1

MINISTRE DE LENSEIGNEMENT SUPRIEUR UNIVERSIT DE SOUSSE com/hsalhi/ Courses and in the Internet. the

" "cially hose related to your exam

FACULT DES LETTRES ET DES SCIENCES HUMAINES DPARTEMENT DANGLAIS D

Structure of English:
Phonology and Morphology
You are invited to partake in the very real pleasure of playing with the language system

Dear Students,

The Course

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Lecturer: H. Salhi

WEEK

Course Description

By Hammouda Ben Ammar Salhi Teacher of Translation and Linguistics Web Site: http://www.freewebs.com/hsalhi/ E-mail: hammouda_s@hotmail.com

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES

|OBJECTIVES
This course provides third year students with the opportunity to grasp the basic principles, methods and terminology of phonological and morphological analysis through a detailed study of the phonological system and morphological structure of Standard English. The course will be concerned with a practical rather than theoretical study of the English phonology and morphology. Throughout we will bear in mind the importance of applying those principles and methods to other languages.

|THE SUCCESSFUL STUDENT will

know what the basic concepts of phonology and morphology are (phonemes, features, rules, roots, affixes, etc.) know what is entailed by the relation between phonetics and phonology, esp. from the point of view of the latter. know how these concepts are usually applied to bodies of empirical data from natural languages be able (at a basic level) to him/herself creatively apply these concepts to some given empirical data, be able of formulating rules, for instance. be able to identify and describe the different morphemes of a given word. And, most importantly,be able to enjoy the system of sounds and morphemes to ensure exam (and life) success.

OUTLINE OF THE COURSE Introduction. Part one: Phonology (7 weeks)

Chapter 1: Basic concepts of phonological analysis (2 weeks) 1. Phonemes and allophones 2. Tests for the identification of phonemes and allophones: minimal pairs, complementary distribution and free variation Chapter 2: Major distinctive features (3 weeks) 1. Main class features: Consonantal and non-consonantal, Syllabic and nonsyllabic,and Sonorant and non-sonorant 2. Cavity features: Labial and non-labial 3. Tongue body features: High and non-high, Low and non-low, and Back and non-back 4. Laryngeal features: Voiced and voiceless 5. Manner features: Continuant and noncontinuant, Lateral and non-lateral, and Nasal and nonnasal 6. Prosodic features Long and short Chapter 3: Phonological processes and rules (2 weeks) 1. What is assimilation? 1.1. Direction of assimilation 1.2. Assimilation across word boundaries 2. Voice assimilation 3. How to formulate a phonological rule? Part Two: Morphology (5 weeks) Chapter 1: Basic concepts of morphological analysis (1 week) Lexemes and word-forms, morphs, morphemes and allomorphs Chapter 2: Types of morphemes (2 weeks) Roots, affixes, stems and bases Inflectional and derivational morphemes
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Lecturer: H. Salhi
Chapter 3: English word formation processes (2 weeks)

WEEK
Major processes Minor processes

GRADING
You will be graded according to the following scale:

1. Phonology: 12 (or 13) points 2. Morphology: 8 (or 7) points

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The slogan

When you are fed up with the (language) system, It means that you are fed up with (the) life (exam) The Lecturer

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Introduction

In this course, we shall handle language as a grammatical set of rules. That is, we shall attempt to introduce students to some rules constraining the use of language. Many people mistakenly think that words are the smallest units in language. In Fact, there are smaller units in language. In this course, we will see the smallest meaningful units (i.e. morphemes) as well as the smallest sound units (i.e. phonemes). In the first part, we will investigate the word as a combination of sounds. In other word, we will see how, and according to which rules, sounds form words. In the second part, however, we will see how words are composed of different types of morphemes.

Language can be studied as a structure at different levels. The levels are assumed to be ordered in a hierarchy. The following figure shows such a hierarchy. Semantic level: Syntactic level: Morphological level: Phonology (or phonemics): deals with meaning deals with sentence-structure deals with word-structure deals with sound systems

The task of describing the grammatical aspects of a language is seen as working out, in separate stages, first the pronunciation, then the word-structure, then the sentencestructure and finally the meaning of utterances. In this course, however, we shall only be concerned with the first two levels; i.e. phonology and morphology.

Part One: Phonology

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What is Phonology?

Phonology is a branch of linguistics, closely related to phonetics, which studies the manners of organization and usage of the speech sounds in natural languages. The history of this science reaches ancient times, as the Greek and Roman grammarians also investigated the phonological systems of their languages. The foundations for modern phonological inquiries were laid in the nineteenth century by linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Henry Sweet. Phonetics deals with the smallest chunks of language, yet it is in connection with other linguistic disciplines like morphology, because adding morphemes may change the meaning of words and their pronunciation, frequently following patterns. Phonetics is also related with syntax, as depending on a function of a word in a sentence it can be pronounced differently with a shifted phrasal stress and with changed intonation. Similarly, this branch of linguistics is connected with semantics because of intonation constraints. While phonetics studies the production and perception of the speech sounds, phonology is more interested in the abstract, that is mental aspects of these sounds. It inquiries into and describes the patterns of sounds and sound types which native speakers acquire intuitively. However, since the term 'speech sounds' seems to be used mainly in phonetics, phonologists speak of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in the human language. Yet it is not identical with the sound itself, it is rather a theoretical representation without mentioning its position in a syllable, word, or phrase. One important feature of phonemes is their contrastiveness which enables their identification. It is by contrasting the two phonemes, for example /k/ and /g/ that can be seen that they differ in at least one feature, like voicing. Therefore we shall devote a whole chapter, in this course, for distinctive features. All languages have a set of such distinctive phonemes. By and large, it seems that the majority of languages have about 30 phonemes, but there are some that have as few as 11 or as many as almost 150. The English language, it is said, has about 43 phonemes, depending on the variety of English in question. Even though the number of phonemes may differ from language to language, the sets are always limited, but enable speakers to create unlimited numbers of words. In English the word step consists of four phonemes, and the word pest has the same four phonemes, yet since they are in different order the meaning is not the same. Phonology also investigates the possible sequences of phonemes in a given language. Therefore, it indirectly studies word formation processes, as they too are constrained by the rules of phonotactics, that is allowable organization (or sequences) of phonemes. Thus it is very unlikely that any English word should begin with ng- or the sound /?/ while this sound is quite common in the middle, or at the end of English words. However, the fact that phonotactic constraints do not allow for some sounds in a language to occur in certain positions, which confines the word-coining and word formation processes of a language, it does not mean that such words do not appear in that language. Sometimes loan words may break the phonological rules of a given language and still be in use, as is the case with the initial position of the /n/ sound in English. By and large, words with such a sound in the initial position have started appearing in English only recently and all of them are loan words: schnapps, schnitzel, schmo. The analysis of the possible sequences of phonemes focuses not only on phonemes themselves, but also on syllables and clusters, though the present course does not devote any section to syllables. Therefore, we are going to brush up your memory with what you have seen in the course of Pronunciation of 2nd year. A syllable must comprise a vowel, but usually there is also a consonant (C) before the vowel (V). Syllables are frequently described as consisting of an www.freewebs.com/hsalhi or a few onset, which is a consonant,

