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Go/goes/going/went/gone and Better and Best in Good/better/best - Suppletive Forms Are Common in Irregular Usage

The document discusses 8 different types of words: 1) The orthographic word refers to words in terms of written symbols separated by spaces. 2) The phonological word refers to words in terms of sounds that occur together in speech. 3) The morphological word refers to the underlying form behind orthographic and phonological words that can take affixes.

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35 views

Go/goes/going/went/gone and Better and Best in Good/better/best - Suppletive Forms Are Common in Irregular Usage

The document discusses 8 different types of words: 1) The orthographic word refers to words in terms of written symbols separated by spaces. 2) The phonological word refers to words in terms of sounds that occur together in speech. 3) The morphological word refers to the underlying form behind orthographic and phonological words that can take affixes.

Uploaded by

Anglophile123
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1) the orthographic word, 5) the grammatical word,

2) the phonological word, 6) the onomastic word,


3) the morphological word, 7) the lexicographical word,
4) the lexical word 8) the statistical word

1) The orthographic word = in terms of alphabetic or syllabic writing systems: a visual


sign with space around it: BrE colour and AmE color = the same word may be written in
two visual forms.

2) The phonological word understood in terms of sound: a spoken signal that occurs
more commonly as part of a longer utterance than in isolation and is subject to
rhythm:
Its no good at all.
Snow good a tall.
In the flow of speech, words do not have such distinct shapes as on paper, and syllable
boundaries do not necessarily reflect grammatical boundaries: the phrases a notion and an
ocean are usually homophonic and only context establishes which has in fact been said.

3) The morphological word is the word in terms of form that lies behind both the
orthographic and the phonological word:
colour colourful and discoloured

4) The lexical word (= a full word, lexeme, lexical item) means the word in terms of content
relates to things, actions, and states in the world. It is usually realized by one or more
morphological words, as when do, does, doing, did, done are taken to be five versions of
the one verb DO. Lexical words are generally fitted into the flow of language through such
mechanisms as affixation, suppletition1, stress shift, and vowel change, all of which have
morphological and other effects. The set of such words is always open to new memebers,
and in English embraces nouns, vebs, and adjectives, and other parts of speech when they
behave like nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as in But me no buts. Lexical words may be
simple in structure (cat, mouse), or composite (cold-bloodedness, incomprehensible, teapot,
blackbird, Commonwealth, stamp collector, put up with, natural selection, Parkinsons
disease).

1
13th C: from Latin suppletio/suppletionis making complete a term in linguistics for a situation in which
a form in a grammatical paradigm bears no family resemblance to the base form: for example, went in
go/goes/going/went/gone and better and best in good/better/best.Suppletive forms are common in irregular usage
in many languages.
5) The grammatical word (= function word, structure word) is the word that in terms of
syntactic function contrasts with the lexical word and is an element in the structural system of
a language. It serves to link lexical words. In English: conjunctions, determiners,
interjections, particles, and pronouns are grammatical words. They occur frequently and
have their own semantic systems, as which such particles as up and down, which relate to
position, direction, space, and time. In principle, such words are a closed set to which new
items are seldom added. As lubricants, grammatical words are like affixes: the out in throw
out is like the prefix e- in eject; the before in before the war means the same as pre- in pre-
war. They can also function like affixes, as in he-man and yes-man.

6) The onomastic word the word in terms of naming establishes special, often unique
reference: the difference between Napoleon and emperor. It may be simple like Smith or
complex like Smithsonian. Names may be motivated, like Sitting Bull (a Sioux name derived
from an omen involving a bull buffalo) or conventional, like Smith today (though not in the
Middle Ages, when the name was occupation-based). Although such words are lexical, they
are not usually listed in dictionaries and may or may not be relevant in encyclopaedias. They
are often regarded as apart from normal vocabulary, though they too have to be learned.

7) The lexicographical word the word in terms of dictionaries is usually presented in an


alphabetic setting. Many dictionaries have an entry did as the past of do, an entry them as
the object form of they, and so on, with cross-references to the representative form. There
are therefore two kinds of entry: anything the compilers think anyone might look up, and the
citation forms under which definition proceeds. The conventional citation form for nouns is
the singular (unless a word is always plural) and for the verb is the bare infinitive (unless the
verb only occurs as a participle, or is a modal verb).

8) The statistical word the word in terms of occurrences in texts is embodied in such
instructions as Count all the words on the page: that is, count each letter or group of letters
preceded and followed by a white place. This instruction may or may not include numbers,
codes, names, and abbreviations, all of which are not necessarily part of the everyday
conception of word. Whatever routine is followed, the counter deals in2 tokens3 or instances
and as the count is being made the emerging list turns tokens into types: for example, there
could be 42 tokens of the type the on a page, and 4 tokens of the type dog. Both tokens and
the types, however, are unreflectingly spoken of as words.

2
deal in = zaobera sa (m); venova sa (omu)
3
token = prznak; charakteristick rys; symbol; dkaz; doklad vskytu

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