By desmond bett; B. A- criminology m. A – public administration & policy

BY
DESMOND BETT;
B.A- CRIMINOLOGY
M.A – PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & POLICY
PHD- HOMICIDE AND CRIME PREVENTION

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1
WHY STUDY WORDS?
Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would not give up words for anything. Every day we utter thousands of words. Communicating our joys, fears, opinions, fantasies, wishes, requests, demands, feelings – and the occasional threat or insult- is a very important aspect of being human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway-even when awkward, or even oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.
It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind’s most valuable single possession. It is language that sets us apart from our biologically close relatives, the great primates. ( I would imagine that many a chimp or gorilla would give an arm and a leg for a few words-but we will probably never know because they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most of us take words (and more generally language) for granted. We cannot discuss words with anything like the competence with which we can discuss fashion, films or football.
We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is intended to make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and structure of English words. It addresses the question ‘what sorts of things do people need to know about English in order to use them in speech?’ It is intended to increase the degree of sophistication with which you think about words. It is designed to give you a theoretical grasp of English word-formation, the sources of English vocabulary and the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind.
I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the enrichment of your vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very practical way, your awareness of the relationship between words. You will be equipped with the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words and to see in a new light the underlying structural patterns in many familiar words which you have not previously stopped to think about analytically.
For the student of language, words are very rewarding object of study. An understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general. Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they impinge on every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the ramifications of the fact that words are complex and multi-faceted entities whose structure and use interacts with other modules of the grammar Such as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words in speech, SYNTAX, the study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the study of meaning in language.
In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access various types of information from the word-store which we carry around with us in the MENTSL LEXICON or DOCTIONARY that is tucked away in the mind. We need to know:

[1.1]
(i) its shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/frg/ which enables us to pronounce it, and its ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION frog. If we are literate and know how to spell it (see the Key to symbols used on page xix);