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consonants, and a rhyme, often subdivided into a nucleus (a vowel), and coda (any following consonants). In the English language coda does not always have to occur in a syllable, like for instance in the words: he (CV), or too (CV). Clusters, or consonant clusters are simply two or more consonants one after another. Clusters, like other phonotactic rules, are characteristic of a given language, for instance the /st/ cluster in English can be an onset: street, or a coda: highest, however it is impossible in Japanese. Apart from analyzing the phonemes of a language, clusters and syllables, phonology also deals with the processes that occur in everyday, fluent speech. The most frequent processes that can be observed in casual speech are assimilation and elision, though, in the present course, we are going to focus only on the assimilation process. Assimilation is a process in which certain sounds copy the characteristics of another, adjacent sound. Elision is a process in which some sounds, or even syllables are omitted and not pronounced at all, although in other situations they are normally uttered. Elision occurs not because of laziness of speakers, but to make the pronunciation more fluent. But let un start from the beginning now, the basic concepts of phonological analysis.

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Chapter One

Basic Concepts
Of Phonological Analysis

Phonemes and Allophones

It is essential to consider sounds from a functional (i.e. difference in meaning) point of view, that is not to take them only as individual physical sounds, but rather of families of sounds which are considered as one in a given language. Such a family of sounds is called phoneme. Members of the same phoneme family, i.e. the various executions of that sound in reality are called allophones (or variants) of that phoneme. Phonemes (which are written between slashes, e.g. /i/) and allophones (which are written between brackets, e.g.[i]) are two of the most basic and important concepts in phonetics and phonology. You have already been introduced to them last year in the course of Introduction to Linguistics. Therefore, you can refer back to this course for more details about these two concepts. For instance, the two phonemes /t/ and /k/, each of which has a range of allophones which differ slightly from each other. Utter the following words slowly: car keys. You will notice that in car, the back of the tongue touches the part of the soft palate near the uvula, at the very back of the roof of your mouth, but in keys it is the more front part of the soft palate near the hard palate that the tongue makes contact with. The two allophones of k are physically different. But they are not functionally different. They cannot be used to distinguish word meaning. In other words, if we pronounce car with that more fronted variant as pronounced in keys, we still understand that it is a CAR. So the two realizations of k are allophones of the same /k/ phoneme and which one is used on a given occasion depends on what the neighboring sounds happen to be. Functionality (or non-functionality) can be seen in some phonological tests such as the minimal pair test, the complementary distribution test and the free variation test.

Tests for the identification of phonemes

In this section we shall outline the basic procedures which linguists use to identify the phonemes or the functionally significant segments of a language.

The minimal pair test

When two words are identical in all respects, except for one segment (or sound), they are referred to as minimal pairs. For instance, read-lead, card-guard, mice-nice and batmat are minimal pairs. These examples of minimal pair test show that the sounds /r /and/l /, /k/and /g/, /m/and /n/, /b/and /m / are classified as separate phonemes because they are responsible for a difference in meaning in a minimal pair. In other words, minimal pairs are pairs of words whose pronunciation differs at only one segment (vowel or consonant sound), such as sheep and ship, or lice and rice. They are often used in listening tests and pronunciation exercises. Theoretically it is the existence of minimal pairs which enables linguists to build up the phoneme inventory for a language or dialect, though the process is not without difficulties.

The Complementary distribution test

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When two sounds are in complementary distribution, they are barred from occurring in identical environments: there is a rigid division of labour so that one sound appears in certain contexts and the other in some different ones. Thus, the very back [k] allophone (or variant) of the phoneme /k/ that we have seen above ( in the section of phonemes and allophones) occurs before back vowels and the fronted [k] as in keys before front vowels. But in case the two allophones occur in exactly the same environment, we can say then that this is a case of free variation.

The Free variation test

Sometimes a phoneme may also have free variants. For example, the final consonant of cup may not be released by some speakers so there is no audible sound at the end of this word. In this case, it is the same word pronounced in two different ways: [k p ] and [kp ], with the diacritic indicating no audible release or unreleased sound in IPA symbols, i.e. the sound is not actually heard. The difference may be caused by dialect or personal habit, instead of by any distribution rule. Such a phenomenon is called free variation. Free variation is often found in regional differences. For example, most Americans pronounce the word either as [i] whereas most British people say [a]. Individual differences may also determine the use of [drkn] or [darkn] for the word direction. The following are other examples, consider the following words containing [p] and [p; ] [p represents an unreleased voiceless bilabial stop: ] Leap [lip] leap [li p ] Soap [sop] soap [so p ] Troop [trup] troop [tru p ] Happy [hpi] ---- *[h p i]

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Chapter Two

Major Distinctive Features

Introduction
Speech sounds are divided up into classes according to a number of properties. For example, consonants are described according to their places and manners of articulation, and vowels, which have no place nor manner of articulation, are described according to their frontness or backness. The idea of Distinctive Features was first developed by Roman Jacobson (1896-1982) in the 1940s as a means of working out a set of phonological contrasts or oppositions to capture particular aspects of language sounds. Since then several versions have been suggested, so if you read books on phonology published at different times, expect to find different sets of features. Some of the major distinctions include [consonantal], [sonorant], [nasal] and [voiced]. The feature [consonantal] can distinguish between consonants and vowels, so all consonants are [+consonantal] and all vowels [consonantal]. [sonorant] distinguishes between what we call obstruents (stops, fricatives and affricates) and sonorants (all other consonants and vowels), with obstruents being [sonorant] and others [+sonorant]. [nasal] and [voiced] of course distinguish nasal (including nasalized) sounds and voiced sounds respectively. These are known as binary features because we can group them into two categories: one with this feature and the other without. Binary features have two values or specifications denoted by + and so voiced obstruents are marked [+voiced] and voiceless obstruents are marked [voiced]. In contemporary phonology, some twenty such features are used to group speech sounds from different angles. But in the present course we are going to focus on the main features distinguishing English sounds. Why is it necessary to work with features? For the purposes of making phonological analyses and extracting the rules governing language, it is necessary to look beyond the phoneme and focus on those basic phonological ingredients called distinctive features, which phonemes are made of. According to Francis Katamba1, the belief that the phoneme is the atomic, basic building block of phonology is no more tenable for a number of reasons, but chief among them is

