Knowledge of words and basics of words.ppt

Its all about the basic of words. And the definition of words.

1. Morphology
Lecture 1

2. Knowledge of Words
A child of 6 knows 13,000 words.
Average high school graduate knows about 60,000 words.
Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English
Language has over 450,000 entries.

One can learn thousands of words in a language and still not
know the language.
To know a word means to know aspects of a word: sound,
meaning, spelling, grammatical properties, collocations,
connotations, context, etymology, etc.
But what is crucial is to segment from a string of sounds a
basic unit of meaning, like
Isleptfortenhoursyesterday.

3. What is Word?
Word is a speech sound or a series of speech
sounds that symbolize and communicate
meaning
Word = Sound + Meaning
To know a word thus means the ability to map a
string of sounds with a particular meaning
and specific grammatical properties.

4. Classes of Word
Open Class: lexical categories
Closed class: grammatical categories

5. Open-Class Words
Major parts of speech > content words, e.g.
nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs
They are changeable from one part of speech
to another
The open classes are open to affixations

6. Types of words: open class
Lexical categories -"name" things and describe actions and
ideas
Noun: word naming a
person, place, thing, or idea:
"cat, house, thought,
beauty, Mary"
Verb: word expressing
action or state of being:
"love, run, seem, be"
Adjective: a word
modifying a noun
"green, angry, new"
Adverb: a word modifying a
verb or adjective, telling
when, where, how
"quickly, angrily, very,
soon, presently"

7. Closed-Class Words
They belong to grammatical or functional
classes > function words
They are not derivable.
They are closed to affixations.
Ex. auxiliaries, conjunctions, pronouns,
determiners, prepositions, and
interjections.

8. Types of words: closed class
Grammatical categories - express relations
Preposition: expresses
direction, location,
possession
”to, towards, in, on, of"
Conjunction: expresses
connection between words,
phrases, clauses, sentences
”and, or"
Determiner: directly
qualifies noun
Articles: “the, a”
Demonstratives: “this, that”
Quantifiers: “every, each"

9. What is Morphology?
The study of the internal structure and
form of words in language.
The study of words and the rules for word
formation in (a) language.
Central Issue: how people make up and
understand words they have never
encountered before.

10. Two forms of words
Simple forms
Words that are unable to be analyzed further
into smaller, meaningful segments
Ex. an, the, that, boy, happy, take, dog, but, etc.
Complex forms
Words that have more than one morpheme
Ex. Unhappy, replacement, readability, etc.