2

The form and function

of words

Introduction: Dictionaries and lexemes

When people think of what is central to their language, they often turn to its dictionary, the
written repository of its words. This is, in part, because there is a widespread belief that
words are the language. Although this is a half-truth it is certainly the case that one of the
major tasks anyone has in learning a language is acquiring their own lexicon, their lexicon
personal internalized store of words (as opposed to the store of words written in a
dictionary).
We can get an initial idea of what knowing a word involves by looking at a dictionary
entry. Dictionaries attempt to represent what a literate native speaker of a language knows
about words. Since you will be familiar with dictionaries, they are a useful place to start.
Examine the following simple dictionary entry taken from the Oxford Dictionary of
Current English:
Sept, n. Clan, esp. in Ireland.

First comes the spelling of the word. In some dictionary entries the written spelling of
the word is followed by a representation of its pronunciation in some form of phonetic
script. (We will see examples of this later in this section.) These two forms of spelling,
orthographic and phonetic, represent the word’s phonological form. To be able to be said, orthography

a word must have a phonological form since this represents, in the abstract, what is going phonological form

to come out of your mouth when you say the word. There are no ‘silent’ words.
While a word may have just one phonological form, this is not always the case. Look,
for example, at go and went. Native speakers of English know that these are different
forms of the same word. Because of cases such as this it is necessary to distinguish
between the abstract item of vocabulary GO and the shapes which it can take in sound or
spelling. We can think of these shapes as the abstract vocabulary item’s realizations (in
sound or print). Linguists term such an abstract vocabulary word a lexeme, on analogy
with phonemes, which you will meet in Chapter 5. It follows that a single lexeme can have lexeme
a variety of word-form realizations. You can think of this as being rather like the concept
of a face, and actual faces. A face has two eyes, a mouth, and a nose in the middle, but an
actual face ‘realizes’ this in particular ways. The eyes may be blue and the nose previously
broken.

27
28 Part 1 Words

part of speech Next in the dictionary entry for sept comes its part of speech label. For example, in the
grammatical
entry for sept the letter n. is an abbreviation for noun. Virtually every word in the
category dictionary has one of these labels. What it represents is the word’s grammatical or syntactic
syntactic category category, indicated by a syntactic category label. The syntactic category label of a word is
a kind of summary of its grammatical properties. In essence these properties determine the
locations which the word can occupy in phrases. We will explore this property of words in
section 2.1 and Chapter 7.1. Words all belong to a grammatical category, with a very small
number of exceptions. These are words which are never part of a phrase or sentence. The
word yes is a case in point. If you think of where the word yes is used in a sentence then
you will find that it is never part of a phrase or a sentence. For example, yes is not a word
that can function in phrases like *the old yes, *has been yessing the grass, *yes the lawns.
(Asterisks here indicate that these are ungrammatical phrases.) It seems that yes is a
one-word sentence. It cannot therefore have a syntactic category label as it never functions
as a constituent part of a phrase or sentence. We will suppose that a word has only one
grammatical category and if, as in many cases, what looks like the same word can function
in more than one way then these are different words. For example, turn can be a verb in
The cow turned or it can be a noun as in She will take her turn. You will notice that the
position the word has in the sentence determines is determined by its grammatical category
Nouns fit in positions for nouns and verbs in positions for verbs. The meanings of these
two words are also not the same, although they may be related.
Third in the dictionary entry for sept comes a gloss for the meaning of the word. Most
words have meanings which speakers can readily identify, such as the meaning of the word
horse. But, if you want to know the meaning of the rarer word sept, you look at the section
of the dictionary entry where you find a phrase or sentence or two which gives you the
meaning of the word but expressed in different words. It should be noted, however, that
just as yes does not have a grammatical category, not all words have easily definable
meanings. Look at the meaning of a word like of in a phrase such as the pursuit of
happiness. Other words, such as this and a, have important grammatical roles to play.
However difficult it may be to pin down exactly what their meaning is, they clearly are not
meaningless. But the word of in the pursuit of happiness seems only to have a phono-
logical form and grammatical category, but is otherwise meaningless.
sense We can call the representation of the meanings or senses of a lexeme its semantic
semantic representation.
representation
A word, or, as we can now say, a lexeme, is consequently a three-part symbol. It has a
form or a number of forms, grammatical category, and meaning, the relationship between
the form and meaning being arbitrary. The link between the syntactic category and the
meaning of a word is less arbitrary. For example, it is clear that for breathing to be
happening, some biological organism with lungs must be doing it. This semantic fact about
the lexeme breathe has grammatical repercussions. In looking at lexemes in this part of the
book we will be looking at all three of these sets of properties in turn.
The properties of lexemes we have just glanced at are strictly linguistic, that is they
form part of the knowledge which speakers have of their language. However, when we
examine how words are used, they also appear to have a social aspect. Again, using a
dictionary for illustration, one sometimes finds words listed with indications as to how
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 29

they should be used. For example, the abbreviation vulg., short for vulgar, is often used to
indicate that one should be careful about using such a word in polite company. The word
sorry has an important use as an apology.
Furthermore, sets of words are often used by members of particular groups. This can be
seen through the large number of specialist dictionaries which exist. There are dictionaries
for foreign-language learners, for biologists, dictionaries of slang, dictionaries of the
vocabulary of the criminal underworld, and bilingual English–Greek dictionaries sold at
airports for tourists going on holiday to Crete. Later, in Chapter 3, we will look at how
words are used for specialized purposes.

2.1 Words and their grammatical categories:

Syntactic categories and inflection
2.1.1 Introduction
As we have noted, in a dictionary the words of a language are classified by grammatical
category. We can look at grammatical categories in more detail and at how words may be
assigned to particular categories. The reason for examining this property of words first is
that the later section in this chapter where we look at the internal structure of words
depends on being able to identify a word’s grammatical category.
The speakers of a language recognize not only the words of their language, but also that
words fit in different places in phrases and sentences. On the basis of where they fit, words
can be classed into different categories. Speakers of English may not know the names of
these categories or the principles by which words are assigned to categories, but they are
aware that, for example, wombat and stupid are different in a rather basic way. If you are
uncertain about this, try inserting each in turn in the following frame: a . . . idea. We will
find that this difference is because they belong to different syntactic categories.
At this stage in our exploration of syntactic categories, we have said only that syntactic
categories indicate the function which words have in phrases and sentences. However, we
have not said anything in detail about phrases and sentences themselves, and will not be
looking at phrases and sentences seriously until Part III. Fortunately, this does not prevent
us from looking at syntactic categories in a preliminary way. It happens that particular
syntactic categories of words often have characteristic grammatical endings which change
the form of the word. We can use these as a partial way to identify at least some syntactic
categories. We can also look at some of the functions of lexical categories as a way of
supporting the analysis based on the word’s grammatical endings.
Before looking at the grammatical categories of English lexemes, we need to look in a
little more detail at the way lexemes change their form. Look, for example, at the lexeme
TRY. Depending on how it is functioning it can take any of the following forms: try, tries,
tried, trying, as in the following sentences: The horse must try, The horse tries, The horse grammatical
tried, The horse is trying. We can call each of these forms a grammatical word form of the word form
30 Part 1 Words

lexeme, since it is the grammar of English which requires the lexeme TRY to have these
different forms in different contexts. The grammatical endings which create these different
inflection grammatical word forms are termed ‘inflections’. The form of the lexeme to which they
stem are attached is termed its ‘stem’.
The processes whereby words come to have internal structure such as a stem and
morphology inflection are morphological processes, the morphology of words having to do with their
internal structure, just as geomorphology has to do with the internal structure of the earth.
Since inflections are associated with both the morphological structure of words and the
syntactic functions of words, the categories for which words inflect are often called
morphosyntactic morphosyntactic categories. Tense, which accounts for the past-tense inflection -ed in
category tried, is an example of a morphosyntactic category. Properties such as present tense or past
morphosyntactic tense are therefore morphosyntactic properties.
property
The grammatical categories which we will look at in this section are five major lexical
categories: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and prepositions. We will be looking at the
morphosyntactic categories for which the first four inflect. At the section’s conclusion we will
briefly look at prepositions, although these do not have any characteristic grammatical endings.

