Exercise

Very bad teenager joke:

Q: How do you make a cat drink?

A: Put it in a blender.

What are the verbal tricks here?

Derivationis the process of creating separate but morphologically related words. Typically, but not always, it involves one or more changes in form. It can involve prefixing, as in resaw, and suffixing, as in sawing, sawer, sawable. Another type of derivation, while not visible, is at least audible. It involves a change in the position of the primary stress in a word. Compare:

Examples of derivation in the English language:

Change of stress

‘permit (noun) - per’mit (verb)

‘contact (noun)- con’tact (verb)

‘perfect (adj.)-per’fect (verb)

‘convert (noun)-con’vert (verb)

Consonant changes:

Advice- advise

belief -believe

mouth -mouthe

breath- breathe

Change in a stressed vowel:

divine -divinity

profane -profanity

serene -serenity

Change in the final consonant of the root:

Part- partial

face -facial

seize -seizure

remit -remission

Palatalization , accompanied by a laxing of the vowel:

collide collision

elide elision

Change in the stress pattern, with consequential changes in the pronunciations of the vowels.

‘telegraph- te’legraphy

‘regal –re’galia

‘tutor -tu’torial

Other cases:

Ap’prove- appro’bation

The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.

Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word’s grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its grammatical category.

A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.), number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive).

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.

To avoid confusion between "morpheme" and "lexemes" it is very important to remember that morphemes are structural units while lexemes are communicative units: morpheme are built of phonemes and they are used to build words - lexemes. Lexemes take an immediate part in shaping the thoughts, that is, in building sentences. Besides, lexemes may consist of one or more morphemes. The lexeme "tree" consists of one morpheme while the lexeme "ungentlemanly" consists of four morphemes: un - gentle - man - ly.

Modern English nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are inflected. Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.

Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but this form shows variations in pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound), and horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz).

Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man, men; woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three have plurals in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged; e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse. Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms for subject and object (e.g., he/him, she/her). Adjectives have distinctive endings for comparison (e.g., comparative bigger, superlative biggest), with several irregular forms (e.g., good, better, best).

The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (to be) has eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some that end in t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting.

In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main morphological (structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two subsidiary ones—back-formation and blend.

Читайте також:

<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
Examples of compounding from different languages	\|	Affixation

Не знайшли потрібну інформацію? Скористайтесь пошуком google:

Генерація сторінки за: 0.004 сек.