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Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage |
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| Modern English
Grammar English 2126 |
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Word Classes: An Introduction
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Although the word seems to be a fundamental unit of language at first glance, one quickly discovers that words themselves have recognizable constituents, each one expressing a consistent meaning. Those constituents, morphemes, form the smallest units of language having significance in grammar. If we examine sentence (3) again, we see not only that the words are meaningful but also that parts of the last two words have meaning in themselves:
(3) The water evaporated quickly.
The verb evaporated and the adverb quickly each seem to possess two component parts:
The water evaporate (a verb) & ed (past tense ending) quick (adjective) & ly (adverb ending)
The word endings above have consistent meanings to English speakers, so that any -ed found on the end of a verb will be interpreted as the past tense of that verb, and form part of a system of word endings commonly used with verbs (verb inflections). Similarly, the word ending -ly expresses consistent meaning in that nearly any adjective joined by the ending -ly will function as an adverb. Secondly, the -ly ending forms part of a system of endings, all of which function to create new word types from old. For example, -ly creates adverbs from adjectives (quickly), -ness creates nouns from adjectives (greatness), -er/-or creates nouns from verbs (speaker/actor), -ate creates verbs from nouns (chlorinate), - able creates adjectives from verbs and nouns (disposable, fashionable), etc.
Whenever a constituent of a word satisfies both of those conditions (consistent meaning and systematic use), such a constituent is called a morpheme.
When we look closer at language, we further discover that morphemes can be subcategorized. Whenever we take a category of language, such as the morpheme, and subcategorize all the significant, meaningful distinctions within that category, we are moving along a scale called delicacy. That is, as we work at subcategorizing the relevant features of language, the finer will be our sense of all the important details, and more 'delicate' will be our description of language.
As the figure below illustrates, morphemes can be subcategorized into two large subgroups -- lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes.
Lexical morphemes have consistent meaning beyond whatever grammatical information they also carry. The great bulk of a language's word stock is carried in its lexical morphemes. Lexical morphemes are subcategorized into bases (such as deny) and affixes (such as un- or -able). (Some morphemes often "stand alone" as words in a language, and when any morpheme can "stand alone" as a word, it is also called a free morpheme. Other morphemes do not occur as free words and can only occur in combination with other morphemes. Such morphemes are then known as bound morphemes, such as un- and -kempt in the word unkempt.) Affixes are subcategorized by the position they regularly occupy relative to a base morpheme. Those affixes that occur before a base are prefixes (such as un- in undeniable), those occurring after a base are suffixes (such as -able in undeniable), and those within a base are infixes. English does not use infixes in any great way, though there are several informal constructions in spoken English that resemble infixes, such as fan-damn-tastic, where the insertion of a middle element helps to add emphasis to the whole structure.
Some Examples of Lexical Morphemes in English Bases Affixes Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs Prefixes Suffixes dog have silly very anti ness chart touch hot too con ion word be strong now di ity child stay new again pro or student go quick then re al Grammatical morphemes, on the other hand, function only to express grammatical information. Some grammatical morphemes are free morphemes such as prepositions like under, to, or of, and those are called function words. The meaning of the preposition by in the sentence The letter was written by Dave expresses only the grammatical information that Dave was the 'agent' responsible for writing the letter. Function words, like lexical morphemes, can be ambiguous; that is, they have more than one meaning. The preposition by in the sentence The letter is by the lamp has a different meaning (to indicate 'location'), although the preposition is still a function word.
Some Examples of Grammatical Morphemes in English Function Words Inflections Pronoun Preposition Auxiliary Conjunction Article Number Case Tense Aspect Comparison Comparative Superlative she of be and a -s -'s -s -ed -er -est he to have but an -en -ed -ing it on do or the -um -en we under may so -a our between might yet them with shall when their by should until you in will that any for would because some from can since someone over could when everyone above must that through ought to who at need to Each function word expresses a specific bit of grammatical information, which in isolation may seem small and insignificant, but is really quite important. Sometimes people believe that grammatical morphemes are relatively meaningless when compared to all the meaning expressed by lexical morphemes. But think about how hard it would be to communicate without function words: Oscar Wilde's aphorism "The cynic knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing" would read only "Cynic knows price, value" if we ignored the grammatical function words.
The second category of grammatical morphemes are called inflections. Inflections are word endings, like suffixes, but unlike suffixes, inflections express only grammatical information. For examples, number inflections on nouns and verbs in English distinguish singular and plural forms. The -s ending is the regular noun inflection to distinguish the singular noun house from the plural noun houses. The -s inflection on the verb indicates the third person, singular, present tense, such He hits hard. Other inflections indicate the grammatical case of nouns, such as the genitive ending -'s to indicate "possessive" meaning as in Dave's letter, or their gender. Modern English no longer distinguishes nouns on the basis of grammatical gender, but English does have a lexical morpheme, a suffix, that marks nouns a feminine forms, such as the use of -ess to indicate the feminine, as in hostess, waitress, stewardess, and poetess. In English, adjectives and adverbs are marked for comparison, using the -er inflection for the comparative, as in faster, and the -est inflection for the superlative, as in fastest.
Unlike inflections, affixes carry more information than grammatical information alone. For example, the suffix -ful means "to be full of," as in the words careful, sorrowful, and joyful. Although affixes are known by the lexical information they carry, affixes also carry grammatical information. The suffix -ful, for instance, also marks the word grammatically as an adjective. In other words, when nouns like sorrow, joy, or care add the -ful suffix, they function as adjectives. This phenomenon is a common process in language called derivation, and the study of how affixes 'convert' one word into another is called 'derivational morphology.'
Irregular morphemes differ from the regular morphemes in one of two ways: they may use inflections that are less common than the regular inflection, such as the use of -(r)en to indicate plural nouns in forms like children or oxen, or they may change the phonological (and graphic) form, in a process known as suppletion, as in went as the past tense of go, or feet as the plural of foot.
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