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Morphosyntax and Lexis Riassunti + link delle slides - Elena Hu CHAPTER – ENGLISH WORDS Estimating the size of the English vocabulary English has a large lexicon and it’s difficult to count how many words there are in English. The vocabulary reflects the political, economic, cultural and social events in the histories of its speakers. On one hand contacts with other languages have contributed to the buildup of a diverse word-stock. On the other hand no single dictionary can record both archaic words and recent neologism, all the dialect and slang words or all the words used in specialized fields. In addition it’s difficult to decide when a words had become “naturalized”, therefore it’s an open question whether words like tsunami(japanese), divan(arabic) should be included in the counts of the English word- stock, though they are entries of the OED Oxford English Dictionary. The estimated number of entries in the “unabridged” dictionary of English ranges between 300,000 to 450,000 entries. Compounds are collected together in a section or group of sections at or near the end of entry, they are also followed by a quotation paragraph where examples are presented. Derivatives are typically entred as the final section of an entry and followed by a quotation paragraph with example of usage. An adult educated speaker 10,000 to 60,000 words range Core and Periphery The parameters that characterize each lexical item in the language are: frequency grammatical type meaning etymology phonological structure The most frequent words form the core of the vocabulary, shared by all adult speakers. Outward from the core there are layers of words of decreasing frequency and familiarity. o The core-periphery distribution of the vocabulary can be represented as a series of concentric circles, where the nucleus is composed of the essential words without which sentence composition or basic communication would be unthinkable. o The core vocabulary is composed of items of high frequency: the innermost circle that represents the 1000 most frequent words in the language. The core includes lexemes which form the structural backbone of syntax, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns, quantifiers, determiners. (function words) The Brown Corpus is a database that is composed of words extracted from 500examples of texts of different genres and the frequency ranking is headed by function words: the, be, of,and,in. The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus in which all of the 50 most frequent words are function words. The BNC British National Corpus is a hundred times larger than the Brown and LOB corpora, the frequency list reveal differences between spoken and written English. The Core vocabulary is made up of functionally and semantically indispensable words, these words are also etymologically near-homogeneous and morhopologically simple, while the outer circles present a more diverse picture. Etymologically the core vocabulary is predominantly German, only 4 of the top-ranked one hundred words in the Brown Corpus are “foreign”.
According to a recent study the composition of the core vocabulary has been changing in favour of borrowings,half of the word in the British national Corpus BNC are non-Germanic. The core lexicon includes function words and common words such as water,food,sleep, and is predominantly native in origin. Lexemes covering more complex notions such as capitalism, elegant, psychoanalysis are in the outer frequency layers and loanwords. Loanwords are words from the realm of ideas, art,science, technology and specialized discourse generally, they are located in the more peripheral layers. Another denominator for the core and periphery lexicon is their syllable structure: 93% of the first 100words in the Brown Corpus are monosyllabic words and the remaining are two syllables words. The paths and Perils of the Borrowing words The origin of the 10,000 most frequent words are divided into:
- Old english
- French
- Latin
- Other germanic languages
- Other languages The vocabulary of English is thus a blend of indigenous words and loanwords; the affixes used to form new words are also of mixed origin. Words like phanter, giraffe,tsunami,kiwi, volcano,mahjong and the names of exotic animals enter the the language as mono-morphemic items and the interaction between these items and the native word-stock is phonogical. Apart from that, these borrowings tend to preserve their formal and semantic identity and independence. A different type of borrowing duplicates the native lexicon partially, the duplicate can correspond to the pre-existing word etymologically and semantically. The degree of overlap between the earliest form and meaning, the ETYMON, and the current form and meaning is largely unpredictable. The borrowed version of the shared original etymon can appear in phonogical forms (for example the penultimate stress in December) and with native processes (vowel shift in labor,decade and stress shift in category). Phonological and semantic variability is not restricted to pairs of Germanic and Classical or French word, it can happen also when two germanic languages come in contact, as was the case with Old English and Old Norse. The Old Norse members of pairs like kirk-church, skirt-shirt are. the result of such borrowing that share root-initial stress. Different phonological shapes of the same etyological input can sometimes be due entirely to differences within the non-Germanic donor languages, as in the pairs debt-debit, frail-fragile. The members of such pairs were borrowed at different times. Moreover words that had alreadt been borrowed from French in Middle English were sometimes re- borrowed from Latin, resulting in duplication of the original meaning, some examples are: sever/separate, spice/species,sure/secure. The duplication of meaning is when a language has a word for a particular notion and a new word is added which has a similar meaning but a completely different shape, the resulting pair or set of words will be partial syonyms. The most typical case is the expansion of a semantic set by the historical addition of Romance loanwords which duplicate meanings alread covered by Germanic lexems: freedom-liberty, feed-nourish,top-summit. In these sets the first word goes back to Old English.
