1

THE HISTORY OF ATLANTIS

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all other- stories, for the fundamental reason that
it seeks to record the chronicles of a country the soil of which is no longer available for
examination to the archæologist. If, through some cataclysm of nature, the Italian peninsula
had been submerged in the green waters of the Mediterranean during a period after the fall
of Rome, we would still have had much documentary evidence concerning the growth and
ascent of the Roman Empire. At the same time, the soil upon which that empire flourishes,
the ponderable remains of its civilisation and its architecture, would have been forever lost to
us save as regards their colonial manifestations. We should, in a great measure, have been
forced to glean our ideas of Latin pre-eminence from those institutions which it founded in
other lands, and from those traditions of it which remained at the era of its disappearance
among the unlettered nations surrounding it.

But great as would be the difficulties attending such an enterprise, these would, indeed, be
negligible when compared with the task of groping through the mists of the ages in quest of
the outlines of chronicles and events that tell of a civilisation plunged into the
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Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1

WHY STUDY WORDS?

Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would not give up
words for anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of words. Communicating
our joys, fears, opinions, fantasies, wishes, requests, demands, feelings and the occasional
threat or insult is a very important aspect of being human. The air is always thick with our
verbal emissions. There are so many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are
important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway-even when we know that what we are
saying is unimportant. We love chit-chat and find silent encounters awkward, or even
oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.

It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind's most valuable single
possession. It is language that sets us apart from our biologically close relatives, the great
primates. (I would imagine that many a chimp or gorilla would give an arm and a leg for a
few words we will probably never know because they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most
of us take words (and more generally language) for granted. We cannot discuss words with
anything like the competence with which we can discuss fashion. Films or football.

We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is intended to
make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about words. It is a linguistic
introduction to the nature and structure of English words. It addresses the question 'What
sorts of things do people need to know about English words to use them in speech? It is
intended to increase the degree of sophistication with which you think about words. It is
designed to give you a theoretical grasp of English word formation, the sources of English
vocabulary and how we store and retrieve words from the mind.

I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the enrichment of
your vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very practical way, your awareness of
the relationship between words. You will be equipped with the tools you need to work out the
meanings of unfamiliar words and to see in a new light the underlying structural patterns in
many familiar words that you have not previously stopped to think about analytically.

For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An understanding of
the nature of Words provides us with a key that opens the door to an understanding of
important aspects of the nature of Language in general. Words give us a panoramic view of
the entire field of linguistics because they impinge On every aspect of language structure.
This book stresses the ramifications of the fact that words are Complex and multi-faceted
entities whose structure and use interact with the other modules of the grammar
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[1.2]

a. We put everything on the table.

b. We put all the big splits on the table.

The study of word formation and word structure is called MORPHOLOGY. Morphological
theory provides a general theory of word structure in all the languages of the world. Its task
is to characterise the kinds of things that speakers need to know about the structure of the
words of their language to be able to use them to produce and understand speech.

We will see that to use language, speakers need to have two types of morphological
knowledge. First, they need to be able to analyse existing words (e.g. they must be able to
tell that frogs contain frog plus -s for plural). Usually, if we know the meanings of the
elements that a word contains, it is possible to determine the meaning of the entire word
once we have worked out how the various elements relate to each other. For instance, if we
examine a word like nutcracker we find that it is made up of two words, namely the noun nut
and the noun cracker. Furthermore, we see that the latter word, cracker is divisible into the
verb crack and another meaningful element -er (roughly meaning 'an instrument used to do
X'), which, however, is not a word in its own right. Numerous other words are formed using
this pattern of combining words (and smaller meaningful elements) as seen in [1.3]:

[1.3]

[tea]Noun-[strain-er]]Noun

[lawn]Noun-[mow-er]]Noun

[can Noun [open-er]]Noun

Given the frame [[ Noun[. Er]] Noun, we can fill in different words with the appropriate
properties and get another compound word (i.e. a word containing at least two words). Try
this frame out yourself. Find two more similar examples of compound words formed using
this pattern.

