Morphology and Word Formation

Morphology and Word Formation

key concepts

Words and morphemes Root, derivational, inflectional morphemes Morphemes, allomorphs, morphs Words English inflectional morphology English derivational morphology Compounding Other sources of words Registers and words Internal structure of complex words Classifying words by their morphology

i n t ro d u c t i o n

This chapter is about words—their relationships, their constituent parts, and their internal organization. We believe that this information will be of value to anyone interested in words, for whatever reason; to anyone interested in dictionaries and how they represent the aspects of words we deal with here; to anyone involved in developing the vocabularies of native and non-native speakers of English; to anyone teaching writing across the curriculum who must teach the characteristics of words specific to their discipline; to anyone teaching writing who must deal with the usage issues created by the fact that different communities of English speakers use different word forms, only one of which may be regarded as standard. Exercise

1. Divide each of the following words into their smallest meaningful parts:landholder, smoke-jumper, demagnetizability. 2. Each of the following sentences contains an error made by a nonnative speaker of English. In each, identify and correct the incorrect word. a. I am very relax here. b. I am very boring with this game. c. I am very satisfactory with my life. d. Some flowers are very attracting to some insects. e. Many people have very strong believes. 121

Delahunty and Garvey

f. My culture is very difference from yours. g. His grades proof that he is a hard worker. h. The T-shirt that China drawing. (from a T-shirt package from China) In general terms, briefly discuss what English language learners must learn in order to avoid such errors. 3. Some native speakers of English use forms such as seen instead of saw, come instead of came, aks instead of ask, clumb instead of...