The Norman Conquest and its effect on the composition of the lexicon The Norman conquest in 1066 (one thousand sixtysix) put the vocabulary of English onto a non-Germanic track. The minority spoke little English and maintained strong cultural and lingustic ties to Normandy for at least a century and a half. After the beginning of the thirteenth century the Anglo-Norman nobility became more “English” but Latin and Anglo-Norman/Old french continued to be the 2 dominant language in the administrative and legal scene. The French influence on English was through cultural superiority and words were borrowed from: medicine,art,science,law,government,artchitecture,literature. Lexicon from legal,administrative,military, and politics often paralled existing English words: council, liberty, tax,defense,navy,soldier. in the Middle English lexicon there were changes in the phonemic inventory(list of items):
- borrowed /v/ initial words valentine
- /z/ initial words zodiac,zone Contributed to the phonemicization of the voiced velar spirants /v/ and /z/ Later, there was the palatalization of s+ion,-ure occasion, measure.
- The Romance vocabulary also contributed to the higher frequency of the palatal fricative and the affricates. Words borrowed with palatal consonants include: chapel,passion,catch,cheer,gentle. All of these loans were early enough to feel completely “naturalized” today. Moreover for disyllabic words borrowed early, the stress Is on the initial syllable of the word: fortune, language, mercy, moral. The nativization of French borrowings with heavy suffixes such as -ance, -ence, -esse, ité, -ment was a more complex process. The Renaissance and after The two centuries following the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476 one thousand four hundred seventy six, stand out as the period of most rapid vocabulary growth in the history of the language. Latin and Greek continued to be perceived as obligatory components of good education. The Renaissance classical borrowings entered the language largely in their original form, some words borrowed from Latin such as curriculum and exclusive and also words from the fields of mathematics, botany, geometry,biology and medicine. Everday words were also adopted and became quickly part of the vocabulary: virus,frequency,plus. Greek words came through Latin or French : atheism,dogma,chaos,drama Direct borrowings from Greek are: catastrophe,lexicon,syllabus. Italian borrowings: stanza,gondola,vermicelli,baazar,fresco,balcony. Dutch: bully, pickle,yatch Spanish: potato,siesta,negro,masquerade The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are marked by rapid increase of the vocabulary, the leading source of that period is French, followed by Spanish, though neo-classical vocabulary continued to created (agglomerate,invertebrate). Once again counting the size of a lexicon is a difficult task.
Recent Acquisitions: Second Half of the Twentieth Century Over the last century, the proportion of borrowed words has decreased, in spite of international contacts. The flow nowadays is from English to other languages but of course this doesn’t stop English from borrowing words when needed. New words and borrowings have been charted in a single source Cannon Cannon provides an exhaustive analysis of 13,683 words corpus. Borrowings consitute only 7. percent of the total and Latin was the most common source. Now French loans are the most common, followed by Japanese, Spanish, Italian and other languages. Borrowing is not the only source of new words. New technologies sometimes bring new words. In the second half of the twentieth century the fields of biotechnology and cmputer science exploded with new lexicon. The Internet has also generated and endless list of abbreviations such as HTML HyperText Markup Language or PDF Portable Document Format. 18% of Cannon is composed of shortening items 24% of Cannon is the category of additions (suffixes,prefixes) CHAPTER – VOCABULARY SIZE, TEXT COVERAGE AND WORD LISTS How much vocabulary does a second language learner need? It’s important to know how many words there are in the target language and how many words a native speaker know but also how many words are needed to do things. Vocabulary knowledge is only one component of language skills such as reading and speaking. Vocabulary knowledge enables (rende possibile) language use and language use enables the increase of the vocabulary knowledge and so on. How many words are there in English? To answer this question you just have to look at the numbers of words in the largest dictionary. The vocabulary of the language is a changing entity with new words and old words falling into disuse. There’s also the problem in deciding if the word “walk” as a noun is the same as the word “walk” as a verb and if names like Nottingham should be counted as words. The vocabulary of Webster’s Third International Dictionary is the largest non-historical dictionary of English, which has around 54,000 word families. How many words do native speakers know? There have been published many reports of the vocabulary size of native speakers English, behind most of these studies lies the idea that the vocabulary size is a refletction of how educated, intelligent or well read a person is. A large vocabulary size is seen as something valuable. “What should be counted as a word?” and “How do we see if a word is known or not?”, these questions has resulted in several study which give very diverse and misleading results Native speakers are expected to add roughly 1000 word families each year to their vocabulary size, that means that a 5year old will have a vocabulary of 4000 word families and a university graduate a vocabulary of around 20,000 word families. A small study of the vocabulary growth of non-native speakers suggests that a non-native spekaer’s vocabulary grows at the same rate as native speakers but the initial gap that existed in the two groups is not closed. However another study has shown that vocabulary growth can occur if the learning is done in the second language environment. The average growth in vocabulary per person in this study, approached a rate of 2500 words per year.