1 Francis is Professor of Linguistics within the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. His

research interests are in the areas of English phonology and morphology, morphological theory, phonological theory, and African linguistics. His recent articles include 'The word in Luganda' . In Studies in African Linguistic Typology Voeltz , F. K. Erhard (ed.) Typological Studies in Language 64, pp. 171-93, (written with Larry Hyman 2006), 'The syllable in Luganda phonology and morphology'. For students who eager continue their postgraduate studies in Linguistics, Professor Katamba can be reached through the following E-mail: f.katamba@lancaster.ac.uk

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the fact that the phonological behaviour of phonemes is largely determined by the phonetic features which they are made of.

Major class features

If we look at the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which you have a copy of it in your workbook with English sounds highlighted, we can find out six major classes: consonants and non-consonants, syllabics and non-syllabics, sonorants and non-sonorants (or obstruents). These form the major class features. a. Consonantal Vs non-consonantal Consonantal sounds (or [+consonantal]) are produced with drastic (or strong) stricture (obstruction) of the airstream, non-consonantal sounds (or [- consonantal]) are made without such obstruction. All obstruents (this term shall be explained below), nasals, and liquids are consonantal (or [+consonantal]). Vowels and glides (or semi-vowels, they are [w], [j], [?] and [h] in English) are nonconsonantal (or [- consonantal]) b. Syllabic Vs non-syllabic [+/- syllabic] Syllabic sounds are sounds which function as syllable nuclei; non-syllabic sounds occur at syllable margins. Vowels are syllabic and so are syllabic consonants such as [l] in bottle and candle or the nasal [n] in cotton and [m] in bottom. c. Sonorant Vs non-sonorant [+/- sonorant] Here we speak about the feature of sonority, means that spontaneous voicing after the production of some sounds labeled [+ sonorant], while [- sonorant] sounds or non-sonorant sounds or even obstruent sounds have a vocal cavity disposition which inhibits (prevents) spontaneous voicing. Normally all sonorants are voiced sounds and obstruents are voiceless. vowels, nasals, and liquids are sonorant stops, fricatives, and affricates are obstruent

Cavity features
These features refer to place of articulation. They specify where in the vocal tract modifications of the airstream take place in the production of a particular sound. For instance, in the production of some sounds, the main obstruction of the airstream is no back than the alveolar ridge such as in the labials [m] and [b], these are called anterior sounds or [+ anterior], but we are going to choose only one feature among the cavity feature for study, the labiality feature. Labial Vs non-labial [+/- labial] In case there is a stricture (or narrowing) made with the lips, the sound produced is labial, if there is no such stricture, the sound is non-labial. It is worth mentioning, however, that

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there is a considerable degree of overlap between the group of sounds labeled as rounded and those labial sounds. Take the example of the [w] sound, for instance, it is both [+ labial] and [+ round].

Tongue body features

It is in accordance with the position of the body of the tongue that we assign some feature to sounds. The norm says that when the body of the tongue is in a neutral position, the vowels produced are said to be mid front vowels. But when it is higher the sound (whether it is a vowel or a consonant) will be [+ high] , when lower it will be [+ low] and when more back it will be [+ back]. High Vs non-high [+/- high] High sounds, as we have seen above, are made with the tongue raised from neutral position while non-high sounds are made without such raising of the body of the tongue. High sounds include vowels like [i u], the glides [w j], alveo-palatal, palatalized, palatal and velar consonants. All other sounds are non-high. Low Vs non-low [+/- low] When a particular sound is produced with the tongue lying at a level below that which it occupies when in neutral position, that sound is [+ low], otherwise it is [- low]. Back Vs non-back [+/- back] When the body of the tongue is retracted (pulled back) from neutral position , the sounds produced in this case are back. Sounds produced with the body of the tongue either in neutral position or pushed forward are non-back. This feature distinguishes between back vowels like [ u o ] and front vowels like [ i e ]. Of the consonants, velars, uvulars, and pharyngeals are back while labials, dentals, palatals as well as glottal are non-back.

Laryngeal features
voiced Vs voiceless [+/- voice] When there is a vibration of the vocal cords at regular intervals, the sound produced in this case is voiced, voiceless sounds are made without such a periodic vibration. All vowels are voiced and consonants are either voiced or voiceless.

Manner features
The features of manner characterize the way in which the airstream is obstructed in the production of consonants. Continuant Vs non-continuant [+/- continuant] Continuants are sounds which are produced by impeding, but not completely blocking, the flow of the air; non-continuants are made by completely blocking the air through the centre of the vocal tract. Affricates, laterals, nasals, and stops are non-continuants All other sounds are continuants

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Lateral Vs non-lateral [+/- lateral] Lateral sounds are produced with the airflow through the centre of the mouth blocked but escapes over one or both sides of the tongue. [ l] is the only lateral liquid in English (the term liquid is conventionally used to refer to sounds similar to the English [ l] and [ r]. Nasal Vs non-nasal (oral) [+/- nasal] A nasal sound is produced when the velum is lowered to allow the air to escape through the nasal cavity. Nasal sounds include nasal stops [ m n ] (these are stops because they are produced with complete blockage of the air at the place where the articulators meet, i.e. in the lips or the alveolar ridge or the velum for [m], [n] and [] respectively), as well as nasalized consonants, glides and vowels. All other sounds are oral or [- nasal].

Prosodic features
Prosodic features have to do with the duration of the production of a sound, its tone and stress. We will cover in this course only those long and short sounds; Long Vs short [+/- long] Length as a feature is clearly relative and undergoes some progression from the shortest to the lengthiest sound. But for the sake of simplicity we will have a binary account of it, that is either [+long] or [- long]. It should be mentioned here that length is a functional distinctive feature in Standard Arabic, i.e. it leads to a change in meaning. Take the example of the following two items that you know. Kataba Kaataba Clearly you can notice the difference in meaning introduced by the lengthening of the vowel [a] from a normal verb to a reflexive one. In English, for example, the contrast between [ ] and [i] (as in seek /sik/ and sick /sk/) is rather being regarded as one between a tense sound versus a lax one. But still we will consider, in this course, that sounds like [ ] as [- long] and sounds like [i] as [+ long].

