Unit 2. English Morphology: Inflectional and Derivational
Morphology
Part 1. Problems with the term “word”: Lexemes, word-forms and
grammatical forms
Exercise 1.
Read the following text and answer the questions that follow:
Certainly a word meaning depends on
something
inside the head. The other day I came across
the word
sidereal
and had to ask a literate companion what it meant. Now I can
understand and use it when the companion is not around (it means “pertaining to the
stars”, as in
a sidereal day
, the time it takes for the Earth to make a complete revolution
relative to a star). Something in my brain must have changed at the moment I learned the
word, and someday cognitive neuroscientists might be able to tell us what that change is.
Of course most of the time we don’t learn a word by looking it up or asking someone to
define it but by hearing it in context. But however a word is learned, it must leave some
trace in the brain. The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in
the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it, and
for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to (Steven Pinker
The Stuff of Thought
2007: 9).
1. Give the number of words in terms of
types
and
tokens
.
Types: 98
Tokens: 180 - 186
2. Identify the lexemes and the word forms. Mention any difficult example.
Exercise 2.
Katamba (1994: 20) states that the distinction between word-forms and
lexemes is one on which word-play in puns and intentional ambiguity in everyday life
depends. Where does the humour lie in the following exchange in a restaurant? Check
a dictionary if necessary.
Customer:
‘Waiter, do you serve shrimps’?
Waiter:
‘We serve anyone, sir. We don’t mind what size you are’.
In this first sentence we can see that the customer is asking to the waiter if they serve
shrimps, whereas in the second one the uses irony to say that they serve anyone,
because the customer does not specifies it.
There is 1 word form, and 2 lexemes.