(ii) its grammatical properties e.g. it is a noun and it is countable-so you have one frog and two frogs;
(iii) its meaning
But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing about the form of words that would enable anyone to work out their meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these simply has to be listed in the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship between a LINGUISTIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words to refer to this small tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouille. In Malay they call it katak and in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others to the job of referring to this small reptile.
And of course, within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can be associated with any meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning association, they have a kosher word. For instance, convenience originally meant ‘suitability’ or ‘commodiousness’ but in the middle of the nineteenth century a new meaning of ‘toilet’ was assigned to it and people began to talk of a ‘a public convenience’. In the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new meaning of ‘easy to use’, designed for hassle-free use’ as in convenience food.
We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean whatever we want them to mean. Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out. The only thing missing from his analysis is the social dimension. Any arbitrary meaning assigned to a word needs to be accepted by the speech community which uses the language. Obviously, language would not be much use as a means of communication if each individual language user assigned a private meaning to each word which other users of language did not recognize. Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the nature of language that Humpty Dumpty gave to Alice (see overleaf).
Let us now consider one further example. All competent speakers of English know that you can add –s to a noun to indicate that it refers to more than one entity. So you say cat when referring to one and cats if there is more than one. If you encountered in blank in [1.2a] an unfamiliar word like splet (which I have just made up), you would automatically know from the context that it must have the plural form splets in this position since it is specified as plural by all . Further, you would know that the plural of splet must be splets (rather than spletren by analogy to children or spleti by analogy to stimuli). You know that the majority of nouns form their plural by adding the regular plural suffix or ending –s. you always add –s unless express instructions are given to do otherwise. There is no need to memorise separately the plural form of most nouns. All we need is to know the rule that says ‘add –s for plural’. So, without any hesitation, you suffix –s to obtain the plural form splets in [1.2b]:
[1.2]
a. We put all the big_on the table
b. We put all the big splets on the table
The study of word-formation and word-structure is called MORPHOLOGY. Morphology theory provides a general theory of word-structure in all the languages of the word. Its task is to characterize the kind of things that speakers need to know about the structure of words of their language in order to be able to use them to produce and to understand speech.
We will see that in order to use language, speakers need to have two types of morphological knowledge. First, they need to be able to analyse existing words (e.g. they must be able to tell that frogs contains frog plus –s for plural). Usually, if we know the meanings of the elements that word contains, it is possible to determine the meaning of the entire word once we have worked out how the various elements relate to each other. For instance, if we examine a word like nutcracker we find that it is made up of two words, namely the noun nut and the noun cracker. Furthermore, we see that the latter word, cracker is divisible into the verb crack and another meaningful element –er (roughly meaning ‘an instrument used to do X’), which, however, is not a word in its own right. Numerous other words are formed using this pattern of combining words (and smaller meaningful elements) as seen in [1.3]:
[1.3]
[tea]Noun-[strain-er]]Noun
[lawn]Noun-[mow-er]]Noun
[can]Noun-[open-er]]Noun
Given the frame [[_]Noun-[_er]]Noun, we can fill in different words with the appropriate properties and get another compound word (i.e. a word containing at least two words). Try this frame out yourself. Find two more similar examples of compound words form using this pattern.
Second, speakers need to be able to work out the meanings of novel words constructed using the word-building elements and standard word-construction rules of the language. Probably we all know and use more words than are listed in dictionaries. We can construct and analyse the structure and meaning of old words as well as new ones. So, although many words must be listed in the dictionary and memorized, listing every word in the dictionary is not necessary. If a word is formed following general principles, it may be more efficient to reconstitute it from its constituent elements as the need arises rather than the permanently commit it to memory. When people make up new words using existing words and wordforming elements, we understand them with ease-providing we know what the elements they use to form those words mean and providing the word-forming rules that they employ are familiar. This ability is one of the things explored in morphological investigations.
In an average week, we are likely to encounter a couple of unfamiliar words. We might reach for a dictionary and look them up. Some of them may be listed but others might be too new or too ephemeral to have found their way into any dictionary. In such an event, we rely on our morphological knowledge to tease out their meanings. If you heard someone describe their partner as ‘a great list maker and a ticker-off’, you would instantly know what sort of person the partner was-although you almost certainly have never encountered the word ticker-off before. And it is certainly not listed in any dictionary. The –er ending here has the meaning of ‘someone who does whatever the verb means’. Given the verb tickoff a ticker-0ff must be a person who ticks off. Similarly , if you know what established words like handful, cupful, and spoonful means, you are also able to figure out the meanings of novel words like fountain-penful (as in a fountain-penful of ink) or hovercraftful (as in hovercraftful of English shoppers returned from Calais loaded down with cigarettes, cheese and plonk). Virtually any noun denoting a container can have –ful added to it in order to indicate that it is ‘full of something’.
To take another example , a number of words ending in –ist, many of which have come into use in recent years, refer to people who discriminate against, or hold negative views about, certain less powerful subgroups in society, e.g. racist, sexist. Anyone who knows what racist and sexist mean, given the right context should have no difficulty in understanding the nature of discrimination perpetrated by people who are described using the novel word ageist, sizist and speechist. Ageism is discrimination on grounds of (old) age –for instance, denying employment to people over the age of 60; sizism is discrimination (usually against fat people) on grounds of size and speechism is discrimination against people with speech impediments like stuttering.
Did you notice how I exploited your tacit knowledge of the fact that words ending in –ist and –ism complement each other? You were glad to accept ageism, sizism and speechism because you know that corresponding to an adjective ending in –ist there will normally be a noun ending in –ism. This is important. It shows that you know that certain word-forming bits go together-and others do not. I suspect that you would reject putative words like *sizement and *speechment. (An asterisk is used conventionally to indicate that a form is disallowed.) I word-formation it is not a case of anything goes.
A challenging question which morphology addresses is, ‘how do speakers know which non-occurring or non-established words are permissible and which ones are not?’ Why are the words fountainpenful, hovercraftful and speechist allowed while *agement, *speechment and *sizement are not?
Morphological theory provides a general theory of wordformation applicable to any language but, as mentioned earlier, this book focuses on word-formation in English. Its objective is to provide a description of English words designed to make explicit the various things speakers know, albeit in an unconscious manner, about English words. The emphasis will be on the description of English words rather than the elaboration of morphological theory. So, data and facts about English words are brought to the fore and the theoretical and methodological issues are kept in the background for the most part. The use of formal notation has also been kept to a minimum in order to keep the account simple.