Lecture One
A General Survey of English vocabulary
1.The definition of a word
A fundamental unit of speech and a minimum free form; with a unity of sound and meaning (both lexical and grammatical meaning), capable of performing a given syntactic function
2. Classification of English Words
•(1). By origin: native words and loan words
Native words: Anglo-Saxon origin/old English
e.g. sun, rain, moon/head, hand, foot/night, morning, here, there/horse, dog, tree, flower/big, small, red, white, etc.
•Loan/borrowed words: words borrowed from other languages
e.g. fault-French; aikido-Japanese; individual-Latin tofu/litchi/chaa/chinchin-Chinese, etc.
•(2). By level of usage: common words, literary words, colloquial words, slang words, technical words
(3). By notion: function words and content words
•Function/grammatical words: not have much (some of them have no) lexical meaning of their own; and just serve grammatically
• e.g. The (article) friend of (preposition)mine will(auxiliary) come to my house to (infinitive) take his book.
•Content/lexical words: have lexical meanings; refers to substance, quality, action, such as ns, vs, advs, advs
Lecture Two
Morphological Structure of English Words
• 2.1 Morphemes
• 2.2 Types of Morphemes
• 2.3 Allomorphs
• 2.1. Morpheme(词素,形位)
(1) The definition of a morpheme
A morpheme(词素) is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language, not
divisible or analyzable into smaller forms.
•Examples
•One morpheme: nation
•Two morphemes: nation-al
•Three morphemes: nation-al-ize
•Four morphemes: de-nation-al-ize
2.2 Types of Morphemes
• 1. Free & bound Morphemes
2. Roots and affixes
•(1)Free morphemes
•Morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free. They have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in
sentences.
•Eg: man, faith, read, write, red
•(2)Bound morphemes
•Morphemes which cannot occur as separate words are bound. They are so named because they are bound to other morphemes to form words. Unlike free morphemes, they do not have independent semantic meaning; instead, they have attached meaning (un-kind, hope-ful) or grammatical meaning (cat-s, slow-ly, walk-ing, call-ed). They are also called grammatical morphemes. Most of them are derived from Latin or Greek
2. Roots and affixes
•(1) Roots (root morphemes): a root is the basic unchangeable part of a word, and it conveys the main lexical meaning of the word.
•Take for example, the following set of semantically related words: (to) work, workable, worker, worked,and working: in each word the root is work, which is the basic unchangeable part, carrying the main lexical meaning.
•Roots are either free or bound:
• A. free roots:
•In English, many roots are free morphemes, such as boy, moon, walk, black. (i.e. they can stand alone as words). A word consisting of one free root (or one morpheme) is a simple word.
• B. bound roots
Quite a number of roots derived from foreign sources, especially from Greek and Latin, belong to the class of bound morphemes.
e.g. tain in contain/ detain/sustain/retain,
ceive in conceive/deceive/receive.
in Latin: tain-to hold; ceive-to take .
Yet in Modern English, they are not words, and so are not free morphemes; they cannot exist on their own.
• A root, whether it is free or bound, generally carries the main component of meaning in
a word. Notice what the following words have in common:
•(2) Affixes
•Affixes(词缀): Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function.
• e.g.: workable, worker, and working
work-root
-able, -er, -ing---affixes
According to the functions of affixes, we can put them into two groups: inflectional and derivational affixes.
A. Inflectional affixes/ morphemes
•Inflectional ~:affixes attached to the end of words to indicate grammatical relationship .
• e.g. the regular plural suffix –s (-es), books,horses;
•the form –’s indicates the possessive case of nouns; Tom’s, Mary’s;
•suffixes –er, -est show comparative or superlative degrees of adj. or adv. Slower, slowest;