Second, speakers need to be able to work out the meanings of novel words constructed
using the word-building elements and standard word-construction rules of the language.
Probably we all know and use more words than are listed in dictionaries. We can construct
and analyse the structure and meaning of old words as well as new ones. So, although
many words must be listed in the dictionary and memorised, listing every word in the
dictionary is not necessary. If a word is formed following general principles, it may be more
efficient to reconstitute it from its constituent elements as the need arises rather than
permanently

Commit it to memory. When people make up new words using existing words and
word-forming elements, we Understand them by providing we know what the elements they
use to form those words mean and Providing the word-forming rules that they employ are
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familiar. This ability is one of the things explored in Morphological investigations. In an

average week, we are likely to encounter a couple of unfamiliar words. We might reach for a

Dictionary and look them up. Some of them may be listed but others might be too new or too
ephemeral to have found their way into any dictionary. In such an event, we rely on our
morphological knowledge to tease out their meanings. If you heard someone describe their
partner as a great list maker and a ticker-off, you Would instantly know what sort of person
the partner was although you almost certainly have never encountered the word ticker-off
before. And it is certainly not listed in any dictionary. The -er ending here has
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It could be a bat with which you play cricket or a small, flying mammal. This is a case of
LEXICAL AMBIGUITY. We have in this sentence a word form that represents more than one
lexeme with a meaning that is quite plausible. It is not possible to determine the right
interpretation of the sentence without looking at the wider context in which it appears.

We have established that the relationship between a word form and the meaning that it
represents is a complex one. This is exploited not only in literature and word-play as we saw
above but also in the language of advertising. For instance, a recent British Gas newspaper
advertisement for gas heating said:

[2.15]

You will warm to our credit. It's free.

This advertisement exploits the lexical ambiguity that is because warm (to) can mean
'become enthusiastic' or 'experience a temperature rise". Next time you look at an
advertisement, see whether it exploits any of the relationships between lexemes and word
forms that we have examined.

2.2.3 Grammatical words

Finally, let us consider the word from a grammatical perspective. Words play a key role in
syntax. So, some of their properties are assigned taking into account syntactic factors. Often
words are required to have certain properties if they serve certain syntactic purposes. Thus,
although in [2.16a) we have the same sense of the same lexeme (play) realised by the same
word form (played), we know that this word does at least two quite different grammatical jobs
in the sentence of which it is a part:

[2.16]

a. She played the flute.

She has played the flute.

b. She took the flute.

She has taken the flute.

If you compare the sentences in [2.16] above, you will see that in [2.16a] the verb play is
realised by the word form played regardless of whether it simply indicates that the action
happened in the past as in the first example or that an action was (recently) completed as in
the second example. Contrast this with the situation in [2.16b] where these two grammatical
meanings are signalled by two different forms. Took indicates that the action happened in the
past while taken (after has/had) indicates that the action is complete. In She Played the Flute
and She Took the Flute the words played and took are described grammatically as the 'past
tense forms of the verbs play and take'. By contrast, in She Has Played the Flute and She
Has Taken the Flute we describe played and taken as the 'past participle of play and take.
 6

Linguists use the term SYNCRETISM to describe situations such as that exemplified by play
where the Same word form of a lexeme is used to realise two (or more) distinct grammatical
words that are represented separately in the grammatical representations of words
belonging to some other comparable Lexemes. The phenomenon of syncretism is one good
reason for distinguishing between word forms and Grammatical words. It enables us to show
that words belonging to the same lexeme and having the same Form in speech and writing
can still differ. A further example should make the ideas of grammatical words and
syncretism even clearer. Consider The verbs in the following sentences:
 7

20 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A MORPHEMIC KIND

[3.2]

childish hopeless sooner mended elephants re-boil unsafe ex-wife

You would have to give a different answer. You would need to tell your interrogator, who by
now would be getting increasingly bewildered, that the words in [3.2] can be divided into
smaller units of meaning as shown in [3.3]:

[3.3]

child-ish hope-less soon-er mend-ed elephant-s re-boil un-safe ex-wife

The part of the word that is not italicised can function as an independent word in the
grammar. Indeed, each of the non-italicised chunks is a word (i.e. vocabulary item) that is
listed as such in the dictionary. By contrast, the italicised bits, though meaningful (and their
meanings can be indicated as shown in [3.4]). Cannot function on their own in the grammar.

