Morphology Basics
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Introduction
We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own. Yet few of us ever stop to consider what we know when we know a language. There is no book that contains the English or Russian or Macedonian language. The words of a language can be listed in a dictionary, but not all the sentences, and a language consists of these sentences as well as words. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of “possible” sentences.
These rules comprise the grammar of a language, which is learned when you “acquire” the language and includes the sound system (the phonology), forming of words (the morphology), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), the way in which the sounds and meanings are related (the semantics), and the words or lexicon. If you had never heard the word syntax you would not, by its sounds, know what it meant. Language, then, is a system that relates sounds with meanings, and when you know a language you know this system. Let us consider language as a tool for communication. The only means by which humans communicate is language (be it spoken or body language). It is the most vital tool of interaction between people. With time, language needs to change in order to meet with the requirements of the people. If we take the word "gay" for example, its meaning has changed. It no longer means what it used to mean some years ago. "Happy", "jovial", "cheerful" were the meanings of gay. But in present times, the word "gay" is connoted to "homosexuality". "If a word is used by many speakers of a language, it will probably survive and it can happen that one day, it becomes an everyday word and enters our dictionaries" (Wagner 2010) . This is exactly what happened with the word "gay". People started associating it with homosexuality, and today, in some 2011 dictionary editions, the word "gay" means "homosexual". Like the word "gay", words like "surf" and "web" have
Introduction
We are all intimately familiar with at least one language, our own. Yet few of us ever stop to consider what we know when we know a language. There is no book that contains the English or Russian or Macedonian language. The words of a language can be listed in a dictionary, but not all the sentences, and a language consists of these sentences as well as words. Speakers use a finite set of rules to produce and understand an infinite set of “possible” sentences.
These rules comprise the grammar of a language, which is learned when you “acquire” the language and includes the sound system (the phonology), forming of words (the morphology), how words may be combined into phrases and sentences (the syntax), the way in which the sounds and meanings are related (the semantics), and the words or lexicon. If you had never heard the word syntax you would not, by its sounds, know what it meant. Language, then, is a system that relates sounds with meanings, and when you know a language you know this system. Let us consider language as a tool for communication. The only means by which humans communicate is language (be it spoken or body language). It is the most vital tool of interaction between people. With time, language needs to change in order to meet with the requirements of the people. If we take the word "gay" for example, its meaning has changed. It no longer means what it used to mean some years ago. "Happy", "jovial", "cheerful" were the meanings of gay. But in present times, the word "gay" is connoted to "homosexuality". "If a word is used by many speakers of a language, it will probably survive and it can happen that one day, it becomes an everyday word and enters our dictionaries" (Wagner 2010) . This is exactly what happened with the word "gay". People started associating it with homosexuality, and today, in some 2011 dictionary editions, the word "gay" means "homosexual". Like the word "gay", words like "surf" and "web" have
Bibliography: R.H. Robins, General Linguistics An Introductory Survey, 1965 An Introduction to Language, B. Vukovska, Intro to General Linguistics Handout, 2001 Bagasheva, Morphology of English language handout, 2001 http://www.slideshare.net/furrakhabbas/processes-of-word-formation http://neutronenglish.wordpress.com/?s=morphology http://linguisticsnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:morphological-processes&catid=1:latest http://abcd.lk/sliit/Story_Books/English%20Learning%20E-Books/Word%20Formation%20In%20English.pdf http://books.google.mk/books?id=yoNqhym0u2sC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false