Wide range means that the word occurs not just in one or two disciplines such as economics or mathematics but across a wide range of disciplines. Some items are: index, job, labour, formulate, modify, negative, quote, objective, idenfity, random. The UWL is a word list for learners with specific purposes, namely academic reading. The purpose behind it was to create a list of high frequency words for learners with academic purposes. Word frequency lists Frequency information provides a rational basis for making sure that learners get the best return to their vocabulary effort by ensuring that words studied will be met often. The making of a frequency list is not simply a mechanical task, there are also factors that need to be considered in the development of a resource list of high frequency words:
- Representativeness : the spoken and written corpora used should cover a range of representative text types.
- Frequency and range: a word should not become part of general service list just because it occurs frequently, it should occur frequently in a wide range of texts.
- Word families: the list needs to make use of a sensible set of criteria regarding what forms and uses are counted as being members of the same family
- Idioms and set expressions : some items larger than a word behave like high frequency words. They occur frequently as multi-words such as “good morning”, “never mind”.
- Range of Information: a high list of frequency words need to include the following information for each word, the word family, the meaning of the word, variations of meaning and collocations and relative frequency and uses. The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary include much of this information.
- Other criteria : West found that frequency and range alone are not sufficient criteria for deciding what goes into a word list and one of the interesting findings in COBUILD project was that different forms of a word often behave in different way and express different shades of meaning. CHAPTER – LEXICOGRAPHY Introduction Lexicography, the central and original use of the term is with reference to the writing of dictionaries. Lexicograpy is the study of dictionaries and of their use, more precisely called dictionary research, academic lexicography/metalexicography. Definitions: Dictionary typology It’s difficult to talk about lexicography without first considering what a dictionary is. To the publisher and to the public, dictionary can mean merely “an alphabetically arranged reference work” that suggests clear explanation, authority and exhaustiveness. In reality, encyclopaedia is often used in the same way, but dictionary may have the edge over encyclopaedia in commercial publishing because there is no necessity to chose between spelling variants. To the lexicographer, dictionary mean “ a reference work dealing with words” thus often including theusaruses, but simply excluding encyclopaedia. We can categorize dictionaries according to their intended users. There are bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, but also college dictionaries, beginner’s dictionaries, advanced dictionaries and so on. Dictionaries are sometimes grouped by size: they can be for desk, pocket, mini, super-mini, concise, compact, unabridged.
