TOPIC 1. WORD FORMATION

SET READING

Quirk, R. & S. Greenbaum. 1973. A University Grammar of English. London: Longman. (Appendix I)

Strongly recommended for examples and practice:

Sinclair, J. (ed.) 1993. Collins Cobuild English Guides 2. Word Formation. London: Collins-Harper Publishers.

SYNOPSIS

INTRODUCTION

Levels of analysis

Linguists generally accept four different levels:

1. PHONOLOGY: the level at which the linguist describes the sound system of a particular language. Its unit: the phoneme.

2. MORPHOLOGY: the level at which the linguist describes the internal structure or form of words. Its units: the morpheme / word / phrase.

3. SYNTAX: the level at which the linguist describes how words are put together in sentences. Syntax accounts for the way in which words combine to form sentences. It gives rules for combining words to form sentences excluding the phonological description of words and an account of the meaning that particular words and sentences have. Its units: the phrase / clause / sentence.

4. SEMANTICS: the study of word meaning. Its unit: the lexeme.

In the past year, special attention was paid to SENTENCES. The sentence was the largest unit of grammatical analysis and the object of our study. Within that unit a complex series of processes, phenomena and features was analysed in detail.

This year we will concentrate upon the morphological aspect of the heads of these phrases: the noun, the verb, the adjective and the adverb.

Hierarchy, constituency, potential size and embedding

(Quirk 2.3.-2.10.)

HIERARCHY.

Traditional linguistic theory operates with two fundamental units of grammatical description: the word and the sentence. However, it is clear that in many languages there exists a series of minimal units, of which words may be composed, and which are called morphemes.

"Rank" is a surface-structure notion. This term comes from Halliday. Other terms are "level" (Pike) or "stratum" (Lamb) or "grammatical hierarchy" (Quirk).

There is another unit, the utterance. Harris defines it as "any stretch of talk by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person". An utterance is not identical with the sentence since many utterances consist of only single words or phrases.

Constituents are the smaller parts into which a unit can be divided. One unit may be a "unitary constituent" of another unit, i.e. it may be the only part into which another unit can be analysed. ("Unitary constituency" may thus be distinguished from "multiple constituency" where a unit is divided into two or more immediate constituents).

There is a hierarchical ranking of units in terms of their POTENTIAL size. In this sense, units of grammar may be placed in a hierarchy of POTENTIAL SIZE or EXTENSIBILITY as follows:

It can be defined as the occurrence of one unit as a constituent of another unit at the same rank in the grammatical hierarchy (not subordinated). This means that by repeated embedding, both a noun phrase and a prepositional phrase can be indefinitely extended: some students / at the college / on the other side / of the park / at the north end / of ...