2.1.2 Nouns
Traditionally, a noun is a naming word; typically, the name of a person, place, or thing. For
noun example:

snake, rat, alligator, Louis, chainsaw, lawnmower

are all nouns. For each of the above words we can find a set of objects to which the word
is normally used to refer (although the name of a particular snake, rat, or alligator may be
Louis or Louisa for those with whom the animal is on intimate terms).

Consider the following nouns. Do they pose any problems for our definition of a noun?

anger, fame, cyclops, Zeus, Hamlet, Lilliput, furniture

It is impossible to point to an object in the physical world to which these words refer.
Anger is a feeling and fame is an abstract quality; cyclops and Zeus are both mythical
beings; Hamlet is a fictional character, while Lilliput is a fictitious place. Furniture is not
a person or a place or a thing either, or even a set of objects. It isn’t any particular thing
but a class of things. Unlike alligators, where we can say of a particular alligator, ‘That’s
an alligator’, we cannot say when pointing to a chair, ‘That’s a furniture’. It follows that,
although sometimes when identifying nouns their meaning may be useful, we must look
elsewhere for supporting facts about nouns if we are to become more familiar with them
and be able to tell whether a particular word is a noun. To do that we will look at the inflec-
tions which nouns characteristically take.
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 31

Many nouns inflect for the morphosyntactic category of number and, as such, have a number
plural form like -s or -es. These are the regular (also termed weak) forms. For example: plural

snapper snappers
bee bees
rosella rosellas
box boxes

The uninflected form is the singular form. Some nouns mark their plural in other, irregular singular
ways, often termed strong forms, for example:

foot feet
mouse mice
louse lice
child children
ox oxen

Other nouns never mark their plurals overtly:

sheep sheep
deer deer

while some nouns never occur without the plural marker, for example scissors and
trousers. These are facts about the form of nouns. If a word has a plural form, then it
belongs to the category noun. (Note that the reverse does not follow; namely, that if a word
has no plural form, then it is not a noun.)
Notice that although words like sheep and deer do not take an ending to indicate that
they are plural, they do have a plural form. It happens to be identical to their singular form.
On the basis of this, we can see the necessity to make a distinction between a lexeme and
a grammatical word form. There are two grammatical words with the word form sheep.
One is the singular form of the lexeme SHEEP and the other the plural form. SHEEP is
therefore a noun because it has a plural form.
We can also identify nouns by looking at the words that typically appear with them in
a sentence or phrase. (Let us suppose for the time being that a phrase is a grammatically
complete part of a sentence. We’ll look at phrases in Part III.)
Most nouns appear with either a(n) or the, or denote things that can be counted, for
example:

a wombat the wombat three wombats

a barbecue the barbecue one barbecue
32 Part 1 Words

Table 2.1 Answers to exercise

a(n) the plural count

alligator ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

wombat ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

Pittsburg x x x x

video ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

lawnmower ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

butter x ✓ x x

Fred x x x x

Consider the following list of nouns, and divide them into the following groups:
nouns that can take a(n), nouns that can take the, nouns that have a plural form,
and nouns that refer to things that can be counted. Some nouns will appear in more
than one group:

alligator, wombat, Pittsburg, video, lawnmower, butter, Fred

Which nouns fit into which categories?

Your answer should look as in Table 2.1.

Notice that these nouns fall into three groups: those which appear in all four groups,
those which appear in one group, and those which appear in none of the groups. The set
count noun which appear in all four groups are called count nouns, those that appear in only one group
non-count noun are called non-count nouns, while those that appear in none of the groups are proper nouns.
proper noun In English, proper nouns, typically the names of people and places, always begin with a
capital letter. The nouns that appeared in all four groups, together with those that appeared
common noun in only one group, are called common nouns.
In English, a(n) does not occur with mass nouns (that is, non-count nouns which refer
to uncountable substances such as putty), and mass nouns do not have plurals.
The properties of nouns we have just looked at determine the way nouns are arranged
in grammatical sequences with other categories of word. In other words, nouns are nouns
distribution because of their distribution, that is, where they come in grammatical sequences relative
to where other words come.
We have looked at nouns now from the perspective of both their form and a little of
their function.
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 33

Find the nouns in the following poem: EXERCISE 2.1

The Sick Rose

Oh rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
William Blake

2.1.3 Adjectives
Traditionally adjectives ascribe a property or quality to an object, for example:
adjective

the ripe apple the evil alligator

Adjectives may take two different inflectional endings, giving three forms, for example:

big bigger biggest

tall taller tallest
standard form
The adjective without an ending represents the positive degree of comparison. The one
positive
with the -er ending is the comparative, and is used when we compare two objects for the
comparative
same property. For example:

My dad is taller than your dad.

The -est ending is called the superlative. It is used when we are comparing three or more superlative
objects for the same property. For example:

Your dad may be taller than my dad but Fatima’s dad is the tallest.

Not all adjectives take the -er and -est endings; some use more and most. For example:

evil more evil most evil

incredible more incredible most incredible

The morphosyntactic category which has the morphosyntactic properties of comparative

and superlative is called ‘comparison’. Adjectives which show comparison therefore show it comparison
in three forms: the uninflected positive form, the comparative form, and the superlative form.
34 Part 1 Words

Consider the following list of adjectives, and divide them into three groups: those
which take the -er and -est endings, those which take more and most, and those
which take neither of the above.

high, wide, dead, red, medical, ugly, narrow, absolute, painful, final

Your answers should look as in Table 2.2.

Those adjectives that have comparative and superlative forms are called ‘gradable’
gradable adjective
adjectives, while those that do not are called ‘non-gradable’ adjectives. What we mean
non-gradable
adjectives by ‘gradable’ is that there are degrees of the particular property rather than just the
presence or absence of it. A medical bill cannot be more or less medical, at least as far as
the English language is concerned. As to their function, English adjectives may appear
either before a noun or after a form of the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were, being, or
been), for example:

the ripe apple the apple is ripe

the evil alligator the alligator is evil

Not all adjectives may appear in both of these positions. Some may only appear before
nouns, while others may only appear after a form of the verb to be. (There is some licence
in these restrictions where poetry is concerned, as you will see in Exercise 2.2.)

Table 2.2 Comparative and superlative

-er, -est more, most neither

high ✓ x x

wide ✓ x x

dead x x ✓

red ✓ x x

medical x x ✓

ugly ✓ ✓ x

narrow ✓ x x

absolute x x ✓

painful x ✓ x

final x x ✓
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 35

Consider the following list of adjectives. Which may appear only before a noun,
which may appear only after the verb to be, and which may appear in both
positions?

older, elder, hungry, ill, red, ugly, afraid, utter, incredible, loath

Your answer might look as in Table 2.3.

Table 2.3 Answers to exercise

Before nouns After to be Both

older ✓ ✓ ✓

elder ✓ x x

hungry ✓ ✓ ✓

ill x ✓ x

red ✓ ✓ ✓

ugly ✓ ✓ ✓

afraid x ✓ x

utter ✓ x x

incredible ✓ ✓ ✓

loath x ✓ x

Find the adjectives in the following poem: EXERCISE 2.2

The Lily

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

The humble Sheep a threat’ning horn;
While the Lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.
William Blake
36 Part 1 Words

Application
Below is a portion of a short story with its adjectives in italics. What would the description
be like without the adjectives?