Dictionary research Which dictionaries are of interest to dictionary researchers? researchers have tended to concentrate on dictionaries published before 1830, the Oxford English Dictionary OED, and modern monolingual learner’s dictionaries. Dictionary history An early area of dictionary research was the history of the English dictionary. No one has yet produced anyting to rival Starnes and Noyes’s English dictionary, but several recent publications have supplemented it, including Hullens’s theusaruses, Cowie’s learner’s dictionaries, and Gotti’s and Coleman’s studies of slang dictionaries. Dictionary researchers are also broadening the scope of their field chronologically and textually. Textually, historical dictionary studies are developping their understanding of the relationship between early monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. Learners’ dictionaries Dictionary research has suggested that monolingual learners’ dictionaries are more useful to users, because they can provide more and better targeted information about the language to be learned. Cowie identifies 3 generations of monolingual dictionaries: The first generation defined english words using a restricted range of vocabulary, the second generation was marked by its interests in phraseology, and the third by the use of computer technology. User-perspective The interests of the dictionary-user have also become an important focus in recent dictionary research. Many user- perspective dictionary studies have concentrated on leaners’ dictionaries, both bilingual and monolingual. They consider how and why learners of English consult dictionaries, and how the dictionaries should be designed to ensure that their users can locate the information contained within them. Computer corpora Advancements in IT have played a large part in the development of lerners’ dictionaries. There’s a distinction between computational linguistics(the building of lexicons for natural language processing), computational lexicography(the production or use of machine-readable dictionaries) and computer corpus linguistics(the principle and practice of compiling bodies of electronic texts of actual language). The use of language corpora has revolutionized the production of dictionaries like the Collins COBUILD, and Longman leaners’ dictioanries: instead of beginning with a word-list, the compilers collect texts and recordings of English in use to ensure that they reflect actual usage rather than lexicographers’ preconceptions or linguistic history. Dictionaries as cultural products dictionaries are cultural products and politcal tools. Cultural biases in dictionaries are evident in their selection of headwords, usage labels, and citations, in the wording of definitions and ordering of senses, and even in their willingness to give etymologies from particular language soruces. A modern example is the production of dictionaries of Canadian English, which have being important in defining a sense of national identity. Dictionaries and the internet There have always been non-scholarly dictionaries, but there has been nothing to compare with the exploxion in online dictionaries. A dictionary no longer have a fixed form. The online version of the OED Oxford English Dictionary for example, adds new and revised entries four times a year. Although readers were encouraged to submit material to the OED for inclusion even when it was being edited on paper, online sites make this process easier and more immediate.
Coverage of senses Most of the modern dictionaries recognize the bilingual dictionary as a distinctly different type of reference work, to the extent in some cases, of providing it with a separate numbered definition. The OED list several senses that none of the other dictionaries include, largely because they are rare or obsolete. The OED tend to order its senses chronologically, because it’s a historical dictionary. Partridge list only one use, which none of the other dictionaries has, his purpose is to record slang. Both Hartmann and James and OED have discursive paragraphs on the history and typology of the dictionary and distinguis dictionary from closely related items. While admitting that there is a limited range of ways in which a single word can be defined, there is a marked similiarity between the Chambers definition and Johnson’s. Dictionary entries Dictionaries provide a wide range of different types of information about the words they list. The only feature they all share is the headword. Etymologies a feature important enough to some lexicographers to be included in their definition of dictionary, are excluded from most of the modern works. Even definitions are not essential, Harraps and Partridge instead provide a synonym in French or standard English. Citations The 3 dictionaries in this selection include illustrative citations in order to illuminate changes in the practice of lexicography. Johnson’s used earlier dictionaries as the foundation of his work and unlike earlier lexicographers he illustrated his entries systematically with citations showing the words in use. Johnson is an example of prescriptive dictionary, one that tell its users how the language should be used. The OED on the other hand, is descriptive: to show how the language actually is used. Murray the editor, encouraged the public to send him citations from their own reading. An estimated 5million citations from this reading programme are in the first edition of the OED. Individual entries show chronological coverage and common connotations. There are a number of criticism of the OED’s use of citations, and in the later development of dictionaries, including the OED itself. Collins COBUILD overcomes the problem of the OED by using vast databanks. Lexicographers no longer piece together their entries from snippets of text, they now have access to examples of words in use in thousands of entire works at the touch of a button. The 3rd^ edition of the OED makes use of a wider range of text types, particularly newspapers and magazines but it’s still largely based on written English. Market Forces We shouldn’t forget that most dictionaries are commercial products and have to meet market demand. An example of clash between lexicographic theory and customer’s wishes came with the publication of the 3rd edition of Webster’s dictionary of American English. Lexicographers shy away from prescriptive pronouncements, publishers still provide this area of the market in the shape of dictionaries of hard words and usage guides. Modern lexicographers are very reluctant to use prescriptive lables (bad,vulgar,base), but not to indicate the social connotations to swear-words, racist, sexist and homophobic vocabulary, would be to do a disservice to their buyers. Summary
