In Chapter 2 of Finegan lexicon and morphology are discussed. This chapter begins by explaining the different lexical categories. Then moves on to discuss different types of morphemes and what they are. Next, Finnegan explains how languages increase their vocabulary by using compound words, suffixes, prefixes.
The first part of the chapter was a refreshing grammar lesson for me. Relearning what lexical parts of speech there are and what their function in the sentence is was rather easy. It did help me brush up on a few things like interrogative and demonstrative pronouns.
What are morphemes? Morphemes are the meaningful elements in words. Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone. Bound morphemes are morphemes that can not an example of this would be prefixes un or re. Derivational morphemes produces words in two ways either from changing a words lexical category or by changing the meaning of a word. Inflectional morphemes change the form of a word but not lexical category. For example by signifying a plural noun from a singular noun.
According to Finnegan languages increase their vocabulary in three ways. By creating new words from existing words or morphemes. Words are borrowed from other languages. Lastly, new words are made up. Words can use suffixes like ly, ed, and ment to create new words. This form is very common. The last common is developing new words from scratch.
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Like you, much of the info in this chapter was review, especially the lexical labels/parts of speech aspect. It was good review and did take some concepts a bit deeper and further than I had learned in the past. I like grammar so it was fun reading for the most part. The end of the chapter was pretty foreign however.
ReplyDeleteI found the content of this chapter very useful and i hope I can apply this information in the future.
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