His name described him better than I can. He looked like a great, stupid, smiling bear.
His black, matted head bobbed forward and his long arms hung out as though he
should have been on all fours and was only standing upright as a trick. His legs were
short and bowed, ending in strange, square feet. He was dressed in dark blue denim,
but his feet were bare; they didn’t seem to be crippled or deformed in any way, but
they were square, just as wide as they were long.
John Steinbeck, ‘Johnny Bear’

If you remove the adjectives which come after forms of be such as is, was, were, the
sentences become ungrammatical. When you remove all the adjectives which come
before nounsv as well, there is virtually no description left.

2.1.4 Adverbs
Traditionally, adverbs tell us how (manner), where (place), or when (time) the action
adverb
denoted by a verb occurs but this is problematic since not only adverbs perform this
function. For the meantime let us suppose that these are adverbs:

She runs quickly. how

The cat lay down. where
They left yesterday. when

Adverbs have no inflected forms, although many do, like adjectives, take comparison,
but using the more and most forms, for example more quickly, most quickly.
The class of adverbs may be divided into two groups: degree, and general adverbs.
Degree adverbs are a small group of words like very, more, and most. They must always
appear with either an adjective or a general adverb, for example:

She runs very quickly. *She runs very.

This sculpture is more beautiful. *This sculpture is more.

General adverbs are a large class, and may appear without a degree adverb. For example:

She runs quickly.

Many adverbs end in -ly, for example:

quickly, quietly, properly, instantly, seemingly, stupidly.

 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 37

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that the -ly ending which forms adverbs is attached to
adjectives. It is not an inflection since it does not relate to any morphosyntactic categories
such as tense or number. We shall have more to say about such word-forming endings in
the next section.
We will not provide an exercise for hunting adverbs. The easy cases all end in -ly, which
makes such an exercise hardly worth doing. In other cases, adjectives and adverbs behave
in rather similar ways and so they are often hard to tell apart, which makes such an
exercise difficult.

2.1.5 Verbs
The grammatical class of verbs can be divided into two groups: auxiliary verbs and
auxiliary verb
lexical verbs. The class of auxiliaries is quite small, and contains the following: has, had,
have, be, is, are, was, were, do, does, did, can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, lexical verb

might, and must. We will look at these verbs in more detail in Part III. In this section we
will concentrate on the class of lexical verbs.
Traditionally lexical verbs are defined as denoting actions or states, for example eat,
drink, run, speak, forgive, understand, hate. The first four of these verbs denote actions;
that is, in doing these things we perform some physical action, while the final three denote
states, that is, we can ‘do’ these things without performing any physical action.
English verb lexemes have more grammatical word forms associated with them than
are associated with either nouns or adjectives. Each verb lexeme has five associated
grammatical words. The changes in form associated with each grammatical word form,
listed below, are brought about by adding an inflection to the verb. (The oddity of the form
called being placed under -en will be explained later.)

V stem V-s V-ed V-ing V-en

call calls called calling called

Looking now at the morphosyntactic categories that are associated with these different
grammatical words and word forms, the first category is tense. All English verbs can take
tense and there are two tenses: past and present. The present tense form of CALL is call and
the past tense form is called. You may ask what happens to the future in English. The future
is not indicated by a grammatical word form but can be indicated by other means, such as
the auxiliary verb will as in will call. It is not the case that English has no future; it just has
no future tense inflection. Future is not a morphosyntactic property of English verbs.
The next inflected form, the one ending in -s, indicates a number of morphosyntactic
properties together. It is found only if the verb to which it is attached is in the present tense,
the noun in front of it in a simple two-word sentence must be singular and can be substi-
tuted for by he, she, or it, for example:

he / she / it / the postman / Amira calls in the morning.

38 Part 1 Words

person Such nouns are the third person nouns: not the speaker, who is the first person, nor
first person the person being addressed, the second person, but the person or thing spoken about, the
second person third person. Here we have an inflection which indicates the state of not one morphosyn-
third person tactic category but three: tense, number and person. It also illustrates a process called
agreement agreement. Notice that only the tense is a morphosyntactic property of the verb itself while
the number and person categories are a result of the morphosyntactic properties of
something else with which the verb must ‘agree’.
This is a complicated set of arrangements to keep in mind when you are speaking.
Perhaps that is why the -s ending is not used in many parts of the English-speaking world.
For example, it is often not used in Singapore and Malaysian English. Singapore speakers
will say, She lock that door every day rather than She locks that door every day. Since almost
all Singaporeans are at least bilingual, it is worth mentioning that the other languages that
Singaporeans speak do not show third person singular present tense agreement. Official
attitudes to this lack of agreement are not positive. The National University of Singapore, for
example, requires its students to use ‘standard English’, including showing this agreement.
participle The V-ing and V-en forms are called participles. The V-ing form is the progressive
progressive participle and the V-en form is the perfect participle. They not only function as inflections
participle
on verbs. We discuss the other functions of these participles further in section 2.2. The
perfect participle
simple form of verbs, without any endings, is called the infinitive. It is often introduced by
infinitive
the word to, for example, to call.
Verbs like call are regular, and regular verbs form the majority of verbs in English. For
regular verbs, the past tense form and the perfect participle form are identical. So how can
we tell that these identical forms represent different grammatical words? In part because
they have different functions in phrases and sentences, but also because, in the case of
irregular verbs, the forms are different. There are about 200 irregular verbs in English.
Some are given in Table 2.4
These verbs are all irregular in different ways. All the verbs above and in Table 2.4,
both regular and irregular, have regular V-s and progressive participle forms. The differ-
ences occur in the past tense and perfect participle.
Each of the verbs in Table 2.4 has its own way of being irregular. In the case of meet,
a different vowel sound is used in the stem of the word for the past tense form. Other verbs
that follow this pattern include bleed (bled) and feed (fed). Write and bring similarly
change their stem vowels in the past tense (wrote and brought) and perfect participle forms
(written and brought). Other verbs that also do this include: sing, ring, ride, and strive.
Table 2.4 Inflections of irregular verbs

V-stem V-s V-ed V-ing V-en

meet meets met meeting met

put puts put putting put

write writes wrote writing written

bring brings brought bringing brought

 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 39

Put does not change at all in its past tense and perfect participle forms. Hit is another
verb that follows this pattern.
Morphemes can, as we have now illustrated repeatedly, have variant forms (allomorphs). allomorph
Just like variant pronunciations these can sometimes tell us where a speaker comes from.
In English, as we said in Chapter 1.7, almost everywhere you go there are two allomorphs
of the -ing progressive participle inflection. The -ing ending is one of the most studied
morphological variables in sociolinguistics. These appear in many different varieties of
English. In the American South, -in is more common. Men, the English-speaking world
over, seem to use -in more frequently than women in the same region. And almost every-
where you go, the -ing pronunciation is more socially prestigious than the -in pronunciation.
Some regional, social and ethnic dialects with low prestige such as some working-class
London dialects and African American Vernacular English characteristically use the
-in pronunciation, as in I am goin. In Irish English the -in form is more generally used so
is an indicator of regional dialect. The perfective participle of GOT is got in the UK and
in all the Southern Hemisphere Englishes but is usually gotten in the United States.
We can now note again that not all changes of word form are by way of inflection, that
is, the addition of an ending. Some morphosyntactic categories are realized in particular
lexemes by changes to the stem of the lexeme. We have seen this earlier in the case of
nouns, some of which also have strong forms of the plural.

If the verb to concorde, meaning ‘to fly at supersonic speed’, or to potato, meaning
‘turn something into a potato’, were to be added to the language, would they
follow the regular pattern or one of the irregular patterns? If there were more
groups of irregular verbs, and these groups were larger, would this cause any
problems for someone trying to learn English?

