Morphology Final Exam Wq 2009

Bethany Deibler MORPHOLOGY At-home final examination Winter 2009 1. What is a word? How can words be identified as such? What other kinds of morphemes are there other than words? Explain the diff erences. There is no precise definition of a word. It can be defined grammatically, syntactically and phonologically, but there is not one set definition. Syntactically, a word is the smallest unit of syntax. Letters make up words, words make up a sentence and sentences make up paragraphs, etc. Words can also be defined as the smallest unit of language that can stand alone. However this definition doesn’t work as there are bound words and free words. Bound words such as ―the‖ are meant to accomp any other words, in this case, nouns. Not all words can stand alone and still make sense. Sa ying ―the‖ and nothing else would be very strange. Grammatically we distinguish between words like ―cat‖ and ―cats‖. Those are both words, but what do we do with the morpheme – s? It cannot stand alone and is o bviously not a word either. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. A word is the next thing up. A morpheme can be a word too, but not all words are single morphemes. Words are the inflected and derived forms of morphemes. Phonologically, we can use the idea of stress to define a word. Howev er, because of clitics, this definition cannot work either. Clitics rely on other words for their stress. To test for potential wordhood, we can ex amine the order of the sentence, the separability and the stress on the word.

Morphology Final Exam Wq 2009

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