Example:
Look at the features of the following English sounds.

Table 1: example
Consonantal Continuant Labial Voiced

b + + -

t + + +

u + -

+ + +

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Below you can find some of the distinctive feature we have seen above applied for English consonant phonemes.

Table 2: Distinctive feature matrix for English consonant phonemes p b t d k g f v s z h m n w l r j consonantal approximant sonorant nasal lateral voiced continuant /+ /+

(Source: Radford, et al. 1999: 141)

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Chapter Three

phonological processes and Rules

The phenomenon of variation in the pronunciation of phonemes in different positions is called allophony or allophonic variation. If we scrutinize the phonological change involved in allophonic variation, we can find out a number of general processes this change takes. In this chapter, we are going to see the commonest phonological process responsible for a number of such allophonic changes, the assimilation process.

What is Assimilation?
Assimilation takes place when there is a modification of a sound in order to make it more similar to some adjacent sound(s). Speakers of a language resort to assimilation in their pronunciation with a view to have a smoother, more effortless and more economical transitions from one sound to another. They usually try to conserve energy by using no more effort than is necessary to produce an utterance. Let us begin by looking at the following sets of words. Consider their pronunciation in each case. Example 1 a. cap [kp] b. tap [tp] Example 2 a. tent [tnt] b. ninety [nanti] Example 3 a. since [sns] b. mince [sns] sink [sk] mink [mk] tenth [tn] ninth [nan] can [kn] tan [tn]

In both examples 1a and 1b, the words differ in two sounds. The vowel in the second word of each pair is nasalized because of the influence of the following nasal consonant. In example 2, the nasal /n/ is dentalized before a dental fricative. In example 3, the alveolar nasal /n/ becomes the velar nasal [] before the velar stop [k]. In this situation, NASALIZATION, DENTALIZATION, and VELARIZATION are all instances of ASSIMILATION, a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound, as we have seen above.

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1.1. Direction of assimilation

Similarly, there are two possibilities of assimilation: if a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, we call it REGRESSIVE ASSIMILATION; the converse process, in which a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, is known as PROGRESSIVE ASSIMILATION. All our examples in 1 3 are instances of regressive assimilation.

1.2. Assimilation across word boundaries

Assimilation can occur across syllable or word boundaries, as shown by the following: Example 4 a. pan[]cake b. sun[]glasses Example 5 a. you can[] keep them b. he can[] go now

Voice Assimilation
In addition to velarization, nasalization, dentalization and palatalization, assimilation can be in terms of voice as well. For instance, assimilation studies of English fricatives and affricates have shown that their voicing is severely influenced by the voicing of the following sound. The five pairs of English fricatives and affricates are listed in below. List of English fricatives and affricates: f, v, , , s, z, , , , Examples in 6 below show how fricatives and affricates in English may be assimilated in voicing: Example 6 a. five past b. love to c. has to [favpst] [lvt] [hzt] > [fafpst] > [lft] > [hst]

d. as can be shown [zknbn] > [sknbn] e. lose five-nil [luzfavnl] > [lusfavnl]

The first column of symbols shows the way these phrases are pronounced in slow or careful speech while the second column shows how they are pronounced in normal,

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connected speech. Investigations into other sounds reveal that DEVOICING, a process by which voiced sounds become voiceless, in such contexts does not occur with other sounds, such as stops and vowels. These changes exhibit PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES in which an AFFECTED SEGMENT undergoes a structural change in certain ENVIRONMENTS or CONTEXTS. In each process the change is conditioned or triggered by a following sound or, in the case of progressive assimilation, a preceding sound. Consequently, we can say that any phonological process must have three aspects to it: (a) a set of sounds to undergo the process; (b) a set of sounds produced by the process; (c) a set of situations in which the process. We can represent the process by means of an arrow: (4) /v/ [f]

Our data have shown that this does not only apply to /v/ but also to other fricatives, like /z/. Therefore, we can make a more general rule to indicate that voiced fricatives are transformed into voiceless fricatives before voiceless segments: (5) voiced fricative voiceless / _____ voiceless

This is a PHONOLOGICAL RULE.

1. How to formulate a formal rule:

Now lets take a look at the English prefix in- and see, in more detail, how phonological rules are formulated, starting from the observation to the formulation of the rule (the scientific method I explained last year if you can remember). [m] i[m]potent i[m]partial i[m]possible i[m]practical i[m]mature i[m]balance [n] [ ]

i[n]direct i[]conclusive i[n]dependent i[]considerate i[n]tolerance i[]correct i[n]sufferable i[]complete i[n]sufficient i[]convenient i[]gratitude

Question: what do you notice? Answer: We notice that the nasal in the prefix in- has the same place of articulation as the following consonant: [m] before [p, b, m] [+labial] [n] before [t, d, s] [+alveolar] [] before [k, g] [+velar] We say: the nasal assimilates in place of articulation to its following consonant. Consider the following data: i[n]advisable

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i[n]animate i[n]ordinate i[n]eligible Based on these data, [n] occurs in the most environments: that is, before vowels, t, d and s. Therefore, we want to say that the underlying form of the prefix is /n/. The rule: /n/ [m] / ___ bilabial consonants [ ] / ___ velar consonants [n] elsewhere [p, b, m] [k, g] [t, d, s] and vowels

A formal rule: As you have seen in the above figure, a formal rule should consist of the following: a. The input, which states the sound or sounds affected by the rule, in the above case it is /n/; b. The arrow(s), which means is realized as or becomes; c. What occurs to the right of the arrow(s) is the output of the rule; d. Following the output, there is a diagonal line / , to the right of that line is the environment, the ___ line which forms part of the environment shows precisely where the changed segment is located;

So the rule reads: the prefix /n/ becomes (or is transformed into) [m] when it appears before bilabial consonants, becomes [] when it appears before velar consonants and becomes [n] elsewhere. Nasalization, dentalization, and velarization are also typical phonological processes that can be represented by the following rules: (7) Nasalization rule [nasal] [+nasal] / _____ [+nasal]

(8) Dentalization rule [dental] (9) Velarization rule [velar] [+velar] / _____ [+velar] [+dental] / _____ [+dental]

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Part Two: Morphology

What is Morphology?

