Unit3 The Units of English

Describe the following sounds:

/f/

/i/

/:/

Review

[f]: voiceless, labia-dental, (oral), fricative

/i/: high, front, lax, short, unrounded

/:/: mid, central, tense, long, unrounded

Major contents

4.1 English morphemes

4.2 English words

4.3 English clauses and sentences

4.4 Collocations, idioms, and constructions in English

Morphology [形态学 ] is the branch of grammar that studies the internal structure of words and the rules of word formation.

Morphology falls into two categories:

inflectional morphology (study of inflections)

lexical/derivational morphology (study of word formation).

4.1 English morphemes

The morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning, lexical or grammatical.

Ask: How many morphemes does the following word contain?

weaknesses

Morphemic analysis

weaknesses weakness -es weak -ness

Practice:

Analyze the word:

unwomanliness

Classification:

free/bound morpheme e.g. weak/ness

derivational/inflectional morpheme

(lexical meaning) (grammatical meaning)

e.g. weak/ness-es

root/affix morpheme e.g. weak/ness

Task

What are the inflectional morphemes in the following phrases?

(a) the government’s policies

(b) the latest news

(c) two frightened cows

Root, affix

Root: the part expressing the basic meaning of a word. It can be free or bound.

c.f. brotherly—receive

Affix morphemes: prefix; infix; suffix

Example of infix: foot-feet goose-geese BUT: It 's controversial.

Discuss

P. 53 No. 1, 2

Compound

A word composed of two or more free root morphemes is a compound.

c.f. bookcase -- friendship

Allomorph

A set of allomorphs, e.g. in-, im-, il- ir-, are the variants (different realizations) of a morpheme, in- in this case. They have the same meaning and are in complementary distribution.

For the morpheme of "plural meaning" in English:

map-maps /s/, dog-dogs /z/,

watch-watches /iz/, mouse-mice /ai/,

ox-oxen /n/, tooth-teeth /i:/,

sheep-sheep /Ø/

Root and stem

The stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be attached.

e.g. lived, shortened, weaknesses, landlords

A stem-formative is the morpheme that serves to create stems.

e.g. biology, thermometer

Discuss

PP. 53-54 No. 3

4.2 English words

Presentation session Word formation in English

Practice:

Point out the devices of word formation for each of the following:

smog, enthuse, tec, PLO,

hospitalize, plane (v.) nylon

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 always spoke a very heavy dialect.

Classification of English words

grammatical words (function words/form words/ functors)

lexical words

Practice: Identify those that are function words and those that are lexical words in the following short paragraph. What’s the percentage of function words?

What does it mean to be fat? And, moreover, what does it mean to be a woman who is fat? In the United States, the word “fat” is not merely descriptive; it has a negative connotation. Women are pressured to be thin and young looking at every age, and those who do not fit this definition of normal, are, for the most part, marginalized. (67 words)

closed-class words -- open-class words

New members of word class:

particles: pass by; make up; to do; not

auxiliaries: I don't do it; is he coming? he has gone.

pro-forms: Your pen is here (pro-adjective); He knows better than I do (pro-verb); I hope so(pro-ad); He's here, behind the tree. (pro-locative)

English phrases

Phrase is a single element of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of clauses. e.g.

(1) a traditional festival

(2) freezing cold

(3) in the next century

4.3 English clauses and sentences

A clause in English is one unit of organization that contains a subject-predication structure. A simple sentence is a clause. Alternatively:

A clause is a group of words that has its own subject and predicate but is included in a sentence. e.g.

(1) I want to know why.

(2) Having an influential father is often advantageous.

(3) Do you know where I come from?

A clause may be finite or non-finite. In the latter case, the subject of the predicate is implicit but inferable from the sentence containing the clause, such as an infinite clause, a –ing or –ed participle clause.

superordinate/main/matrix clause

subordinate clause

English sentences

a. Definition:

Semantically, the minimal form that expresses a complete thought

Formally, not included in any larger linguistic form

Classification

simple sentence complex non-simple compound compound complex

interrogative indicative sentence declarative jussive (order-giving) imperative optative (wish-expressing)

exclamatory

Discuss

PP. 56-57 No. 7

4.4 Collocations, idioms, chunks, and constructions

Some phrases, for various reasons, are more or less tight collocations (like “a handsome car”, “a pretty girl”) or closed idioms (like “in the end” and “leave off”).

Idioms generally have semantic unity and function as noun, verb, adjective and so forth.

Idioms differ from compound words in that they, for the most part, allow a certain amount of internal modification. The nominal idiom “man-of-war”, for example, pluralizes as “men-of-war”, instead of “man-of-wars”.

Verb-particle idioms have become extremely common in English during the last three centuries or so.

Such constructions are more common in American English than in British English. Those consisting of three rather than two parts, like “miss out on” and “meet up with”, are almost exclusively American in origin.

Discuss:

PP. 59-60 No. 6

A very large part of language is made up of prefabricated chunks, or ready-made expressions, phraseological units which do not have to be generated every time they are used. “for example”, “think of”, “on the whole” are such chunks.

Native speakers retain many prefabricated lexical items in their memory.

PP. 55-56 No. 6

Chunks in EnglishChunks in English

ConstructionsRather than treating sentences as uniformly formed by virtue of generative rules, a new perspective known as construction grammar argues that there is no principled divide between lexicon and rules and language is a repertoire of more or less complex patterns – constructions – that integrate form and meaning in conventionalized and often non-compositional ways. Form in constructions may refer to any combination of syntactic, morphological, or prosodic patterns and meaning is understood in a broad sense that includes lexical semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure (to be expounded later). 

a. Jane gave John an apple. (ditransitive construction)

b. Jane gave an apple to John. (dative construction)

c. It was Jane that John saw. (It-cleft construction)

d. Jane, John saw her. (left dislocation construction)

e. Jane John saw. (topicalization construction)

f. Jane kissed John unconscious. (resultative construction)

Assignment:

PP. 60-61 No. 9

Explore whether there are parallel word formation devices in Chinese. Use examples to illustrate.