Lexicography and dictionary research are undergoing major changes, largely because of developments in IT. For dictionary-makers as well as dictionary-users, computers, and Internet, offer previously unimaginable possibilities. At the same time the market for dictionaries of English in book-form continue to grow. CHAPTER - ONLINE DICTIONARIES OF ENGLISH Robert Lew, Adam mickiewicz University Abstract In this paper an overview spectrum of available online English language is dictionaries and some general comments on a few selected kew issues are presented. The first notable category for many learners of English wordwide, are the famous british monolingual leaners’ dictionaries (The Big Five). It’s interesting to observe the gradual transition to the online medium in what has been calld the freemium approach. Quality general English dictionaries aimed at the native speaker are not well presented but there are a wide choice of specialized dictionaries. How to tap the richness of the web but present results in a user-friendly manner without laborius human intervention is a tough question. Another issue is the organization of access to data in online dictionaries. Even in highly respected dictionaries, there are still basic problem of access. Robert Lew believes that the dictionary is like an advanced query system sitting on top of a text corpus. Introductory The present paper is intended as an overview of online dictionaries of English, often seen as the leading lexicographic tradition of the present. Classifying dictionaries has tradionally been problematic. This has become even more of a challenge in the age of electronics dictionaries. What could be then, the basic classifying criteria for online dictionaries? clearly most of the traditional criteria can still be applied to online products. Some additional criteria for classifying online dictionaries
- Institutional vs. collective: in terms of involvement there’s the institutional versus the collective opposition, the latter category is a collaborative effort by a community of non-professionals, who can themselves be dictionary users
- Free vs. paid: collective dictionaries are normally free to use, whereas institutional dictionaries aren’t necessarily free.
- Number of dictionaries : individual dictionaries which are single online dictionary, dictionary sets consisting of clusters of related dictionaries, dictionary portals that include hyperlink to actual dictionaries and dictionary aggregators that paste together the contenet of various dictionaries and serve them in a single page. Institutional dictionaries General English Dictionaries: provide a relatively rich microstructural treatment of contemporary English, which is traditionally expected from general reference desk dictionarries, and where the word list is not restricted by domain or register. American: Merriam-Webster online dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Random House Unabridged Dictionary are available online free of charge British : The Oxford University press created a lexicographic portal online, built around the 3rd edition of Oxford dictionary of english and The New Oxford American Dictionary. These oxford dictionaries are free of charge but this offer is used as an opportunity to market and sell extra content.
data from the English WordNwet lexical database. One interesting way in which WordNet data is used is graphic visualization enines such as VisuWords. SOME ISSUES IN ONLINE DICTIONARIES the dictionary web dictionary.com is an example of dictionary resource which doesn’t rely on its own data, instead aggregates lexicographic content from other online dictionaries. The resource aggregates content from 15dictionaries, including the Random House Dictionary and American Heritage Dictionary. Another aggregator is TheFreeDictionary and Collins English Dictionary. These dictionary portals produce long entries by mechanically pasting together, back-to-back, entries from several online dictionaries. Access electronic dictionaries, including online dictionaries are often praised for their access funcionality, wich is claimed to be superior compared to paper book form. The electronic interface is more flexible and has a potential for efficiency that it’s not achievable in printed form, but it’s also true that this potential is not always properly used, especially if the online dictionary is retrospectively digitalized. One example of a dictionary with paper-like access is the American Heritage Dictionary. The step-wise approach to outer access? Hulstijn and Atkins proposed a step-wise access for electronic dictionaries. The spectrum of actual solution in English online dictionaries can essentialy be reduced to three options:
- a menu of target items is presented
- a menu is presented but most likely choice opens by default
- partial entries are listed The first option is the most common, and Macmillan Dictionary online is an example. Here the word team returns a vertical menu of nine matches, each one hyperkinked to an entry: team NOUN team VERB ecc. ecc. The second option features in the Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, where a search for team produces a list of seven items. The third option in the online dictionary at myCOBUILD.com, the approach is an intermediate one between the first and second option, it’s the optimal option but only a few dictionaries have adopted it. Customization and profiling in online english dictionaries a recent study has shown that the first dictionary use ever to employ eye tracking, confirms the suspicion that dictionary users differ gretly in their consultation habits and strategies. The realization and expectation lies behind the the effort to vary or customize e-dictionaries. Oxford English Dictionary online has control buttons to display or hide away pronunciations, spellings, etymology, quotations, data chart, additions. Macmillan English Dictionary Online offer two pre-packaged presentantion modes which can be selected to show less or show more, located next to the lemma sign. However synonym links are still included. User profiling is one of the highlights in the new Louvain EAP dictionary now in development, where the contenet presented depends on the user-selected native language and discipline of interest. Multimedia online dictionaries online dictionaries can potentially include a range of multimedia content. The potential is utilized in online dictionaries of English to varying degrees.