Morphology is the part of linguistics that deals with the study of words, their internal structure and partially their meanings. It is also interested in how the users of a given language understand complex words and invent new lexical items. As morphology is concerned with word forms it is akin to phonology (which describes how words are pronounced, as we have seen in the first part of this course), it is also related to lexical studies as the patterns examined by morphology are used to create new words. Furthermore, it is also linked with semantics as it deals with the meanings of words, as we shall see in the second semester. Scholars differentiate between derivational morphology and inflectional morphology. The former is concerned with the relationships of different words, and with the ways in which vocabulary items can be built from some elements, as in un-speak-able; while the latter deals with the forms of one word that it takes up depending on its grammatical functions in a sentence. When it comes to English it appears that it rather takes advantage of derivational morphemes rather than inflectional ones. Morphemes in morphology are the smallest units that carry meaning or fulfill some grammatical function. The word house itself consists of one morpheme, and because it can stand by itself it can be called a free morpheme. In the word houses there are two morphemes house, which is free, and s whish is a bound morpheme, because it cannot stand by itself as it would have no meaning. In the second example above the bound morpheme -s was attached to house a free morpheme.

Chapter One

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Basic Concepts
Of Morphological Analysis

We move now from an examination of the smallest segments of language (sounds) to a larger unit (the word). Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. So, it is necessary to know what a word is. What we mean by a word is not always clear. This is due to the fact that the term word is used to denote quite a good variety of senses. For instance, this term may refer to the word form or to the lexeme.

Lexemes and word-forms

What would you do if you come across a difficult word, say the word flutter , for the first time in the below context? She flattered eyelashes at him 2 You would probably look up that unfamiliar word in the dictionary, not under flattered, but rather flatter. This is because you know that flattered is not going to be listed in the dictionary. You also know, without consulting anybody, that the words fluttering and flutters will exist. Moreover, you know that fluttering, flutter, flattered and flutters are all different of the same abstract vocabulary item. This abstract vocabulary item is called LEXEME. So, the forms fluttering, flutter, flattered and flutters are REALISATIONS (or representations or manifestations) of the lexeme FLUTTER (lexemes are conventionally written in capital letters). They all share a core meaning although they are spelled or pronounced differently. Therefore, we can define a lexeme as the vocabulary item that is listed in the dictionary; in short it is a dictionary entry. Example: Question: which ones of the words in the table below belong to the same lexeme? see sleeps boys seeing catches women sleep jump taller catch seen woman boy saw tall slept catchin g tallest jumped jumps sees sleeping caught jumping

2 This sentence means she tried to attract him in order to persuade him to do something. www.freewebs.com/hsalhi

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Answer: we should all agree that: The physical word-forms see, sees, seeing, saw, seen SEE sleeps, SLEEP catch, catches, CATCH jump, jumps, JUMP Tall, TALL boy, BOY woman, WOMAN are realizations of the lexeme

sleeping, catching, jumped, taller,

slept caught jumping tallest boys women

As we have seen above, when we use the term word, it is not always the abstract vocabulary item or dictionary entry that is meant. Rather, we use that term to refer to a particular physical realization of that lexeme, that is a particular WORD-FORM. Example: The verb lexeme SEE, has the word-forms see, sees, seeing, saw, seen The adjective lexeme GOOD, has the word-forms good, better, and best However, any sense the term word takes, it is still possible to decompose it into smaller units, namely morphemes, morphs, and allomorphs.

Morphs, morphemes and allomorphs

2.1. Morphemes
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as a word, while bound morphemes cannot stand alone. Most bound morphemes are affixes, which (for English) fall into two broad groups, prefixes (attaching to the beginning of the stem) and suffixes (attaching to the end of a stem). Morphemes with an independent meaning are called content/lexical morphemes, while morphemes that only provide grammatical information are called function/grammatical morphemes. Bear in mind not to confuse between morphemes (units of meaning) and syllables (units of articulation).

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Examples (English)
Unladylike The word unladylike consists of three morphemes and four syllables. Morpheme breaks:

un- 'not' lady '(well behaved) female adult human' -like 'having the characteristics of'

None of these morphemes can be broken up any more without losing all sense of meaning. Lady cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Note that each syllable has no meaning on its own. Dogs The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one syllable: dog, and -s, a plural marker on nouns Note that a morpheme like "-s" can just be a single phoneme and does not have to be a whole syllable. Technique The word technique consists of only one morpheme having two syllables. Even though the word has two syllables, it is a single morpheme because it cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts.

2.2. Morphs and allomorphs

Consider the following words and comment on how their plural is formed, ignoring their spelling. How is the plural morpheme realized? 1. rat, book, laugh 2. dog, reader, way 3. wish, garage, fridge The actual shapes morphemes which are abstract units occur in, are called morphs. Two or several morphs realizing one morpheme are called allomorphs of that morpheme. Thus, the {plural} morpheme of English has several allomorphs. Allomorphs whose occurrence can be predicted from the phonological context (like the voiced/voiceless plural allomorphs) are called phonologically conditioned, while 'irregular' allomorphs that only occur with certain unpredictable words are called lexically conditioned. So, any language has a register of morphemes, the physical realizations of which are called morphs, as we have seen. While morphemes remain ideal abstract units, the corresponding morphs may show some variation. In the above case of the plural morpheme, for instance, various realizations are possible. These variations sound and look differently: /z/ in "dogs, beds, etc."; /s/ in "cats, rats, etc."; /iz/ in "garages, wish, etc. " All three morphs are different representations of the same morpheme of plurality. Several morphs that belong to the same morpheme are also called allomorphs: variants of one morpheme. In morphological transcription, morphs are commonly put between braces. The plural morph in "cats" thus becomes {cat}+{s} in morphological transcription.

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Chapter Two

Types of Morphemes
After seeing that words have internal structure in the previous chapter, the time is ripe to examine the elements that ensure the building of words, so, we are going to see, in this chapter, the types of morphemes. Let us start by roots and affixes.

Roots and Affixes

A ROOT is a (usually free) morpheme around which words can be built up through the addition of affixes. The root usually has a more-specific meaning than the affixes that attach to it. eg.: The root 'kind' can have affixes added to it to form 'kindly', 'kindness', 'kinder', 'kindest'. The root is the item you have left when you strip all other morphemes off of a complex word. In the word dehumanizing, for example, if you strip off all the affixes -ing, -ize, and de-, human is what you have left. It cannot be divided further into meaningful parts. It is the root of the word. An AFFIX is a bound morpheme which attaches to a base (root or stem). PREFIXES attach to the front of a base; SUFFIXES to the end of a base; INFIXES are inserted inside of a root. An example of a prefix is the 're-' of 'rewrite'; of a suffix, '-al' of 'critical'.