Any new verb would follow the regular pattern. They concorded to Paris. Manuel
potatoed the apple. In fact, the classes of irregular verbs have been getting smaller over
the centuries. If the irregular classes were more numerous, and larger, then this would
make learning English more difficult. Rather than learning that the past tense and perfect
participle forms of most verbs are formed by adding -ed to a stem, we would have to
remember which class a verb belonged to and how that class formed its past tense and
perfect participle forms. It is interesting that young children frequently show how the
regular form is used by using it on an irregular verb. For example, a child may say I
bringed my doggy. For them, the regular forms allow them to use the past tense, while
later, as they grow up, they can and do learn all the exceptions.
 40 Part 1 Words

EXERCISE 2.3 Find the lexical verbs in the following poem:

Nurse’s Song

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And whisp’rings are in the dale
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise,
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
William Blake

2.1.6 Prepositions

preposition
The last major syntactic category we will look at in this chapter is the class of prepositions.
Prepositions are words such as in, out, on, by which often indicate relationships involving
locations in time or space, or direction. These locations can be of actions or things, for
example Yvette sat in a chair, the umbrella in the hall.
open class While nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs are members of open classes because the
classes they belong to are large, and because it is possible to add new items to them, prepo-
closed class sitions are members of a small closed class.

Try to make up a new preposition by compounding two existing prepositions.

You will see that plausible options like in under and out from seem fine when you put them
together as individual words but not when you try to make a new preposition out of the
sequence as in inunder and outfrom. These seem impossible, suggesting that the class of
prepositions is closed.
conjunction Other closed classes of words are conjunctions, for example: and, but, because; or
determiner determiners, for example: a, an, the, these, those; and the class of auxiliary verbs we
looked at earlier in this chapter. It is not possible to add new members to the closed classes.
In fact, there is no record of anyone ever adding a new conjunction to the language.
Because the function of these words requires us to look more closely at the grammar of
sentences, we will leave discussing them until Part III, where we look at sentence structure.
The morphosyntactic categories and properties of English lexemes and how they relate
to inflections in English are summarized in Table 2.5. If you speak a variety of English that
does not inflect this way, you can use this table to check out your own English and see just
what it does for each morphosyntactic category and property.
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 41

Table 2.5 Morphosyntactic categories, properties and grammatical word forms

Syntactic Morphosyntactic Morphosyntactic Grammatical Regular

category categories properties words inflections
Noun Number 1. Singular 1. Singular form none
2. Plural 2. Plural form -s

Verb Tense 1. Past 1. Past tense form -ed

2. Present 2. Non-third person no inflection
singular present form

Number 1. Singular 3. Third person singular -s

2. Plural present form

Person 1. First person 4. Progressive participle -ing

2. Second person 5. Perfect participle -ed/-en
3. Third person

Adjective/ Comparison 1. Positive 1. Positive form no inflection

Adverb 2. Comparative 2. Comparative form -er
3. Superlative 3. Superlative form -est

Preposition none none none none

Identify the grammatical category of the italicized words in the following passage: EXERCISE 2.4
The witches hopped in their red Mini and drove gently to the convocation for an evening
of fine wines, entertaining conversation and new spells.

2.2 Word formation

We assumed in the previous section that the lexemes we looked at were simple in not being
made up themselves of other lexemes (although they were in many cases inflected). In this
section we will look at complex lexemes which have other lexemes as component parts.
There are two main ways in which English lexemes may have other lexemes as
constituents. Two lexemes may be put together to make a compound lexeme. For example, compound
the lexeme BOOKSHELF consists, very obviously, of the lexeme BOOK followed by the
lexeme SHELF. A lexeme can also have as constituents a single lexeme plus an ending.
These endings are generally termed affixes. The grammatical endings we looked at in the affix
previous section are inflectional affixes. The ones which are constituents of complex
lexemes are derivational affixes since they derive one lexeme from another. Look, for derivational affix
instance, at the word GENTLENESS. This lexeme, again obviously, consists of the lexeme
42 Part 1 Words

GENTLE followed by the affix -ness. In the following two sections we will look first at
derivation compounding and then at derivation.

2.2.1 Compounding
We saw, when we looked at simple lexemes, that they had phonological, syntactic, and
semantic properties. Compound lexemes too have all three sets of properties but, in their
case, these properties are, in part, predictable in a way that they are not for simple lexemes.
In general, a compound lexeme has the sounds of its component lexemes in that order. This
seems very obvious but, in the case of derivation, this isn’t always the case. For example,
when the lexeme ELECTRIC has the derivational affix -ity added to it, it becomes
electricity. The k sound has changed to an s sound. Compounding does not make changes
to the sounds of the component lexemes.
Compound words in English usually have the main emphasis on the first word. For
example, income tax has the main stress on the in of income and not on the tax. Whitewash
has primary stress on white and soulsearching has primary stress on soul. There is debate
as to whether this is always so. It certainly is generally the case.
As far as their syntactic properties go, compounds have a rather simple, regular set of
properties.
First, they are always binary in structure. In other words, they always consist of two and
only two constituent lexemes. This means that a compound which has three or more
constituents must have them in pairs. For example, washing-machine manufacturer
consists of washingmachine and manufacturer, while washingmachine, in turn, consists of
washing and machine. A simple tree diagram of such a word would show its binary
structure, as in Figure 2.1.
head Compound words also usually have a head constituent. By a head constituent we mean
one which determines the syntactic properties of the whole lexeme. For example, the
compound lexeme LONGBOAT consists of an adjective, LONG, and a noun, BOAT. The
compound lexeme LONGBOAT is a noun, and it is a noun because boat is a noun, that is,
boat is the head constituent of longboat. One interesting piece of support for the existence
of heads comes from compound nouns which have two nouns as constituents. In such a
case, how can you tell which is the head? One piece of evidence is that if one of them has

Figure 2.1 Tree diagram of washing machine manufacturer

 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 43

an irregular plural, then only if it is the head does the whole compound have that form of
the plural. For example, the plural form of snowgoose is snowgeese, that is, the form of
the plural of the whole compound word is the form of its head constituent because the
plural of goose is geese. The same goes for snowman and snowmen, flowerchild and
flowerchildren. In English, of the two constituents of a compound, the right-hand one is
normally its head.
There are exceptions to the generalization that compounds are syntactically headed. For
example, income is a noun consisting of a preposition followed by a verb. Neither of these
constituents determine that the compound is a noun since neither is itself a noun. Bluetooth
is neither blue nor a tooth.
Compound words can belong to all the major syntactic categories we looked at in the
previous section. Here are some examples of each:
Nouns: signpost, sunlight, coatrack, bluebird, redwood, swearword, outhouse
Verbs: window shop, stargaze, outlive, undertake
Adjectives: icecold, hellbent, undersized
Prepositions: into, onto, upon
Some of the constituent structures for compounds are productive in the sense that speakers
can make up new ones on the same pattern readily. For example, a new compound noun
consisting of a noun plus noun, or adjective plus noun, is easy to make up. In the computer
industry new compounds like this are being created almost daily. For example, many of
the following are now familiar words to anyone with a computer: pendrive, spear-
phishing, broadband, screensaver, screendump.
Those constituent patterns where compounding is productive also allow compounds
themselves to have compounds as constituents, as we saw when looking at the binary
structure of compounds. For example, smartphone memory card has the compound noun
smartphone compounded with another compound noun, memory card. On the other hand,
new compound prepositions as we saw earlier seem impossible to create. It should
therefore not be possible to create new prepositions by compounding them.
As far as their meaning is concerned, compound words are often headed in another way.
If we look at a compound like earring, then an earring is a kind of ring, not a kind of ear.
Undereating is a variety of eating, and for something to be overgrown is for it to be grown
in a special way. In other words, the lexeme which is the head of the compound from a
syntactic point of view is also central to its meaning. The non-head modifies the meaning
of the head, making it more specific in some way or other.
There are exceptions to semantic headedness. Redbacks, with which you will become
familiar in Chapter 4, are a variety of Australian spider and not a variety of back. Another
Australian spider, the huntsman, has the same property and some of them are female.
This allows us to make an important distinction. Redback is a lexical item, in other lexical item
words, it is listed in the lexicon of many (if not most) Australian speakers of English.
Lexical items have a tendency to become specialized and for their meaning to become less
predictable. That is why they must be listed in the lexicon since their idiosyncrasy is
something speakers have to learn and cannot deduce. If we make up a new compound
 44 Part 1 Words

word, for instance radiodog, with the stress on the word radio, then we know that it is a
noun because its head, dog, is a noun and we infer that a radiodog is a kind of dog. Further
than that, we do not know what this noun designates. But if it became a lexical item, we
would have to know more, for instance that it was the dog that a particular radio station
used in order to bark the hours of the day before the reading of the hourly news bulletin.
(Heaven forbid.)
Here again we have an important distinction between lexemes, which are abstract
words which may or may not be lexical items, and lexical items, which are actual words.
We would want to say that radiodog is a possible word of English but not a lexical item
of English (although it may just have become one in the previous discussion).

