BING4316/MODUL 1
1.9
Unit 2
Words and Word-Structure
efore we talk about morpheme in Unit 3, let’s have a brief introduction
about words and word-structure in this unit. Subconsciously we know that
illiterate speakers realize that there are words in their language however the
assumption that languages contain words is taken for granted by most people,
even though every speaker of every language knows tens of thousands of words.
Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language has over
450,000 entries. Most speakers don’t know all these words.
Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a
component of our mental grammars. But one can learn thousands of words in a
language and still do not know the language. Anyone who has tried to be
understood in a foreign country by merely using a dictionary knows this is true.
On the other hand, without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts
through language. Thus, what is a word? What do you know when you know a
word? Suppose you hear someone say morpheme and don’t have the slightest
idea what it means, and you don’t know what the “smallest unit of linguistic
meaning” is called. Then you don’t know the word morpheme. A particular
string of sounds must be united with a meaning, and a meaning must be united
with specific sounds in order for the sounds or the meaning to be a word in our
mental dictionaries. Once you learn both the sounds and their related meaning,
you know the word. It becomes an entry in your mental lexicon (the Greek word
for dictionary), part of your linguistic knowledge. This shows that in a particular
language, the form (sounds or pronunciation) and the meaning of a word are like
two sides of a coin.
Similarly, in English, the sounds of the letters bear and bare represent four
homonyms (also called homophones), different words with the same sounds, as
shown in the sentences: Sometimes there are differences of opinion as to what
units are to be treated as words. For instance, English speakers might not agree
whether “all right” is one word or two and as a result disputes may arise as to
whether “all right” is the correct way of writing all right. But, by and large,
people can easily recognize a word of their language when they see or hear one.
And normally their judgments as to what is or is not a word do coincide. English
speakers agree, for example, that the form “cantik” in the sentence “Cat cantik
sat on the mat” is not an English word – but all the other forms are.
B
1.10
English Morpho - Syntax
She can’t bear (tolerate) children.
She can’t bear (give birth to) children.
Bruin bear is the mascot of UCLA.
He stood there – bare and beautiful.
Sometimes we think we know a word even though we don’t know what it
means. In an introductory linguistic class, most of the 400 students had heard the
word antidisestablishmentarianism and believed it to be the longest word in the
English language. Yet, many of these students were unsure of its meaning.
According to how we have defined what it means to “know a word” – pairing a
string of sounds with a particular meaning – such individuals do not really know
this word.
Since each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word stored in our mental
lexicon must be listed with its unique phonological representation, which
determines its pronunciation, and with its meaning. For literate speakers, the
spelling, or orthography, of most of the words we know is included. Each word
in your mental lexicon includes other information as well, such as whether it is a
noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction.
That is, its grammatical category, or syntactic class, is specified. You may not
consciously know that a form like love is listed as both a verb and a noun, but a
speaker has such knowledge, as shown by the phrases I love you and You are the
love of my life. If such information were not in the mental lexicon, we would not
know how to form grammatical sentences, nor would we be able to distinguish
grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. The classes of words, the syntactic
categories – such as nouns, verb, adjectives, and so on – and the semantic
properties of words, which represent their meanings, will be discussed later.
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