntactic rule is to modify a
noun or a pronoun because an adjective gives more information about what
the noun or pronoun refers to. In English, adjective forms are an open class of
words. Adjectives are the third largest group of words.
Qualitative or descriptive adjectives
Classifying adjectives
Connection between adjectives and inflection is comparative and superlative,
and infinitive of adjectives is called absolute form.
The inflections identify two steps in the expression of the higher degree.
First step adding -er to create the comparative form. Second step is adding
est that produces the superlative form. There is no inflection way of
expressing the same or lower degree in English. These notions are express
syntactically as..as, for the same degree..(X is a big as Y) and for the lower
degree less or least..(X is less interested than Y), (Z is the least interested of
a U).
A large number of adjectives can be recognized by the presence of a suffix.
Several of the most frequent adjectival suffixes are: ese- Chinese,
Portuguese, an- Republican, Parisian, ist-Socialist, loyalist, it-socialite.
VERBS
-
Lexical verbs, they are also called full verbs, they are those which with
meaning can be clearly and independently identified-main verbs.
Nine modal verbs: can, could, may, might, should, shall, will, would, must,
ought to, need.
Another class is the class of primary words. They can function either as main
verbs or as auxiliary verbs. There are three: HAVE, DO and BE.
Depending on the kind of contrast in meaning verbs can express finitenessfinite forms, the verb can be limited in some way and this is in fact what
happens when different kinds of endings are used. The finite forms are
those which limit the verbs to a particular number, tense, person or mood exinflectional s form is used when the verb is limited to the 3 rd person singular,
like goes, walks.
The non finite forms do not limit the verbs in there forms. The -ing form is
used to the verb and it refers to any number, tense, person and mood.
ADVERBS
-