EXERCISE 2.5 Compounds are often frequent in modern technical areas where new vocabulary is being
created. Find the compounds in the following passages:

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was
created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup.

2.2.2 Derivational affixation

We have seen so far that, although words in a dictionary are represented by sequences of
letters and a grammatical category, they may have more structure than the dictionary
usually provides. Some are compounds consisting of two lexemes. Still others have affixes
as constituents. Look, for example, at a word like loveliness. Its form is a sequence of
sounds, but it can also be divided into three sections. It is made up of love plus li plus ness.
One of these is a lexeme. The other two are affixes.

Divide the following words into these same kinds of building blocks.

movement, lowly, nationhood

You will almost certainly have got the following divisions: move+ment, low+ly,
nation+hood. These minimal building blocks of lexemes are called morphemes. Why are
morpheme morphemes, and not speech sounds, the basic building blocks of complex lexemes?
A morpheme is usually realized (given form) as a speech sound or sequence of speech
sounds just as a lexeme is, and it functions as part (or all) of a word. Morphemes also
contribute to the meaning of a lexeme. For example, the word girlhood consists of two
morphemes girl and -hood. The girl part means ‘young female person’ and the -hood bit
means ‘abstract property or state of being a . . .’. So the word girlhood means ‘the abstract
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 45

property or state of being a girl’. A linguistic unit whose meaning is the sum of the
meanings of its structural parts is described as ‘compositional’ and it has the abstract compositional
property of compositionality.
Another property of morphemes which they share with lexemes is that the relationship
between their form, that is the sounds of which they are constructed, and their meaning is
arbitrary. Any sequence of speech sounds that the language allows can be a morpheme.
There is nothing in the sequence of sounds that go to make up the morpheme -hood that
makes it particularly suitable to be a morpheme, or the morpheme -hood in particular. The
great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure termed this property of words and morphemes
‘the arbitrariness of the sign’.
Because they are essentially made the same way, that is, as symbols, morphemes are
the basic building blocks of lexemes. Morphemes are building blocks of words just as
lexemes are building blocks of phrases. The inflections which we looked at in section 2.1
are clearly morphemes, as are the derivational affixes which we will look at now.
The creation of new lexemes by the process of derivation involves word formation
rules. These rules specify what happens in the process of using one lexeme to derive
another. A word formation rule operates on a base, that is, a lexeme with all the properties base
lexemes have: form, syntactic category, and meaning. It then specifies what happens to the
base in the process of the derivation. The stem is the form of the base, that is, its phono- stem
logical shape, and that is how we have been using the term.
Take the nouns ending in -ness. The base for such nouns is a set of adjectives, for example:
happy, sad, cheerful, gentle, soft, prickly. The word formation rule which derives the nouns
happiness, sadness, cheerfulness, gentleness, softness, and prickliness from their respective
bases only takes adjectives as a base, as we can see because the following are not possible
English words: *shipness, *slowliness, *putness, since these have a noun, adverb, and verb
respectively as base and are therefore not well-formed. Secondly, the word formation rule
specifies that the meaning of the new word will be something like ‘the state of being A’,
where A is the meaning of the base. So the meaning of happiness is something like ‘the state
of being happy’. Thirdly, the word formation rule specifies the form of the new lexeme by
indicating that the new lexeme has the suffix -ness attached to right hand end of the stem.
At this point you might look again at the endings on participles, usually -ing and
-en/ed. What is happening in the words which have these endings?
1 The writing is on the wall.
2 Joanna’s writing style is terrible.
3 Joanna’s written work is just fine.
It looks as though -ing in 1. is a derivational affix creating a noun out of a verb base. In 2.
-ing is creating an adjective out of a verb base, and in 3. -en is creating an adjective out of
a verb base. It therefore looks as though these affixes can be inflections, as we saw in the
previous section, but also derivational affixes when they change the grammatical category
of their base.
So far so good; but things are not always this simple. They can be even more complex.
Many word formation rules specify their bases more narrowly than this. Look, for
46 Part 1 Words

example, at the suffix -ee in words such as addressee and payee. The base for this word
formation rule is a set of verbs, and the meaning of the resulting lexeme is something like
‘the one who is V-ed’, the one who is addressed or paid. But this means that the verb which
is the base for the word formation rule and to which the -ee suffix attaches must be the
kind of verb which has both someone to do the V-ing and someone to whom the V-ing is
done. It would, for example, not be possible to attach -ee to a verb like breathe because
when breathing takes place no one gets breathed, nor to a verb like mow since what gets
mowed is not a person. On the other hand, not all verbs which look as though they should
be eligible permit this, in that the process denoted by the verb cannot be something like
that denoted by kiss or thump. We do not get *kissee or *thumpee.
The suffix -able, by way of comparison, does attach to mow and sing, but not to sit. The
reason for this is that there are at least things like grass and songs which get mowed and
sung but nothing gets sat. The word formation rule for -able takes as its bases verbs which
are not just actions but actions done to things or people. People who might be loved are
lovable; the things that could get mowed are mowable, and so on. Clearly things might
also be kissable or thumpable.
The exact limitations on these particular word formation rules are not perhaps as
significant as the fact that they involve rather delicate facts to do with the meaning of the
base, and these facts must be accessible to the rules of word formation.
In other cases, word formation rules specify that their base must belong to a sub-class of
lexemes which came into the English language originally from another language. Look, for
example, at the suffix -ion and the lexemes to which it attaches, like decision, induction,
conclusion and allusion. The verb bases to which -ion is attached here are decide, induce,
conclude and allude. All of them have Latin as their language of origin. Native English verbs
like break, run, and breathe cannot take -ion, as you can work out for yourself. Another
suffix which attaches to such Latin bases is -ity. Thus domesticity, reciprocity and anonymity
are well-formed English words since their bases are foreign imports, but *hardity, *greyity
and *loneity are not, because their bases are lexemes which have been part of English
vocabulary for a very long time and were not ‘borrowed’ from other languages.
Word formation rules may also be sensitive to phonological properties of bases. The
prefix de- with the meaning ‘take off’ seems typically to apply to monosyllabic bases as in
delouse, dehorn, degrease.
A word formation rule may also be sensitive to what word-formation process (if any)
took place to create its base. For example, the suffix -ity happily attaches to bases ending
in -able, for example, readable, readability; taxable, taxability. But it is not happy to
attach itself to lexemes ending in -ful, for example, thoughtful, *thoughtfulity; restful,
*restfulity. On the other hand, -hood will not attach to any base which is anything but a
single morpheme. For example, sisterhood, parenthood and priesthood are well-formed
but *blackbirdhood is not.
All this suggests that the processes of derivation are potentially sensitive to all of the
following properties of bases: their phonological form, their syntactic properties, their
semantic properties, their derivational source and even their historical provenance.
Their effects, you might imagine, would also include the same range of possible
properties. We have already seen that derivational processes have the basic phonological
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 47

effect of adding an affix which determines the syntactic category of the new lexeme and
its meaning. But these are not the end of the matter.
Word formation rules which add derivational affixes may be divided into three groups.
There are those which add stress-bearing affixes to their stems and those which cause the
stress to shift, and those, like inflectional affixes, which have no influence on stress
placement. We will look at this phenomenon from a phonological point of view in Chapter
6. The first group includes: -ee, -ese, and -esque. All three suffixes take stress, for example:

parole – paroˈlee, Suˈdan – Sudanˈese, ˈRoman – Romanˈesque.