[3.4]

-ish 'having the (objectionable) qualities of child-ish= 'having the qualities of a child
-less 'without X' hopeless= 'without hope
-er 'more X sooner 'more soon
-ed ‘past mended= 'mend in the past
-S 'plural elephants= 'more than one elephant
re 'again' re-boil 'boil again'
un, not X unsafe 'not safe'
ex "former’’ ex-wife= "former wife'
What we have done to the words in [3.4] can be done to thousands of other words in
English. They can be decomposed into smaller units of meaning (e.g. re- again') or
grammatical function (e.g. -ed "past"). The term MORPHEME is used to refer to the smallest
unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the
atoms with which words are built. It is not possible to find sub-morphemic units that are
themselves meaningful or have a grammatical function. Thus, given -less or un-, it would
make no sense to try to assign some identifiable meaning to any part of these forms. Of
course, it is possible to isolate the individual sounds /1-1-s/ or /n/, but those sounds in
themselves do not mean anything.

We have now established that words are made up of morphemes. But how do we recognise
a morpheme when we see one? Our definition of the morpheme as the smallest unit of
meaning (or grammatical function) will be the guiding principle. Any chunk of a word with a
particular meaning will be said to represent a morpheme. That is how we proceeded in [3.3]
and [3.4] above.
Morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any word in which they
appear. If We take re- and un-, for example, they mean 'again' and 'not' respectively not just
in the words we have listed above, but also in thousands of other words. Usually,
morphemes are used again and again to form Different words. Thus re- meaning 're-do
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whatever the verb means can be attached before most verbs to Yield a new word with a
predictable meaning (e.g. re-run, re-take, re-build etc.). In like manner, un-
Meaning 'not X' (where X stands for whatever the adjective means) can be attached to
various adjectives
(e.g. un-real, un-clean, un-happy etc.) to yield a new word with a predictable negative
meaning.
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10 WHAT IS A WORD?
acrobat
kingfisher
patriarchate
annoying
de polish
Chau cerian
cahoots
Gabardine
hullabaloo

Main stress can fall on only one syllable in a word. The location of the main stress is part of
the make-up of a word and is not changed capriciously by individual speakers. You cannot
decide to stress hullabaloo on the penultimate syllable on a Monday (hullabaloo), on the
antepenultimate syllable on a Tuesday (hullabaloo), on the initial syllable on a Wednesday
(hullabaloo) and on the final syllable for the rest of the week (hullabaloo).

However, in some cases, if we wish to contrast two related words, we can shift stress from
its normal position to a new position. This can be seen in 'vendor and even dee which
normally are stressed on the first and second syllable respectively. But if the speaker wants
to contrast these two words both words might be stressed on the final syllable as I heard an
estate agent do in a radio interview.

[2.6]

It is the vendor, not the vendor who pays that tax.

This example illustrates well the point that a word is allowed just one stress. Stress can be
shifted from one syllable to another, but a word cannot have two main stresses. We could
not have 'vendor and 'vendee where the two syllables received equal stress. Stress has to
do with relative prominence. The syllable that receives the main stress is somewhat more
prominent than the rest, some of which may be unstressed or weakly stressed. By contrast,
function words are normally unstressed. We can say Nelly went to town with no stress
unless we wish to highlight it for contrastive purposes, e.g. Nelly went to town and not far
away from town).

