Lecture 4 The units of English
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Review
Describe the following sounds:
➢ /f/
➢ /i/
➢ / :/
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➢ [f]: voiceless, labia-dental, (oral), fricative
➢ /i/: high, front, lax, short, unrounded
➢ / :/: mid, central, tense, long, unrounded
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Major contents
4.1 English morphemes 4.2 English words 4.3 English clauses and sentences 4.4 Collocations, idioms, and constructions in English
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Syntactic units
➢ Hierarchical system: ➢ (morpheme-)word-phrase--clause—
sentence
➢ e.g. I met Tom. ➢ a (handsome American young) man ➢ a (handsome American young) man who
(lexical meaning) (grammatical meaning) e.g. weak/ness-es ➢ root/affix morpheme e.g. weak/ness
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Task
➢ What are the inflectional morphemes in the following phrases?