Selfwritten Textbook BÜ English Linguistics:
1. Morphology:
Morphology is the study of words. It examines how they are created, structured and changed.
1.1 Morphology and Grammar
Orthographic words: written words preceded by a space and followed by either a space or a
punctuation mark.
Phonological words: spoken words, less easy to individually recognize since speakers don’t
usually leave pauses between their words
Linguistic sings: arbitrary (random, because all speakers of a language agree on it)
combinations of concept and sound
images
Content words: words with semantic
(lexical) content that contribute to the
meaning of the sentence they occur in,
e.g: student, book, school
Function words: words that have little
lexical meaning, and express
grammatical relationships among
other words within a sentence, or
specify the attitude or mood of the
speaker, e.g: the, from
Mental lexicon: a mental dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning,
pronunciation, syntactic characteristics etc. The mental lexicon is a construct used in
linguistics and psycholinguistics to refer to individual speakers' lexical, or word,
representations.
Word types: particular words, i.e. words of various grammatical forms, not counting words
used more than once, e.g: The sentence “The birds sang and the bells rang” has 6 word types
= The type frequency is 6.
Word tokens: occurrence of words, i.e. how often words of various grammatical forms appear,
counting words used more than once, e.g: The sentence “The birds sang and the bells rang”
has 7 word tokens = The token frequency is 7.
Lexemes: a unit of lexical meaning that serves as a base for a set of words that are related
through inflection, e.g: run, runs, ran and running all share the same lexeme “run”
Open classes: word classes that frequently adopt new members, i.e. where the speaker has the
ability to create new words
Closed classes: word classes that do not adopt new members, i.e. where the speaker does not
have the ability to create new words