Stems and Bases

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A BASE is an element (free or bound, root morpheme or complex word) to which additional morphemes are added. A base can consist of a single root morpheme, as with the 'kind' of 'kindness'. But a base can also be a word that itself contains more than one morpheme. Example: (English) We can use the word 'kindness' as a base to form the word 'kindnesses'; to make 'kindnesses', we add the plural morpheme, spelled '-es' in this case, to the base 'kindness'. The STEM is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes (i.e. those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of plural in nouns, tense in verbs, etc.) have been added. Inflection shall be discussed in the following section. In other words, A stem is the root or roots of a word, together with any derivational affixes, to which inflectional affixes are added. Example: (English) The verbs tie and untie are both stems. The inflectional third person singular suffix -s may be added to the stems to form ties and unties.

Inflectional and derivational morphemes

Bound morphemes can be divided into two major functional categories, namely DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES and INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES. These two categories reflect two main word-building processes, namely derivation and inflection. This is because derivational and inflectional morphemes form words in different ways. Derivational form new words either: By changing the meaning of the base to which it is attached; e.g. kind vs unkind (both are adjectives but with opposite meanings); obey and disobey (both are verbs but with opposite meanings). By changing the word-class that a base belongs to, for example the addition of ly to the adjectives kind and simple produces the adverbs kind-ly and simp-ly. By changing the grammatical sub-class of a word without moving it into a new wordclass (as in the case of friend (noun) and friend-ship (another noun). Below is a sample of some English derivational affixes. This is only a sample; there are far more affixes than presented here. Some derivational affixes of English Affix Class(es) of word to which affix applies Noun, adjective Adjective Verb Adjective Nature of change in meaning Negation/opposite Changes to noun Reverses action opposite quality Examples

Prefix 'non-' Suffix '-ity' Prefix 'un-'

Noun: non-starter Adj.: non-partisan electric/electricity obese/obesity

tie/untie, fasten/unfasten clear/unclear, www.freewebs.com/hsalhi

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safe/unsafe Suffix '-ous' Prefix 're-' Suffix 'able' Noun Verb Verb Changes to adjective Repeat action Changes to adjective; means 'can undergo action of verb' fame/famous, glamor/glamorous tie/retie, write/rewrite print/printable, drink/drinkable

As for inflectional morphemes, they do not engender any change of the above mentioned kinds, but rather they are required by the syntax such as markers of plural in nouns, tense in verbs, etc., as we have seen above. See the table below for a list by the frequently used inflectional morphemes in English (all of them are suffixes). It should be mentioned that English has no inflectional prefixes but some other languages do.

Note that the above listed inflectional morphemes fall within what we call REGULAR INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY, and that you are also required to master the IRREGULAR INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY. The below table shows some English irregular inflectional morphemes: Irregular inflectional morphology: Type of irregularity Noun plurals
Unusual suffix Change of stem vowel oxen, syllabi, antennae foot/feet, mouse/mice

Verbs: past tense

, run/ran, come/came, flee/fled, meet/met, fly/flew, stick/stuck, get/got, break/broke feel/felt, kneel/knelt

Verbs: past participle

taken, seen, fallen, eaten swim/swum, sing/sung

Change of stem vowel -s noun with unusual suffix

plural book-s -s verb 3rd person, singular, present sleep-s tense Change in base/stem , send/sent, bend/bent, -ed verb past tense walk-ed form (sometimes think/thought, verb progressive (action) walkwith unusual suffix) teach/taught, in buy/bought g Zero-marking (no deer, sheep, hit, beat -er adjectiv comparative degree tall-er suffix, no stem moose, fish e change) adjectiv superlative degree tall-est e

write/written, do/done, break/broken, fly/flown send/sent, bend/bent, think/thought, teach/taught, buy/bought hit, beat, come

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Chapter Three

English Word Formation Processes

Introduction
Although the terms WORD FORMATION do not have nowadays a clear-cut, universally accepted usage, they are conventionally used to refer to all processes connected with changing the form of the word by, for example, affixation, which is a matter of morphology. In its wider sense word formation denotes the processes of creation of new lexical units. Although it seems that the difference between morphological change of a word and creation of a new term are quite easy to perceive there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending is still a morphological change or making a new word. There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages:

Major processes
The below mentioned word formation processes are the most frequent or important in the English language.

2.1. Derivation or affixation

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Derivation is probably the most common word formation process in the English language. It is achieved by adding affixes: prefixes are added at the beginning of a word, suffixes added to the end of a word, or infixes which are inserted inside a word, but infixes are unusual in English and are especially common in Semitic languages like Standard Arabic. English prefixes include for example re-, un-, mis-, pre-, dis-; suffixes include for instance -ful, -less, -able, -or.

2.2. Compounding
Compounding is a process in which two different words are joined together to denote one thing. For example flower-pot is a compound made of two words: flower and pot, but it does not denote two things, it refers to one object. Some English compounds include: windmill, waterfall, fingerprint, scarecrow. Compounds are pronounced as one unit, but sometimes difficulties in writing arise: some compounds are written with hyphens: full-time; some are written separately: bank account, mini skirt; and some can be written in both ways.

2.3. Conversion
Conversion or zero derivation process is a change in function of a verb without changing its form. Nouns start to be used as verbs like: bottle to bottle, bottling as in Im bottling the compote; butter to butter, buttered as in Ive buttered the bread. Also verbs can become nouns: must a must as in Watching this film is a must; guess a guess as in It was a lucky guess.

Minor Processes
Other minor word-formation processes in English are also productive, the most productive ones are explained below. Blending is very similar to compounding, but it is characterized by taking only parts of words and joining them. Famous English examples include: smog which combines smoke and fog, motel made of motor and hotel, Spanglish which is combination of Spanish and English; and guesstimate, from guess and estimate. Borrowing is taking a word from one language and incorporating it into another. The English language has been very absorbent and took over words from all over the world, some of them include: biology, boxer, ozone from German; jackal, kiosk, yogurt from Turkish; pistol, robot from Czech. Acronym is a word formed from initial letters of a few words in a phrase or a name. Some acronyms are pronounced by saying each letter separately, as in CD, DVD, VCR, IBM, FBI. Some are pronounced as words, like NATO, laser, AIDS, UNESCO. Backformation is a process in which a word changes its form and function. Word of one type, which is usually a noun, is reduced and used as a verb. To show it on an example: the English word arms meaning weapon was backformed to arm to mean provide weapons, similarly edit was backformed from editor, or typewrite from typewriter.

