Chapter 5Compound & Complex Bases

Morphology

Lane 333

Recap

Stems: are bases to which affixes with grammatical meanings (grammatical affixes) are attached

Bases have internal structure

Compound lexemes

Base may consist of two bases (both roots of which are free morphemes) in a head-dependency relation

e.g: ‘houseplant’, ‘passwords’

This includes hyphenated compounds like ‘phone-booth)&

Combination of two words with stress on first element (‘language expert’)

Both function in the same way:-The houseplant looks close to death- The language expert looks close to death

Compound lexemes

The two bases and their meanings are associated with each other

In (‘milkman’, ‘dustman’, ‘postman’, doorman’), man means “male person practicing a trade or profession”

- not all carry the meaning of delivery

Exercise

5.2 to what lexical categories do the two bases in the following words belong? What’s the meaning?

matchbox hairbrush football stadium

cat-basket bedroom flower vase

Exercise

5.3 what do the structures of the following compounds mean?

death-defying town planning rocking chair

show-stopper boyfriend churchgoer

Complex lexemes

Other multi-part bases are structured in more complicated ways

Central element or root+ affixes (bound derivational or lexical), e.g. ‘sub-human’, ‘pack-age’, ‘de-select’, ‘confess-or’

Grammatical affixes must be added to the complete stem & not to the component parts; e.g. (‘confessors’ NOT *‘confessesors’)

Exercise

5.4 which of the following lexemes are compound & which are complex?

postbox pre-war pro-life weekly

strongly stomach-ache tone-poem

Functions of affixes

1. It makes an A into a B (A & B are different lexical categories), e.g. the affix –less in ‘homeless’ changes the noun ‘home’ into an adjective ‘homeless’

2. The B it makes has a particular sort of meaning (not having (an) X) where X is the root

We have RECUURENCE: it’s not property to homeless alone (heartless, breathless, useless)

Exercise

5.5 what do the following make into what?

inter- -age

-ly - mono

-est -ant/-ent (treat as of the same)

arch- -er/-or (treat as of the same)-ous

Bound lexical morphemes

Functions:

signaling the lexical category of the word, e.g. (-er)

OR

carrying some kind of lexical meaning which is put together with that of what precedes or follows to build lexical meaning of the resultant word, e.g. (’mono’- means one)

Exercise

5.10 what are the jobs of the following affixes in English?

Conserv-ATION paint-ER affor-ABLE

Muisc-AL humid-ITY HYPER-active