¡Descarga English Language: Understanding Morphemes, Compounds, and Dictionaries y más Apuntes en PDF de Teatro solo en Docsity!
Activity 1.
English monolingual dictionaries do not provide
separate entries for words like the plural debts for
nouns, or the past tense walked for verbs. However,
they may have an entry for brethren and another one
for walking. Can you think of any particular reason for
this?
Walking : it is the sentence subject. It is a noun. Brethren : It's the other plural from brothers and it has a religious meaning too.
Activity 1.
Discuss the arguments in these two quotations from
Atkins and Rundell’s The Oxford Guide to Practical
Lexicography (2008: 2):
All dictionaries are incomplete, and come under the
heading “work in progress”. And just as there is no
such things as a perfect dictionary, there is equally, no
“right” way to produce a dictionary.
It means that "work in progress" is like it isn't complet and that's because there are news words always so we can't do a complet dictionary.
Activity 2.
Quirk et al. (1985: 1569) have commented on the
variability of compounds in writing. Some English
compounds even show three alternative forms, like flower
pot , flower- pot , flowerpot. Differences may be due to
different standards; American English speakers prefer to
write language retarded , while British English speakers
prefer language-retarded. There may be other reasons
which account for these orthographical differences.
Examine then ten more compound in a contemporary
English corpus [we suggest the British National Corpus
(BNC)] to decide whether these differences are frequent or
infrequent. Note that the BNC just represents the British
English variety.
Activity 3.
Read this short paragraph and answer the questions below:
Pilon nodded his head in the dark and spoke with a quiet
philosophy. “It is seldom that one finds all things at one
market – wine, food, love and firewood. We must
remember Torrelli, Pablo, my friend. There is a man to
know. We must take him a little present sometime.” [John
Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat 1935]
1.How many words are there in this text? 50 words. 2.How many lexemes did you count? 52 lexemes. 3.How many word forms and grammatical words did you find? 21 word forms and 8 grammatical words. 4.Draw up a list with open-class items and another one with closed-class items. Open-class items: Pilon, dark, quiet, philosophy, man, is, finds, things, market, present, food, love, take, firewood, remember. Closed-class items: his, the, my, and, with, it, is, seldom, him, one, all, at, one, we, must, there, to, sometime, that.
5. Did you experience any particular difficulties in counting words? yes, when I had to find the forms and grammatical words.
Activity 4.
Read the paragraph below and group the morphemes you see according to the various classifications mentioned in this section. Try to find explanation for cases where morphemic segmentation is difficult: Twins separated at birth and adopted by separate parents later married each other without realizing they were brother and sister,
you perform corpus searches, or consult the internet to prove this point?
- ity : it is a noun suffix that is formed from adjectives. - ness : It is used to make nouns from adjectives, but not every adjective can be modified in this way. they can be added to bases with – ed too.
Activity 5.
Consider how the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an are used in speech and decide whether you would classify their different phonological realizations as allomorphs. I suggest that you use Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. You will have to provide examples to prove your arguments. a/an: these indefinite article are use for the same thing, but "a" is put before words that begins with consonant, (e.g: a bus, a beer) and "and" is put before wirds which start with a vowel (e.g: an article, an egg).
Activity 5.
The English words battleship and scholarship have a second element , - ship, which is apparently the same. Use your morphological knowledge to decide whether – ship represents one or two different morphemes. Secondly, decide whether resulting words , battleship and scholarship are compounds or derived words.
- battleship: it means "barco de guerra".
- scholarship: it means "beca en el colegio".
- ship: it means a different thing depending on the world that you put with it.
Activity 5.
Read this fragment from Denning, Kessler and Leben (2007: 14) and find 5 words corresponding to each of the two morphemes or morphs that are being discussed (one of them implicitly) by the authors. In the light of your results discuss the need of distinguishing between morphemes, morphs and homonymic morphs:
We should not expect that every word that contains the letter of one of these elements does in fact contain that element. For example, a bicycle is not a living wheel; that word begins with another morpheme, the prefix meaning “two”. On occasion we explicitly point out homographic morphemes, but even when we do not, you should always keep your eye open for them.
How many words are there in PDE? I can't found it, there are a lot of words and it's too difficult to count them.
How can they be counted? (Dictionaries, corpora) We can count them in the dictionaries.
Is there agreement among scholars? No, some of them count the derivations of some words and anothers not.
Is Spanish vocabulary richer or poorer? I think richer, we have more derivations or conjugations for the verbs, etc. BIBLIOGRAPHY: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ http://www.longmandictionariesonline.com/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv230.shtml
