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Advanced Grammar - Unit 2

The document discusses word structure and morphology. It defines simple words as those consisting of a single morpheme that cannot be further divided, and complex words as those made up of roots and affixes. Complex words have an internal structure determined by the order of affixes attached to roots. This structure can be represented visually with tree diagrams or bracketing. Prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes that attach in particular positions to form new words within the same or different lexical categories. The document provides examples of complex word analysis and representations.

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72 views

Advanced Grammar - Unit 2

The document discusses word structure and morphology. It defines simple words as those consisting of a single morpheme that cannot be further divided, and complex words as those made up of roots and affixes. Complex words have an internal structure determined by the order of affixes attached to roots. This structure can be represented visually with tree diagrams or bracketing. Prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes that attach in particular positions to form new words within the same or different lexical categories. The document provides examples of complex word analysis and representations.

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hongaini18022002
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNIT 2: WORD STRUCTURE

1. TYPES OF WORDS: SIMPLE VS COMPLEX WORDS

There are two basic types of words in human language - simple and
complex. Simple words are those that cannot be broken down into smaller
meaningful units while complex words can be analyzed into constituent parts.
The word houses, for example, is made up of the form house and the plural
marker –s, neither of which can be divided into smaller morphemes. While
many English words consist of only one morpheme, others can contain two,
three, or more (see Table 1).
Table 1: Words consisting of one or more morphemes
One morpheme Two Three More than three
And
Boy boy-s
Hunt hunt-er hunt-er-s
Hospital hospital-ize hospital-ize-ation hospital-ize-ation-s
Gentle gentle-man gentle-man-ly gentle-man-li-ness

Morphology deals with the internal structure of complex worlds. The


word of any language can be divided into two broad types of categories, closed
and open, of which the latter are most relevant to morphology. The closed
categories are the function words: pronouns like you and she; conjunctions like
and, if, and because; determiners like a and the; and a few others. Newly coined
or borrowed words cannot be added to these categories, which is why we say
that they are closed. The categories of words that open are the major lexical
categories: noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), and adverb (Adv). It is to the
categories that new words may be added. Because the major problem of
morphology is now people make up and understand words that they have never
encountered before, morphology is concerned largely with major lexical
categories.
Each word that is a member of a major lexical category is called a lexical
item. A lexical item can best be thought of as an entry in a dictionary: A
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lexicon. The entry for each lexical item will include, in addition to the
pronunciation (phonology), information about its meaning (semantics), what
lexical category it belongs, and in what syntactic environments it may occur
(subcategorization).
Thus, a simple word is a word consisting of a single morpheme; a word
that cannot be analyzed into smaller meaningful parts, e.g. 'item', 'five', 'chunk',
'the'. A complex word is a word consisting of a root plus one or more affixes
(e.g. 'items', 'walked', 'dirty'). Besides these two types of words, we can also
have compound words which can be defined as words that are formed from two
or more simple or complex words (e.g. landlord, red-hot, window cleaner).
The analysis of morphological structure is based on a number of
fundamental contrasts. The first involves the distinction between a free
morpheme, which can constitute a word by itself, and a bound morpheme,
which must be attached to another element. The morpheme house, for example,
is free since it can be used as a word on its own; plural – s, on the other hand, is
bound.
2. WORD STRUCTURE
Like sentences, complex words such as builder and gentlemanly have an
internal structure. At least, we can readily see that the word builder is composed
of two morphemes: build and –er, and the word gentlemanly is composed of 3
morphemes: gentle, -man and -ly. In this section, we will consider the categories
and representation that are relevant to the analysis of words structure.
What sort of structure do complex words have? The word denationalization
contains five morphemes: de nation al ize ation. It is an essential point that
these five parts have to put together in a particular way, with a particular
arrangement and order. For example, none of these possible orders of the same
five morphemes constitute an English word:
* ationizalnationde
* alizdeationnation
* nationdeizational

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In fact, of the 120 possible arrangements of these five morphemes, only
one denationalization, could be an English word. The order is so strict because
each of the bound morphemes is an affix, a morpheme which not only must be
bound, but must be bound in a particular position. Furthermore, reach affix
attaches only to a particular lexica; category (either N or V or A), called its
base, and results in a word of another particular lexical category. The negative
affix de-, for example, attaches to verbs and forms other verbs:
ionize deionize
segregate desegregate
Similarly, the affix –al forms adjectives from nouns, -ize forms verbs
from adjectives or nouns, and –ation forms nouns from verbs.
Given these restrictions, the structure of the word denationalization can
best be seen as the result of beginning with the simple form nation, which we
may call the roof of the word, and adding affixes successively, one at a time, as
follows:
nation
national
nationalize
denationalize
denationalization
The structure of an entire word may be represented by means of either a
set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram. The two types of notation are for the
most part interchangeable. Both are shown in the figure. The diagram reveals
how the word begins at its root.

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2.1. The tree diagram and bracket diagram of the words with suffixes
Let’s consider the word ‘nationalization’ below
N

V Af

A Af

N Af

nation al ize ation


[[[[nation]Nal]Aize]Vation]N

Figure 2: The representation of the internal structure of ‘nationalization’

Figure 2 shows the building up levels of the word nationalization is


developed to the right side of the word where the affix ation is located at the
farthest end of the word.
To count the number of the morphemes that a word in question may
consist we can use a simpler system of representation that indicates the location
of the morphemes boundaries:
il-legal; hospital-ize; nation-al-ize-ation.
2.2. The tree diagram and bracket diagram of the words with both prefixes
and suffixes
In some cases, the internal structure of a complex word is not obvious.
The word unhappiness, for instances, could apparently be analyzed in either of
the ways indicated in Figure 3a-b. By considering the properties of the affixes
un- and –ness, however, it is possible to find an argument that favors Figure 3a
over Figure 3b. The key observation here is that the prefix un- combines quite
freely with adjectives, but not with nouns as shown in Table on page (The
advertiser’s uncola is an exception to this rule and therefore attracts the

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attention of the reader or listener). This suggests that un-must combine with the
adjective.
N N

A Af
Af N

Af A A Af

un happy ness un happy ness


[[un [happy ]A]A ness]N [[un [ happy ]A ness ]N]N

Figure 3. The representation of the internal structure of ‘unhappiness’

With the argument mentioned above, the internal structure of the word
denationalization can be represented as in Figure 4 below.

V Af

Af V

A Af

N Af

de nation al ize ation


[[de[[[centre]N al]Aize]V]Vation]N

Figure 4: The representation of the internal structure of ‘decentralization’

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PRACTICE EXERCISES

Ex.2.
Consider the following words and answer the questions below
a. honeymoon e. naked i. barriers m. optionality
b. impossibility f. unbearable j. fastest n. prettier
c. comfortable g. justice k. publicity o. communicate
d. examinees h. unexceptionally l. disobeys p. nationwide
1) For each word, determine whether it is simple or complex
2) Circle all the bound morphemes. Underline all of the roots
3) Cross out all inflectional morphemes

Ex.3.
Consider the following words
a. postmodifiers d. identifiable g. malnutrition
b. delightful e. mistreated h. illogically
c. disobeys f. spiteful i. derivational
1) Draw a tree structure to each word
2) Establish the base and the root for each word

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