Graphics graphic elements aren’t only the domain of electronic dictionaries, however pictorials are more easily and cheaply included in electronic dictionaries. An example is Cambridge dictionaries online or Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Audio it’s becoming increasingly popular for online dictionaries of English to offer audio recordings of entry words. One novel use of audio is to present characteristics sounds associated with the entry word. Such recordings are also available in the free Macmillan English Dictionarry online, the users can hear sounds produced by musical instruments under the headwords. Video and animation video contenent is becoming mainstream on the web. However, english online dictionaries haven’t really embraced the video technology so far. Dictionaries, corpora and lexical databases WordNet is often referred to as a “dictionary”, even though it’s a lexical database. If we look at the recent history of dictionary-making, we se the growing role of information technology and structured data: corpora, databases. The current trend is towards a clearear separation of the data layer from presentation. ForbetterEnglish.com uses the SketchEngine and GDEX technologies to automatically produce entries. Another corpus-based online resource is JusttheWord, which is capable of correcting unnatural word combinations. Strong tea for example is the idiomatic phrase that a learner of english would use instead of powerful tea. The information provided by Justtheword is very useful and relevant, and it may be hard to believe that this output has been computed fully automatically. Summary and Conclusion We have seen that a great variety of dictionaries exist, but without proper guidance users run the risk of getting lost in the riches. It’s surprising to see that many of the online dictionaries are still costrained by the paper model. Moreover with dictionary aggregators, users may get flooded with irrelevant information and more generally the use of search engines present a risk of dictionaries being marginalized. CHAPTER – COMPOUNDS AND MINOR WORD-FORMATION TYPES Introduction Most word-formation in English is done through the 3 processes of prefixation,suffixation,and compounding. Some internal modification (umlaut,ablaut) is generally seen as supporting inflectional affixation, while other sub-types (stress-shift,consonant change) are seen as supporting derivational morphology. Two other types, back-formation and conversion (also known as zero-derivation and functional shift) are seen as closely related to derivational affixation This chapter deals first with compounds and then with other minor-types of word-formation which aren’t clearly morphological in nature. These are all extremely frequently used methods of forming new lexical items in modern English. There are differences between compounds and these minor word-formation types. The most obvious one is the regularity which is usually attributed to compounding, whereas the formal irregularity is often see as characterizing the minor word-formation types This is sometimes characterized as a distinction between the productivity of compounding (implying rule-governed behaviour) as opposed to the creativity of other types (implying the predominance of analogy and other processes which aren’t rule-governed)
The phonology of compounds The stress difference is often taken to be a defining one in terms of English compounds. Words typically have a single stress while black bird has the possiblity of two stresses. There’s a semantic difference between black bird and blackbird. The first one provide a description of a set of birds, blackbirds provides a classification of birds. In black bird, black is a gradable adjective, and in blackbird black is non-gradable. In particular, compound verbs derived by backformation like baby-sit or by conversion like carbon- copy, retain the stress of the words from which they are derived. We still lack a good theory of how stress is assigned to compound items and although we often find first element stress in things we wish to call compounds, there is little evidence that first element stress is necessary in compound structure. The lexical structure of compounds There is no lexical restriction of the words which can be compounded. Indeed many scholars have commented that any sequence of noun and noun, for instance, can be given an interpretation as compound. The grammatical structure of compounds Compounds in English have the structure lexemic-base+lexemic-base+inflection. Specifically this includes inflections from positions which are compoundinternal, although compounds with more than two elements have been admitted in the definition, no such examples have been provided. It seems that longer compounds such as railway timetable can always be broken down into nested compounds. Internal plurals The general rule with English compounds is that the modifying (left-hand) element occurs in the stem form. However some things which otherwise look like compounds have the modifying element marked as plural. Teeth is a plurarl form and it is also irregular. a modifying noun can be submodified by an adjective library book, a white library book is an example, but there are exception like hot-air ballon and black market prices. Internal possessives We can find things that look like compounds except that they have internal possessivenesss: cat’s-paw, cat’s-tail alongside compounds like cat-walk, cat door. We should note that while these things are written as possessives, we can say that they cointain a linking -s- which in some cases could also be interpreted as plural. Second we should note that possessives marked by –‘s are more usual with humans and animated than with inanimates. Non-predicate adjectives non-predicate adjectives usually don’t occur in predicative position. These adjectives are often derived from nouns and aren’t gradable. when they occur in attributive position, they sometimes have a function equivalent to that of the related noun. For example atomic bomb and atom bomb denote the same thing, as do tooth decay and dental decay and so on. Levi argues that these two constructions are equivalent constructions, to be dealt with in the grammar in the same way. In most istances, If there’s an attributive adjective, it’s used and a noun is used in those cases where no attributive adjective can be found Headness For most compounds nouns and verbs, the notion of headness in compounds is uncontroversial.