Note that the ˈ mark coming before a syllable indicates that the following syllable is
stressed.
The second group includes: -eons, -y, -ial, -ion, and -ity. The addition of one of these
suffixes results in the stress shifting towards the suffix, for example:

ˈoutrage – outˈrageous, ˈspectrograph – specˈtrography

ˈadverb – adˈverbial, ˈrenovate – renoˈvation, eˈlectric – elecˈtricity

The third group does not have any influence on the placement of stress. This group
includes: -able, -age, -en, -ful, -ing, -like, -ment, and -wise.
Word-formation processes may also have phonological effects other than that affecting
stress placement.

Look at the following bases and derived words. What sound changes do you notice?

commit commission
submit submission
admit admission
revert reversion
dominate domination

Clearly the addition of the noun-forming suffix -ion has had more phonological effects on
the base than you might expect from just the addition of -ion, and don’t let the spelling of
the last example fool you. In each case the final sound of the base has undergone a change.
This change is morpho-phonemic: that is, it is a phonemic change caused by a morpho- morpho-phonemic
logical process. There are many such processes and they lead us to the concept of
allomorphy. Just as a speech sound in a language may have a variety of different realiza-
tions in different contexts, so a morpheme may have different phonemic realizations in
different contexts. The plural in English, for example, has a variety of forms. Each of
these: /s/, /z/, and /ɪz/, is an allomorph of the plural morpheme.
Allomorphs may be stem allomorphs or affixal allomorphs depending on what has the
variant forms. In the case of the stem to which the -ion affix attaches we are dealing with
stem allomorphs whereas the plural forms are affixal allomorphs.
 48 Part 1 Words

EXERCISE 2.6 Separate the affixes from the following words and divide them into inflectional and derivational
sub-classes:

singularities, neglectful, soils, deliberation, sacrifices, artificially.

2.2.3 Conversion
There is a third word-formation process which is rather difficult to deal with because
nothing happens to the lexeme’s form in the process. Look at the following pairs: N
DRINK, for example Give me a drink, V DRINK, for example She drank the water; N
JOKE, for example That’s a good joke, V JOKE, for example They joked about the
Minister of Finance; N AXE, for example I have an axe for chopping firewood, V AXE,
for example The Prime Minister decided to axe the Minister of Finance. The noun drink
and the verb drink have exactly the same form but differ in their syntactic category
and consequentially also in their meaning. Because they differ in both their syntactic
category and their meaning these pairs are different lexemes. The process which connects
conversion them is often termed conversion. Conversion is different from derivational affixation.
There we can see the way in which the new lexeme has been derived from the base
lexeme by the addition of an affix. The process has an element of directionality. But, in the
above pairs, since there is no change to the form it is hard to say which of the pair is more
basic. In some cases, the meaning helps. Drinking is semantically more verb-like, while
an axe is more noun-like. But in many cases, it is not at all obvious. How do you know
which is which in a particular context? An inflection test will generally confirm which
category it is. In They axed his job there is a past tense inflection on axe. Here axe must
be a verb.
One problematic case of conversion is that of the participles. These can be verbs but
they can also be adjectives as in a growing child and drawn blinds. Since these are not
gradable adjectives the inflection test using -er or -est will not help. The progressive parti-
ciple can also be a noun as in Walking is good exercise. Here walking is a noun but, since
it is not countable, the plural inflection test doesn’t work. For an explanation as to why
these are adjectives and nouns we have to wait until Chapter 7.
Conversion is very common in English. Take most nouns and they can be converted to
verbs. Supermarket could easily become a verb, for example We are going to be supermar-
ketting until 11 o’clock. Conversion also happens with adjectives, as the following
examples show: A YELLOW, for example a yellow tulip, V YELLOW, for example The
paper yellowed gradually; A DARK, for example a dark corner, N DARK, for example
in the dark. Even compound verbs can be converted. The verb to put someone down can
be converted into a noun, putdown.
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 49

2.3 Kinds of morphemes

Now that we have seen how inflections and derivational affixes function, we can look at
morphemes more generally so as to gain an understanding of some of their general
properties.

2.3.1 Bound and free morphemes

Some morphemes which are parts of complex lexemes are lexemes in their own right. In
the lexemes movement, lowly, and national the morphemes move, low, and nation have
this property. They are called free morphemes. Those, like -ment, that cannot stand on their free morpheme
own as lexemes, are termed ‘bound morphemes’. bound morpheme

Divide the following morphemes into free and bound sets: EXERCISE 2.7
ation, nation, pre, post, angle, ible, infra, out.

2.3.2 Stems and affixes

A second classification of morphemes involves looking at the morphemes that are tacked
on at the beginning or end of a word. It is a positional classification. The stem is usually a
free morpheme, as in the case of lovely where love is the stem of the word and a free
morpheme. However, this is not always the case. For example, in the word possible the
-ible seems to be attached to the stem poss, which is itself bound. There are other cases,
like the word cranberry where cran occurs nowhere but in this word and seems, therefore,
to be a bound stem. The bound morphemes which are attached to a set of stems are collec-
tively known as affixes, as you will recall.

Separate the affixes from the stems in the following words: EXERCISE 2.8
trains, succeeded, lighter, predetermined, retroactive, confusions, instructional.

Affixes in English have two locations where they can be attached to stems. The obvious
places are before and after the stem. In a word like recreate, the stem is create and the affix
attached at its left-hand end is re-. Affixes which attach at the left-hand end of a stem are
termed ‘prefixes’. Affixes such as -ation, which are attached at the right-hand end of stems,
are termed ‘suffixes’. One of the interesting properties of affixes is that a given affix is
50 Part 1 Words

prefix either a prefix or a suffix. It cannot be both. This is rather like a hook that the affix is
suffix provided with which is at one end only. A prefix comes equipped with hook, hooking onto
a stem at the affix’s right-hand end and a suffix hooks onto a stem at the affix’s left-hand
end. Free stems, by contrast, have no hooks. We can see that this is the case by the fact
that many stems will take both prefixes and suffixes.
What about bound stems? Since they must be attached to either an affix or another stem
to form a word, they too must come equipped with a hook. Look for example at the cran
in cranberry. It clearly hooks onto a stem to its right.

2.3.3 More on inflectional morphemes

We have seen that there is an important distinction between derivation and inflection. In
the case of derivation, an affix is involved in creating a new lexeme, whereas in the case
of inflection the affix is the realization of a set of morphosyntactic properties.
Inflections tend to appear regularly on almost all the words of a particular grammatical
class, as we saw in the previous section. You will recall that English countable nouns take
the morphosyntactic property plural, and this is often realized in the form of a plural
suffix. All English verbs can take a past tense and this morphosyntactic property is often
realized in the form of a past-tense suffix.
All inflections in English are suffixes and if a word has an inflection attached to it then
it will be the last morpheme in the word, since English only allows a single inflectional
suffix to appear on any word. Inflections never attach to bound stems.
In some cases, as we saw in the introduction to this chapter, verbs and nouns do not
have regular forms of particular morphosyntactic categories, but have what are termed
suppletive form suppletive forms, that is, completely unpredictable ones. We saw suppletion in the earlier
discussion in which we decided that word forms and lexemes had to be distinguished. The
example we used was the past tense form of the lexeme GO, namely went. This form is
suppletive.