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Required Texts:
Katamba, Francis (1989) An Introduction to Phonology. Longman Group UK Limited.

Katamba, Francis (1993) Morphology, MACMILLAN Press LTD

Selected readings at one of the photocopy shops

End of the Course

Thank You and Good Luck

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. . ) ( . . Scholars differentiate between derivational morphology and inflectional morphology. The former is concerned with the relationships of different words, and with the ways in which vocabulary items can be built from some elements, as in unspeak-able ; while the latter deals with the forms of one word that it takes up depending on its grammatical functions in a sentence. When it comes to English it appears that it rather takes advantage of derivational morphemes rather than .inflectional ones Morphemes in morphology are the smallest units that carry meaning or fulfill some grammatical function. The word house itself consists of one morpheme, and because it can stand by itself it can be called a free morpheme . In the word houses there are two morphemes house, which is free, and s whish is a bound morpheme , because it cannot stand by itself as it would have no meaning. In the second example above the bound morpheme - s was attached .to house a free morpheme

Of Morphological Analysis We move now from an examination of the smallest segments of language (sounds) to a larger unit (the word). Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. So, it is necessary to know what a word is. What we mean by a word is not always clear. This is due to the fact that the term 'word' is used to denote quite a good variety of senses. For instance, this term may refer to the word form or to the .lexeme

Lexemes and word-forms .1 www.freewebs.com/hsalhi Page 51 of 27

What would you do if you come across a difficult word, say the word ?'flutter' , for the first time in the below context
She flattered eyelashes at him 2

You would probably look up that unfamiliar word in the dictionary, not under flattered, but rather flatter . This is because you know that flattered is not going to be listed in the dictionary. You also know, without consulting anybody, that the words fluttering and flutters will exist. Moreover, you know that fluttering, flutter, flattered and flutters are all different of the same abstract vocabulary item. This abstract vocabulary item is calledLEXEME. So, the forms fluttering, flutter, flattered and flutters are REALISATIONS (or representations or manifestations) of the lexeme FLUTTER (lexemes are conventionally written in capital letters). They all share a core meaning although they are spelled or pronounced differently. Therefore, we can define a lexeme as the vocabulary item that is listed in the dictionary; .in short it is a dictionary entry : which ones of the words in the table below belong to the same : ?lexeme catching jumped tall catches sleeps

jumps slept

The physical word-forms are realizations of the lexeme see, sees, seeing, saw, seen SEE sleeps, sleeping, slept SLEEP catch, catches, catching, caught CATCH jump, jumps, jumped, jumping JUMP Tall, taller, tallest TALL boy, boys BOY woman, women WOMAN :Answer: we should all agree that :Answer: we should all agree that As we have seen above, when we use the term 'word', it is not always the abstract vocabulary item or dictionary entry that is meant. Rather, we use that term to refer to a particular physical realization of that .lexeme, that is a particular WORD-FORM :
The verb lexeme SEE, has the word-forms see, sees, seeing, saw, seen www.freewebs.com/hsalhi

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The adjective lexeme GOOD, has the word-forms good, better , and best

However, any sense the term 'word' takes, it is still possible to decompose .it into smaller units, namely morphemes, morphs, and allomorphs

Morphs, morphemes and allomorphs

.2

Morphemes .2.1 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as a word, while bound morphemes cannot stand alone. Most bound morphemes are affixes , which (for English) fall into two broad groups,prefixes (attaching to the .(beginning of the stem) and suffixes (attaching to the end of a stem Morphemes with an independent meaning are called content/lexical morphemes, while morphemes that only provide grammatical information are called function /grammatical morphemes. Bear in mind not to confuse between .(morphemes (units of meaning) and syllables (units of articulation (Examples (English
Unladylike .The word unladylike consists of three morphemes and four syllables o :Morpheme breaks o 'un- 'not 'lady '(well behaved) female adult human 'like 'having the characteristics of None of these morphemes can be broken up any more without losing all o sense of meaning. Lady cannot be broken up into "la" and "dy," even though "la" and "dy" are separate syllables. Note that each syllable has no meaning .on its own :The word dogs consists of two morphemes and one syllable o dog, and s, a plural marker on nouns Note that a morpheme like "-s" can just be a single phoneme and does o .not have to be a whole syllable The word technique consists of only one morpheme having two o .syllables Even though the word has two syllables, it is a single morpheme o .because it cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful parts

Morphs and allomorphs .2.2 Consider the following words and comment on how their plural is formed, ignoring . their spelling ?How is the plural morpheme realized

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rat, book, laugh dog, reader, way wish, garage , fridge

.1 .2 .3

The actual shapes morphemes which are abstract units occur in, are called morphs . Two or several morphs realizing one morpheme are called allomorphs of that morpheme. Thus, the {plural} morpheme of English has several allomorphs. Allomorphs whose occurrence can be predicted from the phonological context (like the voiced/voiceless plural allomorphs) are called phonologically conditioned , while 'irregular' allomorphs that only occur . with certain unpredictable words are called lexically conditioned So, any language has a register of morphemes, the physical realizations of which are called morphs, as we have seen. While morphemes remain ideal abstract units, the corresponding morphs may show some variation. In the above case of the plural morpheme, for instance, various realizations are possible. These variations sound :and look differently ;".z/ in "dogs, beds, etc/ ;".s/ in "cats, rats, etc/ " .iz/ in "garages, wish, etc/ All three morphs are different representations of the same morpheme of plurality. Several morphs that belong to the same morpheme are also called allomorphs : variants of one morpheme. In morphological transcription, morphs are commonly put between braces. The plural morph in "cats" thus becomes {cat}+{s} in .morphological transcription

Types of Morphemes
After seeing that words have internal structure in the previous chapter, the time is ripe to examine the elements that ensure the building of words, so, we are going to see, in this chapter, the types of .morphemes. Let us start by roots and affixes

Roots and Affixes

.1

A ROOT is a (usually free) morpheme around which words can be built up through the addition of affixes. The root usually has a more-specific meaning than the affixes that attach to it. eg.: The root 'kind' can have affixes added to it to form 'kindly', 'kindness', 'kinder', 'kindest'. The root is the item you have left when you strip all other morphemes off of a complex word. In the word ' dehumanizing' , for example, if you strip off all the affixes -ing, -ize, and de-, human is what you have left. It cannot be divided further into meaningful parts. It is the root .of the word

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An AFFIX is a bound morpheme which attaches to a base (root or stem). PREFIXES attach to the front of a base; SUFFIXES to the end of a base;INFIXES are inserted inside of a root. An example of a prefix is .'the 're-' of 'rewrite'; of a suffix, '-al' of 'critical