It is easy to see how stress can function as a valuable clue in determining whether two
content words are a single compound word or two separate words. The nouns street and
lamp are both stressed when they occur in isolation. But if they appear in the compound's
street lamp, only the first is stressed. The stress on the lamp is suppressed.

Stress is not the only phonological clue. In addition to stress, there are rules regulating the
positions in which various sounds may occur in a word and the combinations of sounds that
are permissible. These rules are called PHONOTACTIC RULES. They can help us to know
whether we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. A phonological word
must satisfy the requirements for words of the spoken language. For instance, while any
vowel can begin a word, and most consonants can appear alone at the beginning of a word,
the consonant [] is subject to certain restrictions. (This consonant is spelt ng as in long (see
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the Key to symbols used on p. xix). In English words [] is not allowed to occur initially
although it can occur in other positions. Thus, | | is allowed internally and at the end of a
word as in [11] longing and [1 ge] longer, But you could not have an English word like
together, *[ee] with [] as its first sound. However, in other languages, this sound may be
found word-initially as in the Chinese name Nga [a] and the Zimbabwean name Nkomo
[komo).

There are also phonotactic restrictions on the combination of consonants in various positions
in a word in the spoken language. As everyone knows, English spelling is not always a
perfect mirror of pronunciation. So when considering words in the spoken language it is
important to separate spelling from pronunciation (cf. Chapter 7). You know that He is
knock-kneed is pronounced /hl Iz nk ni:d/ and not */he Is kink ni:d/. A particular combination
of letters can be associated with very different pronunciations in different words or
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16 WHAT IS A WORD?

[2.17]

a. You hit me.

(=you hit me sometime in the past)

(=you hit me habitually)

b. You cut it.

(=you cut it sometime in the past)

of

(=you cut it habitually)

As the paraphrases show, the word-form hit belonging to the lexeme hit can represent either
the present tense or the past tense form of the verb. In other words, there is syncretism. We
have two different grammatical words: hit (+verb, present) and hit [+verb. +past] but a
single-word form. The same analysis also applies to cut. It can represent either the present
or past tense of the verb cut.

Syncretism is not limited to verbs. It can apply to other word classes (e.g. nouns) as well:

[2.18]

(a) The wolf killed a sheep and one deer.

(b) The wolf killed two sheep and three deer.

In these two sentences, although the word form sheep belongs to the same lexeme and is
unchanged in form, we know that its grammatical value is not the same. In [2.18a] it realises
the word with the grammatical properties of noun and singular, but in [2.18b] it represents a
plural form. Likewise, the same word-form deer represents a singular noun in [2.18a) and a
plural noun in (2.18b].

What can we say about the word as an entity that functions as a grammatical unit in the
syntax of a language? As mentioned already, the (grammatical) word is normally defined as
the MINIMAL FREE FORM that is used in the grammar of a language. Let us now put some
flesh on this terse and somewhat cryptic statement.

By free form we mean an entity that can stand on its own and act as a free agent; it is an
element whose position in a sentence is not dictated by other items. To explain what
'freedom' means in this context, we need to take on board two ancillary ideas: POSITIONAL
MOBILITY and STABILITY. Although words are not the smallest grammatical units used to
construct sentences (see the discussion of morphemes in the next chapter), at the level of
 12

sentence organisation the rules of sentence formation treat words as unanalysable units.
Often it is possible to change the order in which words appear in a sentence and still
produce a well-formed sentence. Words enjoy considerable positional mobility. However, the
elements inside a word do not enjoy such mobility. While syntactic rules can transport words
to new places in a sentence, they cannot shift in the same way elements that are found
inside words. Moving words around

The following produces grammatical sentences with basically the same meaning but
somewhat

Different emphasis:

[2.19]
a. This old industrialist revisited Lancaster, fortunately.
b. Fortunately, this old industrialist revisited Lancaster,
c. Lancaster, this old industrialist revisited,
fortunately,
d. Fortunately, Lancaster was revisited by this old industrialist.