What are the comparative and superlative forms of GOOD and BAD?

They are better and best, and worse and worst. Their form is totally unpredictable on the
basis of that of good and bad. Therefore, their formation cannot be rule-governed and so
they are also suppletive forms and must be learned.
On the other hand, sometimes words which are different in their inflectional morphology
are identical in form. As we saw in section 2.1, the perfect participle in English is often
indistinguishable in form from the past tense form. For instance, Lila has towed the boat
and Lila towed the boat have identically inflected forms of the verb TOW. In the first
sentence, tow has the perfect participle form and in the second, it has the past tense form.
We can tell this is so because, for other verbs, the two forms are different. For example,
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 51

the verb BREAK in the following two sentences has different forms: Lila has broken the
mower and Lila broke the mower. The situation where two different grammatical words
have the same inflected form is termed ‘syncretism’. Someone who wants to speak syncretism
English must learn these forms separately. Allomorphy and syncretism will therefore
create difficulties for foreign-language learners of English.

Find five further English verbs which show syncretism between the past tense and
past participle forms.

Remove all the inflectional affixes from the following passage:

The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down, went to
the window. His rooms were the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance
could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were looking out
of the lantern of a lighthouse.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The privileged man open the packet, look in, then, lay it down, went to the window.
His room were the high flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond
the clear pane of glass, as though he were look out of the lantern of a lighthouse.

You can see from this exercise that two things have happened. First, the English sounds
more telegraphic and quite ungrammatical. Also, the removal of some inflections, such as
the plural, creates a different meaning and changes other things such as the fact that the
word were is no longer the correct word to use if there is only one room. Other instances,
such as the loss of the -ing in were looking, make the sentence ungrammatical since -ing
is a necessary ending. You can see that inflectional affixes are an essential part of the
language, even in a language which has as few of them as English does.
There are varieties of English where even the few inflections which English has are
dispensed with. This happens in pidgin Englishes. In a pidgin language, usually used for
trading and basic communication, there are no inflections. For example, in Bislama, which
is now one of the national languages of Vanuatu, you might want to ask, ‘Can you tell me
of any good restaurants?’ and say, ‘Yu save talem mi eni gudfala restoron blong kakae long
hem?’ Notice that restoron has no plural.
Inflection stripping is not limited to pidgin languages. You might also have noticed that
the inflectionless text sounds like some forms of ‘foreigner talk’. When adults first begin
to learn a foreign language, they tend to leave out the inflections, particularly if they
normally speak languages like the Chinese ones which have no inflections.
 52 Part 1 Words

EXERCISE 2.9 More exercises on the structure of words.

(a) Divide the following words into their constituent morphemes by placing a plus
sign (+) between the morphemes, and indicate for each morpheme whether it is
bound or free:

cleaning lady, anti-skidding device, mushroom, nationhood, deputize,

derailments, predestination, internationalization.

(b) Indicate for each of the following words, which have been divided up into morphemes,
which are the affixes and, for each affix, what is its associated stem.

involve+ment, in+support+able, sub+profess+or+ial,

inter+sub+ject+iv+ity.

(c) A number of morphemes in the following passage are italicized. For each, say
whether it is bound or free; if bound, whether it is an inflection or a derivational
affix.

We are at once the most resilient, most resourceful, most restive, most receptive,
most radical, most reactionary people who ever lived. We have had time and the
tide for everything but those moments of thought necessary to reverse the priorities
to cause us occasionally to look before leaping.

2.4 Morphological properties

2.4.1 Existing and non-existing, possible and
impossible words
If we look again at the distinction between inflectional and derivational affixes, you will
recall that adding an inflectional affix to a stem does not make a new lexeme. There is just
the word with an affix added, whereas if we add a derivational affix to a stem then we have
a new lexeme. That enables us to make two further important distinctions. There are words
which we have stored in our brains as words, that is, words that we know. We have earlier
called these ‘lexical items’. All native English speakers are likely to know the words tree
and sister. They are words which exist in a native speaker’s lexicon, the internalized store
of words in his or her brain. Then there are words which do not exist in anyone’s brain,
perhaps – for example, the following word: insultability. There is no reason why this
should not be a lexeme of English. It just doesn’t seem to be a lexical item of English. It
is therefore a possible but non-existing word. A word like fmukg is also non-existing, but
it is also impossible in English for reasons having to do with the sequencing of its sounds,
as we will see in Chapter 5.3.2.
Not all bases for word formation need to be existing words, that is lexical items. For
example, adjectives ending in the suffix -ly can provide the base for the word formation
rule which creates words ending in the suffix -ness, for example friendliness. The number
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 53

of lexemes in a language is therefore infinite but the number of lexical items anyone
actually has stored in their brain at one time is finite.

2.4.2 Productivity
Earlier we found that some affixes appear to attach to a limited set of bases.

How many lexemes can you find ending in -hood?

You will not have found more than two dozen. However, in theory it looks as though -hood
is restricted to bases which are nouns and which are morphologically simple. So, again in
theory, -hood should attach to base lexemes such as soldier, friend, parson, nurse, and
many others. But you will be aware that soldierhood, friendhood, parsonhood, and
nursehood are not English words. So as well as the potential set of lexemes of which a
derivational morpheme might be a constituent, the actual set of lexical items that it is a
constituent of may be much smaller. By contrast, -ness attaches to adjectives and creates
nouns. It is hard to find any adjective to which it cannot attach. It therefore appears that
affixes may differ in their productivity.
Productivity can be looked at in a number of ways: -hood has a limited potential for
creating new lexemes in that it will only attach to lexemes consisting of a single morpheme,
and the lexeme must be a noun. However, the set of such lexemes is quite large. But -hood
does not form new lexemes from most of the set. In other words, its productivity, given its
potential, is quite small; -ness, however, is very productive given its potential.
Another way to look at productivity is to see how freely people use the affix in making
new lexemes. If speakers commonly use the affix in coining new words, then the affix is
productive. Sometimes this is very much a matter of time and place. In New Zealand there
have been charity events on television dubbed telethons. To raise money, clubs and
families would run cakeathons, jogathons, bathathons and many more. So, for the duration
of the fund-raising event, -athon became a productive suffix, thereafter disappearing.
Clearly productivity is a matter of degree. Some affixes may be highly productive,
some middlingly so and some may be totally unproductive, that is, never used to create
new lexemes. The prefix a- in such words as astern, adrift, and asleep is now completely
unproductive, whereas the prefix non- can be quite freely attached to adjectives.

Application
It is useful to be able to look at the morpheme structure of words because you can often get
a good idea of a writer’s style from looking at the structure of the words they use. When
words of only one morpheme are used the style will appear to be very simple, whereas if
words made up of a number of morphemes are used the style will appear to be more complex.
 54 Part 1 Words

EXERCISE 2.10 Compare the extracts below by splitting words up into morphemes. Try and come to some
conclusions about the authors’ styles.