Stems and Bases

.2

A BASE is an element (free or bound, root morpheme or complex word) to which additional morphemes are added. A base can consist of a single root morpheme, as with the 'kind' of 'kindness'. But a base can also .be a word that itself contains more than one morpheme (Example: (English
We can use the word 'kindness' as a base to form the word 'kindnesses'; to make 'kindnesses', we add the plural morpheme, spelled '-es' in this case, to the .'base 'kindness

The STEM is that part of a word that is in existence before any inflectional affixes (ie those affixes whose presence is required by the syntax such as markers of plural in nouns, tense in verbs, etc.) have been added. Inflection shall be discussed in the following section. In other words, A stem is theroot or roots of a word, together with .any derivational affixes , to which inflectional affixes are added (Example: (English
.The verbs ' tie' and ' untie' are both stems The inflectional third person singular suffix -s may be added to the stems to . 'form ' ties' and ' unties

Inflectional and derivational morphemes

.3

Bound morphemes can be divided into two major functional categories, namely DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES and INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES . These two categories reflect two main word-building processes, namely derivation and inflection . This is because derivational and inflectional morphemes form words in different ways. Derivational :form new words either
By changing the meaning of the base to which it is attached; .a eg kind vs unkind (both are adjectives but with opposite .(meanings); obey and disobey (both are verbs but with opposite meanings By changing the word-class that a base belongs to, for example the addition of .b .ly to the adjectives kind and simple produces the adverbs kind-ly and simp-ly By changing the grammatical sub-class of a word without moving it into a new .c .(word-class (as in the case of friend (noun) and friend-ship (another noun

Below is a sample of some English derivational affixes . This is only a sample; there .are far more affixes than presented here Some derivational affixes of English www.freewebs.com/hsalhi Page 51 of 27

As for inflectional morphemes, they do not engender any change of the above mentioned kinds, but rather they are required by the syntax such as markers of plural in nouns, tense in verbs, etc., as we have seen above. See the table below for a list by the frequently used inflectional morphemes in English (all of them are suffixes). It should be mentioned that English has no inflectional prefixes but some .other languages do book-s sleep-s walked walking tall-er tall-est
rd

sperson, singular, present 3 stense ed(progressive (action -

comparative degree ersuperlative degree -

Note that the above listed inflectional morphemes fall within what we call REGULAR INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY , and that you are also required to master the IRREGULAR INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY. The : below table shows some English irregular inflectional morphemes :Irregular inflectional morphology
Verbs: past participle Verbs: past tense Noun Type of

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plurals
tak en , see n , fall en , eat en ox en , syllab i , antenn ae foot/f ee t, mouse/m ice

irregularity
Unusual suffix

swim/sw u m, sing/s u ng

run/r a n, come/c a me, flee/fl e d, meet/m e t, fly/fl ew , stick/st u ck, get/g o t, break/br oke feel/f e l t , kneel/kn e l t

Change of stem vowel

write/wr i tt en , do/d one , break/br o k en , fly/fl own

Change of stem vowel with unusual suffix Change in base/stem form (sometimes with (unusual suffix Zero-marking (no suffix, no stem (change

send/sen t , bend/ben t , send/sen t , bend/ben t , think/thought , think/th ought , teach/t aught , teach/t aught , buy/b ought buy/bought hit, beat, come hit, beat

deer, sheep, moose, fish

Word Formation
.1

Although the terms ' WORD FORMATION ' do not have nowadays a clear-cut, universally accepted usage, they are conventionally used to refer to all processes connected with changing the form of the word by, for example, affixation, which is a matter of morphology . In its wider sense word formation denotes the processes of creation of new lexical units. Although it seems that the difference between morphological change of a word and creation of a new term are quite easy to perceive there is sometimes a dispute as to whether blending is still a .morphological change or making a new word There are, of course, numerous word formation processes that do not arouse any :controversies and are very similar in the majority of languages

Major processes

.2

The below mentioned word formation processes are the most frequent or .important in the English language

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Derivation or affixation .2.1 Derivation is probably the most common word formation process in the English language. It is achieved by adding affixes: prefixes are added at the beginning of a word, suffixes added to the end of a word, or infixes which are inserted inside a word, but infixes are unusual in English and are especially common in Semitic languages like Standard Arabic. English prefixes include for example re-, un-, .mis-, pre-, dis-; suffixes include for instance -ful, -less, -able, -or Compounding .2.2 Compounding is a process in which two different words are joined together to denote one thing. For example flower-pot is a compound made of two words: flower and pot, but it does not denote two things, it refers to one object. Some English compounds include: windmill, waterfall, fingerprint, scarecrow. Compounds are pronounced as one unit, but sometimes difficulties in writing arise: some compounds are written with hyphens: full-time; some are written separately: bank .account, mini skirt; and some can be written in both ways 3.2. Conversion or zero derivation process is a change in function of a verb without changing its form. Nouns start to be used as verbs like: bottle to bottle, bottling as in I'm bottling the compote; butter to butter, buttered as in I've buttered the bread. Also verbs can become nouns: must a must as in Watching this film is a must; .guess a guess as in It was a lucky guess

Minor Processes

.3

Other minor word-formation processes in English are also productive, the .most productive ones are explained below
Blending is very similar to compounding, but it is characterized by taking only parts of words and joining them. Famous English examples include: smog which combines smoke and fog , motel made of motor and hotel , Spanglish which is . combination of Spanish and English ; and guesstimate , from guess andestimate Borrowing is taking a word from one language and incorporating it into another. The English language has been very absorbent and took over words from all over the world, some of them include: biology, boxer, ozone from German; jackal, .kiosk, yogurt from Turkish; pistol, robot from Czech Acronym is a word formed from initial letters of a few words in a phrase or a name. Some acronyms are pronounced by saying each letter separately, as in CD, .DVD, VCR, IBM, FBI. Some are pronounced as words, like NATO, laser, AIDS, UNESCO Backformation is a process in which a word changes its form and function. Word of one type, which is usually a noun, is reduced and used as a verb. To show it on an example: the English word arms meaning weapon was backformed to arm to mean provide weapons, similarly edit was backformed from editor, or typewrite from .typewriter

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:Required Texts
.Katamba, Francis (1989) An Introduction to Phonology . Longman Group UK Limited Katamba, Francis (1993) Morphology , MACMILLAN Press LTD

Selected readings at one of the photocopy shops

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