A money belt refers to a type of belt, and it’s clearly right-headed. However there are a set of compounds where the rules doesn’t apply so easily. The first of these types is called BARUHVRIHI, compounds like red-head which denote neither a type of head nor a type of red. Rather they denote a person who has a read head. Because they denote something which has the named feature, these are sometimes termed POSSESSIVE COMPOUNDS or EXOCENCTRIC COMPOUNDS, because their head I smissing and is external to the compound itself. In red-head the element read modifies the element head. So these compounds do have a grammatical head, although it doesn’t always determine the inflection class of the compound as a whole. These heads shows only some of the typical feature of the heads, we might call them SEMI-HEADS. There are a few compounds which are left-headed. Forms such as whomever, model T. When we come to compound adjectives it’s difficult to discuss their headness at all pass-fail text, no-drug behavious. We can keep the label of compound adjective for those formations which clearly have an independent existence outside the longer compound construction. Sky-blue can occur in many construction as an adjectival head, but pass-fail is restricted to a premodifier. Neo-classical compounding Neo-classical compounding is the formation of words like genocide,psychology which are created using elements from the classical laguages Latin and Greek. There are number of question about neo-classical compounds in English, none of which has received a satisfactory answer. First they are termed compounds, and there is some justification in this in their headness but it’s not clear if they should be treated alongside compounds rather than as a separate type of word- formation So alongside native compounds like redfish we find neoclassical compounds rhododendron, alongside those like wolf-spider we find lycanthrope. Moreover it’s not clear whethere there is a fixed set of morphonemic adjustments that must be made when the elements are juxtaposed, or whether the morphonemics simply reflect those in the classical languages. THE SEMANTICS OF COMPOUNDING Endocentric compound nouns Compounds that cointan an element whose base is verbal, there is increasing evidence that this verb plays a large part in determining the semantics of the compound as a whole. For example in deer hunting, where hunting is a word containing a verbal base, deer is an argument of the verb. In deer hunter, deer is an argument of the verb but also the subject of the verb which is present in the -er suffix In alcohol-dependent, alcohol is again an argument of the verb depend So the interpretation of the compound is determined by the grammatical pattern available for the verb to some extent In sky-diving the interpretation of the noun doesn’t appear to be costrained by the syntactic possibilities of the verb. Rather the relationships between the elements appears to be much freer. For Instance a city surveyor could be a person who surveys cities. For some scholars there is a finite list of relationships which may hold in those instances where there is no verb costraining the relationship. For example Levi lists 12, others suggests that no such list can capture all the possible relationships between the elements of compounds. Coordinative compounds
Nylon is a word that shows the problem Nylon was first used in 1938, rayon had been in use for 14 years, and both of them resonate with cotton and chiffon. Although it seems unlikely that any resonance with words like lemon,moron, was inteded there may have been some from what were, at the time, relatively scientifict terms like ergon and proton. It’s clear that word-manufacture is the creation of words without any influence from meaningful sub-parts of the words. Clipping Clipping refers to the shortening of some word while the original meaning is retained. Clipping doesn’t create lexemes with new meanings, but lexemes with a new stylistic value. Examples are coon (raccoon), deb (debutante), flu (influenza), mike (microphone), phone (telephone), which show that the material which is removed may come from the beginning of the word, the end or both. That it’s not always the semantic head of the word which is retained and that a compound or phrase may be clipped to provide a single clipping. We may distinguish terminology between FORECLIPPINGs, BACK-CLIPPINGS AND AMBICLIPPINGS. clippings are frequently given additional suffixal material, which has the effet of lenghtening them again. These EMBELLISHED CLIPPINGS are regionally variable in their productivity, Austrial English is perhaps particulary open to their