23. 11. 2006 Words and their parts - Morphology (2) held by Dr. Thorsten Trippel

Revision

antidisestablishmentarianism ( attempt to separate the state from the curch)

• anti + disestablishmentarianism ( prefix + root)

• dis + establishmentarianism ( prefix + root)

• establishment + arianism (root + bound morpheme)

• establish + ment ( free morpheme + bound morpheme)

Compounds: At least two roots

• noun combine with

• noun (fire engine)

• adjective ( greenhouse)

• verbs ( swimming suit)

head: noun

• wall paper

• table cloth

• ring finger

• patch work

• police officer

• watermelon

• birthday

• raindrop

head: verb

• highlight

• undercut

• offset

• upflow

head: adjective

• headstrong

• squeaky clean

• snow white

Derivation

• process of adding a morpheme to a base by which the meaning and/or wordclass of the base changes

Example derivations

Base	Affix	Result
Write verb	- er	Writer noun
Write verb	- ing	Writing noun
Write verb	re-	Rewrite verb
Treat verb	-ment	Treatment noun
Treat verb	Mis-	Mistreat verb
Treat verb	Mis- , -ment	Mistreatment noun

Consequences of derivation

• Suffixes change the wordclass of the base, prefixes the meaning

• Derived words are productive, i.e. they can be used for further word formation, either serving as a base in derivation, or they can be inflected.

• The list of derivational affixes is fixed (it is a closed class).

Some English suffixes

Suffix	Wordclass (base)	Derived wordclass
- able	Verb	Adjective
-ant	Verb	Noun
-(a)tion	Verb	Noun
-er	Verb	Noun
-less	Noun	Adjective
-ly	Adjective	Adverb
-ness	Adjective	Noun
-ment	Verb	Noun
-ous	Noun	Adjective

Some English prefixes

• anti

• de

• dis

• ex

• in

• mis

• re

• un-

Zero Derivation

• special phenomenon in English

• words can change wordclass without the addition of other morphemes (=by adding an empty morpheme)

Base	Derived
Xerox	To xerox
Thread	To thread
House	To house

Task

• select of the following parts of speech 3 each:

• verbs : play, work, write

• nouns: bird, wall, table

• adjectives: small, red, long

   

• derive as many words as possible from them!ab

• Playground, player, played, playing, playable,...

• worker, worked, working, workable,..

• writer, writing, rewrite, writable,...

• ladybird, birdish,...

• wallpaper, chinese wall,...

• table cloth, coffetable, tablewater,...

• smaller,...

• redish, redly,...

• longous, longly, longer,...

Learner's diary

First of all we revised almost completely last week's lecture. We once again said that there is no special definition of the word "word" but everybody knows what it is. Further we spoke about the difference of simple and complex words. We also revised the difference between free and bound morphemes and allomorphs. Moreover we discussed the structure of words and the different types of word formation.

As last lecture only dealt with compounding in terms of word formation, today we spoke about derivation.

We looked at a definition of derivation, at some examples and described the consequences of derivation. As derivation can either add a prefix, a suffix or nothing (zero derivation) to a root, we looked at different prefixes and affixes and spoke about zero derivation, which is a special phenomenon in English.

The first big part of the lecture was revision from last lexture which was quite good of course because it helps you to remember things, but therefore that were not so many new things in today's lecture. We only learned some more details about word formation, especially derivation. Again I likes the structure of the slides and the tasks.

References

• class homepage