I was away for two days at the posts. When I got home it was too late and I did not see
Miss Barkley until the next evening. She was not in the garden and I had to wait in the
office of the hospital until she came down.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050.
Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great
but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty
promises.
Greta Thunberg, Milan speech, 2021

‘Living with the virus’ is a privilege that many countries and communities around the
world cannot enjoy. Ensuring equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and treatments will
not only save lives, but will also protect the world against the emergence of new and more
dangerous variants. It is the only path to normalcy. None of us is safe until we all are.
Francesco Rocca, President of the International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

2.4.3 Diagramming word structure

Now that we have looked at both the functions of words and their internal structure, we
can put the work of the last two sections together to show the structure of words, and their
function, in diagrams. If two lexemes are put together to form another lexeme then this is
like a Chinese box arrangement with units existing within other units, as we saw in the
case of bookshelf. We can represent this structure by the use of tree diagrams, as we saw
in Chapter 1. A tree diagram for blackboard would look like the one shown in Figure 2.2.
What it shows is that we have one unit consisting of two sub-units, and these sub-units
come in a fixed order.
However, there is more to the structure of this word than just the fact that it consists of
two units in a fixed order. We also know that each unit belongs to a grammatical category,
such as noun or verb. We can add this information into the Chinese box structure and it
will look like Figure 2.3. The equivalent tree diagram would look like Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.2 Tree diagram of blackboard

 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 55

Figure 2.3 Box diagram of blackboard

Figure 2.4 Tree diagram of blackboard

Both these representations are difficult to produce on a normal keyboard and so a third
representation has been devised which essentially cuts the lines that join the ends of the
boxes in the Chinese box representation and turns the ends into square brackets, so that the
word blackboard can be represented as shown in Figure 2.5. This representation is called, labelled bracketed
rather obviously, labelled bracketed notation. notation
What about affixes? Since they are bound in a particular direction and are not
themselves lexemes, their structure in the Chinese box representation looks like that in
Figure 2.6. Notice that only the unit slow has a syntactic category and so there is no
labelled box around ly.
It follows that the tree diagram for this word will look like Figure 2.7.

Figure 2.5 Labelled bracketed notation of blackboard

Figure 2.6 Box diagram of slowly

Figure 2.7 Tree diagram of slowly

 56 Part 1 Words

The labelled bracketed form will look like this:

[adverb [adjective slow] ly]

So far, each example has consisted of only two parts. It happens that words always
consist of two parts, that is, two parts at a time. Nationalization consists of nationalize plus
-ation tacked onto it. Nationalize, in turn, consists of national plus -ize tacked on the
end of it, and so forth. The structure of this word in tree notation therefore looks like
Figure 2.8. Or in labelled bracketed notation it looks like this:

[Noun [Verb [Adjective [Noun nation] al] ize] ation]

Figure 2.8 Tree diagram of nationalization

EXERCISE 2.11 Now try to represent the following words both in tree diagrams and in labelled bracketed
notation:

(a) bookworm
(b) singer
(c) mislay
(d) tax collector
(e) physical sciences library
(f) unanalysable
(g) inexcusable
(h) internationalization
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 57

We have taken some time to introduce three different notations to represent the structure
of words because each provides a different way of visualizing the same facts, namely that
words which have internal structure consist of units, which may or may not belong to
syntactic categories and which come in a fixed order. In the case of words, such structures
are relatively simple. When we look in Chapter 7 at the structure of sentences, we will find
that the structure of sentences can be represented in the same ways, but the syntactic
categories are not just the by-now familiar lexical categories which we introduced in
section 2.1. It is well worth taking time over drawing both tree and labelled bracketed
diagrams of word structure. Doing so will help you become familiar with visualizing
linguistic structure and representing it graphically.

Further exercises
What is the grammatical category of the italicized words? EXERCISE 2.12*
Two old Daimlers were parked in a line by the traffic lights. One of them seemed to have
lost its headlights.

In each of the following words, separate the affixes from their respective stems. For each, EXERCISE 2.13*
decide whether it is a stem or an affix, bound or free, and if it is an affix, whether it is derivational
or inflectional:

derivational, headstrong, unlikely, locator beacons.

Draw tree diagrams of the structure of each word.

Study the following passage and then answer the questions given below. Take your examples EXERCISE 2.14**
from the passage.

The crowd, in general more pleased with the bull even than with the peanut vendor,
started to cheer. Newcomers gracefully jumped up on to fences, to appear standing
there, marvellously balanced, on the top railings. Muscular hawkers lifted aloft, in one
sinewy stretch of the forearm, heavy trays brimmed with multi-coloured fruits.
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Identify two compound words, name the grammatical category of each compound, and the
grammatical categories of the elements that compose it.

(Example: blackbird is a noun, made up of adjective + noun.)

(a) Identify the class-changing derivational suffixes, name the grammatical category of
the stem to which the suffix is attached and the grammatical category of the
derived word.
(b) Divide the following words into their component morphemes: newcomers,
marvellously.
 58 Part 1 Words

(c) What kind of word-formation process links the noun hawker and the verb hawk.
(d) Identify an inflectional suffix other than the plural and explain its function or
functions.

EXERCISE 2.15** Study the following passage and then answer the questions given below. Take your examples
from the passage.

The dog swam ahead, fatuously important; the foals, nodding solemnly, swayed along
behind up to their necks; sunlight sparkled on the calm water, which further downstream
where the river narrowed broke into furious little waves, swirling and eddying close
inshore against black rocks, giving an effect of wildness, almost of rapids; low over their
heads an ecstatic lightning of strange birds manoeuvred, looping-the-loop and
immelmanning at unbelievable speed, aerobatic as new-born dragonflies. The opposite
shore was thickly wooded.
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

(a) Identify three compound words. For each one, name the grammatical category of the
compound, and the grammatical category of the elements that compose it.
(Example: watertight is an adjective, made up of noun + adjective.)
(b) Divide the following words into their component morphemes, labelling each
morpheme F (free), I (inflectional), or D (derivational):
unbelievable, dragonflies.
(c) What is the function of the suffix -ly in the words fatuously, solemnly, and thickly?
(d) Identify two other words containing (different) derivational suffixes, name the
grammatical category of the stem to which the suffix is attached, and the grammatical
category of the derived word.
(e) Describe the function of the suffix -s in foals and waves, and that of the suffix -ed in
swayed and sparkled.
(f) Comment on the past tense forms swam and broke.
(g) The Collins English Dictionary contains the following entry:

Immelmann turn or Immelmann . . . n. an aircraft manoeuvre used to gain height while

reversing the direction of flight. It consists of a halfloop followed by a half roll. [C20:
named after Max Immelmann (1890–1916), German aviator.]

Comment on the word-formation processes which have led first to the inclusion of the above
expressions in the Dictionary, and secondly to the author’s use of the progressive participle
form immelmanning in line 6.
 Chapter 2 The form and function of words 59

Look carefully at the choice of vocabulary in the following passages. What differences in the EXERCISE 2.16***
styles can you discern and what do the differences in vocabulary choice suggest about the
narrators of the two stories?

Mrs Clegg was quite a decent sort, but she had a glass eye that was cracked right down
the middle, and it was funny the way she sort of looked out at you through the crack.
Her old man was out of a job and that was why she was running the joint, though seeing
she only had three rooms to let she said she wasn’t making a fortune.
When she’d fixed my bed up she took me down to the kitchen to give me the teapot,
and her old man was reading the paper, and their little girl was saying pretty boy to a
budgie that was answering her back. Though sometimes it would ring a little bell instead.
Mr Clegg told me he’d been a cook on a boat but now he couldn’t get a keel. It was
hard, he said, because he liked being at sea, though I thought by the look of him it must
have been only a coastal or even a scow he’d worked on. He was pretty red too, though
he said he hadn’t been until he’d had experience of being on relief.
Frank Sargeson, ‘That Summer’

It is perhaps an indication of the unusual features of my nature that for some days
following the party, far from finding myself melted into a state of rapturous languor, I
should find instead my mental capacities taxed by harder thinking than I had experienced
during all that year. If I continued my association with Betty and the Gower-Johnsons, I
foresaw that it would be elaborated to such a degree that my entire future might well be
involved; and apart from minor advantages, such as benefiting from Betty’s financial
generosity, I saw my problem, if it was reduced to its bare, ineluctable elements, was
nothing more or less than the same old problem which had first presented itself to me
when I had finished with being a primary school boy: that is to say, the day-to-day activities
of the environment I inhabited appeared not to be connected with what I conceived to be
my major interests.
Frank Sargeson, Memoirs of a Peon