use. These embellished clippings are reminiscent of hypocoristics or pet names. Liz might be a clipping of Elizabeth, and Fred an embellished clipping of Frederick. Surprisingly speakers of English keep inventing new ways to make up hypocoristics. Clippings may be compounded with each other to give CLIPPING COMPOUNDS, such as kidvid (kid’s video), humint (human intelligence), spag (spaghetti bolognese). Alphabet soup There is a whole range of letter-based word -formation patterns, many of which merge into one another. The term alphabetism is used for this set of formations. An INITIALISM is one type of alphabetism. The initial letters of the words in a phrase are taken to replace the phrase. thus we can find examples such as: FBI federal bureau of investigation, PC portable computer, UN united stations. Where the initial lettes of an original are such as to provide something which can be pronounced as a word, and this option is taken, we have an acronym An ACRONYM, is an initialism which is pronounced according to a ordinary grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. UNESCO united nations educational scientific and cultural organization initialism and acronyms function as nouns and adjectives. They don’t appear to be used as verbs, and they’re not used as prepositions Blending BLENDS or portmanteau words as Humpty Dumpty called them, are lexemes made out of phonological arts of two other words, with the parts which remain from the originals being determined purely phonogically without any reference to morphs. smog (smoke+fog) , motel (motor+hotel) in some ways, blends looks like clipping compounds, and indeed the two are often treated as a single phonemenon. However we can make a dintinction by definition. in a clipping compound, the first part of both words in the original is represented in the new form, in a blend the first part of the original and the last part of the second word in the original are represented in the new form. Sitcom (situational comedy) is a clipping compound monergy (money+energy) is a blend
We can distinguish two fundamental types of blend: PARADIGMATIC ORIGIN BLEND and SYNTAGMATIC ORIGIN BLEND. in syntagmatic origin blends, the order of the elements is determined by the original. A motor hotel can’t be a hotel motor. in paradigmatic origin blends, the first element is higher in frequency than the second, shorter than the second, and a more prototypical member of its set than the second. Brunch (breakfast+lunch) it should be notet that sometimes there’s an overlap between words and it’s orthographic rather than phonogical and that blends have some kind of basis in the written language. Echo words Words like namby-pamby, shilly-shally, don’t meet the definition of compounds, though they are frequently called RHYME-MOTIVATED and ABLAUT-MOTIVATED COMPOUNDS, with the term ECHO WORD being a less technical label. The interest with such cases Is on the degree to which the onset consonant in the rhyming cases and the voewl alternation in the ablaut cases is predictable from general principles, and why the attested alternations should be preffered. Conclusion Although these minor types of word formation may not be linguistically very important, arising as they do, at the point where system gives way to random creativity, they are of increasing importance in the lexicon of modern English in terms of the number of forms created by them. CHAPTER - THE ACADEMIC WORD LIST The academic word list was developped from a corpus made of written academic text, by examining the frequency and uniformity of occurrence of words. Their corpus contains 4 disciplines: arts, commerce, law and science. The academic word list provide useful information about which words list give the best return for learning for students with academic goals. The list also provides a useful basis for further research into the nature of academic vocabulary. The AWL is a systematic approach to vocabulary learning. MANCA CHAPTER – LEXIS SEMANTICS LINK DELLE SLIDES Making sense of spelling-Gina Cooke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mbuwZK0lr Spellings sometimes may seem random or unexpected but there’s a video that explains the complex history and meaningful structure of words. Spelling’s job is making sense, spelling is like peeling back the layers of an onion. The first layer is a word’s sense and meaning. Another layer is the word’s structure, and the center of the onion is the word’s base element. a free base element like O-N-E can stand alone as a word. a bound base like R-U-P-T of erupt needs another element rupture two or more bases give us compounds like someone or bankrupt
