Functional word,

content word,
word, and morphemes

(Vocabulary)

By :

Kurnia aya

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 DISCUSSION

PART I
Functional Words And Content Words

The lexical items are of two kinds: functional words and content words.

The functional words are preppsitions, articles, conjuctions, forms

indicating number, gender, or tense and pronouns. They are used chiefly to
express grammatical functions.

The contents are used to express cultural content and they are consists of
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They have more or less independent
meanings.

Example:

1. Cats eat fish.

Cats = Noun

Eat = Verb

Fish = Noun

2. My little daughter does not speak English.

My = Preposition
Little = Adverb
Daughter = Noun
Does not = Tense
Speak English = Verb

3. The children went to the zoo happily.

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 The = Articles
Children = Noun
Went = Verb
To = Conjunctions
Zoo = Noun
Happily = Adverbs

The functional words follow a close system but the content words follow an
open system. Thus, the bulk of the English vocabulary consists of the
content words, especially nouns, since they keep on increasing in
numbers.

The exercise:

Words NOUN VERB ADJECTIVE ADVERB

Knowledge
Smallest
Purely
Various
Combined
Noticeable
Built
Difficult
Matter
Even

Words are among the most noticeable units of a language, yet it is

extremely difficult to find a general, explicit description of this concept

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 that agrees with the judgments made by native speakers of English
about which forms are words. In part, this difficult arises from the fact
that such judgments are matters of performance, and, therefore,
nonlinguistic factors may play a role in the speaker’s determination of
words. Yet, underlying this performance is knowledge of the concept
‘words’ as purely linguistic unit.

Summary:
1. The lexical items are of two kinds : functional word and content
word
2. The content words are used to express cultural content and they
consist of noun, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
3. The functional word is used chiefly to express grammatical
function.
4. The functional words follow a close system but the content words
follow an open system. Thus the bulk of the English vocabulary
consists of the content words, especially, nouns.

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 PART II

Word And Morphemes

A. Morphemes
The morpheme is the smallest meaningful word element. Being the
smallest meaningful element, a morpheme cannot be cut into smaller
parts and still retains meaning. While a word can occur freely by
itself (such as in one word answers), a morpheme may or may not be
able to. When a morpheme can occur by itself, it is a word with a
single morpheme; but when a morpheme cannot occur by itself, it has
to be combined with other morphemes to form a word.

Let’s look at a 6-word sentence from english the word library has
three syllables and see how many morphemes it contains:
the-word-library-have-s-three-syllable-s.

As can be seen, four of the words the word library three each has
only one morpheme. We can’t break it down any of the 4 morphemes
any further and still make the parts meaningful. But the two words
has and syllables can each be cut into two morphemes. Has
consists of have and the third person singular ending –s; syllables
contains syllable and the plural ending –s (the two s’s are
homophones!). So there are 8 morphemes in all. The following table
lists these morphemes, their number of syllables and whether they
can be words by themselves:

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 Morpheme # of syllables Word?
The 1 Yes
Word 1 Yes
Library 3 Yes
Have 1 Yes
-s (3rd person <1 No
sg.)
Syllable 3 Yes
-s (plural) <1 No

As we can see, a morpheme can have more than one syllables (e.g., library)
or less than one syllable (e.g., -s, -s, the two homophonous morphemes).
Therefore, a morpheme cannot be considered the same as a syllable.
Another difference between a syllable and a morpheme is that while a
morpheme has to be meaningful, a syllable may or may not be. None of the
component syllables in the word library and syllable is meaningful. A
morpheme also may or may not be a free word. Neither the plural –s or the
3rd person singular –s is a free word. Hence, a morpheme is not the same as
a word. Rather it is a word element.

B. Word

Definition of Word according to Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams

On The Definition of Word develops a consistent and coherent approach to

central questions about morphology and its relation to syntax. In sorting out
the various senses in which the word word is used, it asserts that three
concepts which have often been identified with each other are in fact distinct
and not coextensive: listemes (linguistic objects permanently stored by the
speaker); morphological objects (objects whose shape can be characterized in
morphological terms of affixation and compounding); and syntactic atoms
(objects that are unanalyzable units with respect to syntax).

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 One common definition of word is the following:
A word is any unit of language that is writing, appaears between
spaces or between a spaces and a hyphen.
Examples:

- Matchbox
- Match box
- Match-box

One of the important function of language is to serve as a tool

For one person to convey his or her concepts or meanings to other

person or persons. It is obvious that one very important property of a
word is the meaning it represents. But it is precisely this meaning
bearing function of word that cause problem in attemps to arrive at an
explicit, complete description of the concept word.

Word are very dissimilar in the ways in which they represent

meanings. Look at the following pairs below:
- Text-texbook
- Cat-cats
- Quick-quickly

Word such as text, cat, and quick each conveys a single, quite
specific meaning. A word like texbook, contains two units of
meaning, both of which may occur independently.

It is clear then that words do not always constitute the smallest

meaningful units in a language. Instead words are sometimes
constructed of smaller parts. These smaller part are called
morphemes.

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 Examples of word
1. trainer 6. development
2. trainee 7. impressive
3. training 8. invovement
4. walking 9. kindness
5. pritection 10. sweetest

Summary:
1. Words are among the most noticeable units of a language, yet it is
extremely difficult to find a general, explicit description of this
concept.
2. Words are not the smallest units of meaning and syntax in a
language. An even more basic unit, the morphemes, serves as the
element from which words are built.
3. A morphemes is not necessarly a word itself.
4. Morphemes which can occur independently are called free
morphemes. The morphemes that cannot occur independently are
called bound morphemes.
5. Every free morphem is word but not every word is necessarily a
free morphemes.(some words contain more than one morphemes).

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 CONCLUSION

Functional word is the word that is used to express grammatical functions.

They included among others : preposition, articles, conjunctions, plural,

singular, gender, pronoun, and tenses.

Content word is the words that have more or less independent meanings. It

is used to express cultural content. They consist of noun, verb, adj, adv.

A word is any unit of language that is writing, appaears between spaces or

between a spaces and a hyphen.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful word element. Being the

smallest meaningful element, a morpheme cannot be cut into smaller parts

and still retains meaning.

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 REFERENCE

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=6614

Katamba, F.1994 morphology,london.MacMillianPress.Ltd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, encyclopedic style. (April 2011)

Rachmadie,sabrony.buku materi pokok

vocabulary.jakarta:kaurunika,universitasterbuka.1986

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