5 Morphology and Word Formation key concepts

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5 Morphology and Word Formation
key
 
concepts
Words and morphemes
Root, derivational, inflectional morphemes
Morphemes, allomorphs, morphs
Words
English inflectional morphology
English derivational morphology
Compounding
Other sources of words
Registers and words
Internal structure of complex words
Classifying words by their morphology
introduction
This chapter is about words—their relationships, their constituent parts, 
and their internal organization. We believe that this information will be of 
value to anyone interested in words, for whatever reason; to anyone inter-
ested in dictionaries and how they represent the aspects of words we deal 
with here; to anyone involved in developing the vocabularies of native and 
non-native speakers of English; to anyone teaching writing across the curric-
ulum who must teach the characteristics of words specific to their discipline; 
to anyone teaching writing who must deal with the usage issues created by 
the fact that different communities of English speakers use different word 
forms, only one of which may be regarded as standard.
Exercise
1. Divide each of the following words into their smallest meaningful 
parts:landholder, smoke-jumper, demagnetizability. 
2. Each of the following sentences contains an error made by a non-
native speaker of English. In each, identify and correct the incorrect 
word. 
a. I am very relax here.
b. I am very boring with this game.
c. I am very satisfactory with my life.
d. Some flowers are very attracting to some insects.
e. Many people have very strong believes.

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Delahunty and Garvey 
 
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f. My culture is very difference from yours.
g. His grades proof that he is a hard worker.
h. The T-shirt that China drawing. (from a T-shirt package from 
China)
In general terms, briefly discuss what English language learners must 
learn in order to avoid such errors.
3. Some native speakers of English use forms such as seen instead 
of saw, come instead of came, aks instead of ask, clumb instead of 
climbed,
drug instead of dragged, growed instead of grew. Are these 
errors? If they are, are they the same kinds of errors made by the non-
native speakers of English listed in Exercise 2? If not, what are they?