(4)   Determiners: Determiners refer to words which are used before the noun acting as head of a noun phrase, and determine the kind of reference the noun phrase has. Determiners can be divided into three subclasses: predeterminers, central determiners and postdeterminers.

3.2   The formation of word

       3.2.1       Morpheme and morphology

Morphology studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

       3.2.2       Types of morphemes

                     1.    Free morpheme and bound morpheme

Free morphemes: Those which may occur alone, that is, those which may constitute words by themselves, are free morphemes.

Bound morphemes: Those which must appear with at least another morpheme are called bound morphemes.

                     2.    Root, affix and stem

A root is the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed. An affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme. A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added.

A root is the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed without total loss of identity. That is to say, it is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. In the word internationalism, after the removal of inter-, -al and -ism, what is left is the root nation. All words contain a root morpheme. A root may be free or bound. E.g. black in blackbird, blackboard and blacksmith; -ceive in receive, conceive and perceive. A few English roots may have both free and bound variants. E.g. the word sleep is a free root morpheme, whereas slep- in the past tence form slept cannot exist by itself, and therefore bound. A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added. E.g. friend- in friends and friendship- in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

                     3.    Inflectional affix and derivational affix

Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.

The distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes is sometimes known as a distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. We can tell the difference between them with the following ways:

(1)   Inflectional affixes very often add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. E.g. toys, walks, John’s, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast, derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning. E.g. cite, citation, etc.

(2)   Inflectional affixes don’t change the word class of the word they attach to, such as flower, flowers, whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.

(3)   Inflectional affixes are often conditioned by nonsemantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. E.g. the choice of likes in “The boy likes to navigate on the internet.” is determined by the subject the boy in the sentence, whereas derivational affixes are more often based on simple meaning distinctions. E.g. The choice of clever and cleverness depends on whether we want to talk about the property “clever” or we want to talk about “the state of being clever.”

(4)   In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes, which are always word final. E.g. drums, walks, etc. But derivational affixes can be prefixes or suffixes. E.g. depart, teacher, etc.

       3.2.3       Inflection and word formation

                     1.    Inflection

Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.

                     2.    Word formation

Word formation refers to the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships. It can be further subclassified into the compositional type (compound) and derivational type (derivation).

                            (1)   Compound

Compounds refer to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as ice-cream, sunrise, paper bag, railway, rest-room, simple-minded, wedding-ring, etc.

The head of a nominal or an adjectival endocentric compound is deverbal, that is, it is derived from a verb. Consequently, it is also called a verbal compound or a synthetic compound. Usually, the first member is a participant of the process verb. E.g. Nouns: self-control, pain-killer, etc. Adjectives: virus-sensitive, machine washable, etc. The exocentric compounds are formed by V + N, V + A, and V + P, whereas the exocentric come from V + N and V + A. E.g. Nouns: playboy, cutthroat, etc. Adjectives: breakneck, walk-in, etc.

                            (2)   Derivation

Derivation shows the relation between roots and suffixes. In contrast with inflections, derivations can make the word class of the original word either changed or unchanged.

       3.2.4       The counterpoint of phonology and morphology

                     1.    Allomorph: Any of the different forms of a morpheme.

2.    Morphophonology / morphophonemics: Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics referring to the analysis and classification of the phonological factors that affect the appearance of morphemes, and correspondingly, the grammatical factors that affect the appearance of phonemes. It is also called morphonology or morphonemics.

3.    Assimilation: Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is more specifically called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation.

4.    Dissimilation: Dissimilation refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another, so that the sounds become less alike, or different.

3.3   Lexical change

       3.3.1       Lexical change proper

                     1.    Invention

Since economic activities are the most important and dynamic in human life, many new lexical items come directly from the consumer items, their producers or their brand names.

                     2.    Blending

Blending is a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words.

                     3.    Abbreviation / clipping

A new word is created by cutting the final part, cutting the initial part or cutting both the initial parts of the original words.

                     4.    Acronym

Acronym is made up from the first letters of the name of an organization, which has a heavily modified headword.

                     5.    Back-formation

Back-formation refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imaged affix from a longer form already in the language.

                     6.    Analogical creation

The principle of analogical creation can account for the co-existence of two forms, regular and irregular, in the conjugation of some English verbs.

                     7.    Borrowing

English in its development has managed to widen her vocabulary by borrowing words from other languages. Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Arabic and other languages have all played an active role in this process.

       3.3.2       Phonological change

                     1.    Loss

The loss of sound can first refer to the disappearance of the very sound as a phoneme in the phonological system. The loss of sounds may also occur in utterances at the expense of some unstressed words.

                     2.    Addition

Sounds may be lost but they may also be added to the original sound sequence.

                     3.    Metathesis

Metathesis is a process involving an alternation in the sequence of sounds. Metathesis had been originally a performance error, which was overlooked and accepted by the speech community.

                     4.    Assimilation

Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is more specifically called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation.

       3.3.3       Morpho-syntactical change

                     1.    Morphological change

                            The form of inflectional affixes may also change.

                     2.    Syntactical change

                            There are more instances of changes in the syntactical features of words

       3.3.4       Semantic change

                     1.    Broadening

Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its specific sense to a relatively general one.

                     2.    Narrowing

Contrary to broadening, the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense.

                     3.    Meaning shift

All semantic changes involve meaning shift. Here meaning shift is understood in its narrow sense, i.e. the change of meaning has nothing to do with generalization or restriction as mentioned above.

                     4.    Class shift

By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion.

                     5.    Folk etymology

Folk etymology refers to a change in form of a word or phrase, resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous.

       3.3.5       Orthographic change

Changes can also be found at the graphitic level. Since writing is a recording of the sound system in English, phonological changes will no doubt set off graphitic changes.

End of Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Syntax

4.1   The traditional approach

       4.1.1       Number, gender and case

       4.1.2       Tense and aspect

[For these two sections, please consult materials on traditional English grammar. – icywarmtea]

       4.1.3       Concord and government

Concord (a.k.a. agreement) may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. E.g. in English the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man, these men. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense, e.g. He speaks English; They speak English.

Government is another type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic construction. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category. E.g. in English, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book; She gave a book to him. In other words, the verb, or the preposition, governs the form of the pronoun after it. The former is the governor, and the latter is the governed.

4.2   The structural approach

       4.2.1       Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations

Syntagmatic (a.k.a. horizontal / chain) relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present, such as the relation between weather and the others in the following sentence: If the weather is nice, we’ll go out.

Paradigmatic (a.k.a. vertical / choice) relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent.

       4.2.2       Immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis)

                     1.    How to do it

Immediate constituents are constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction, which may be a sentence or a word group or a word.