For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
Kinds of Words :
Words are divided into different kinds or classes according to the purpose for which they are used. The different kinds of words are called Parts of Speech. They are eight in number.
1. Noun
2. Pronoun
3. Adjective
4. Verb
5. Adverb
6. Preposition
7. Conjunction
8. Interjection
Until we see a word in a sentence, we are often unable to say to what part of speech it belongs.
(i) Water the roses. (Here water is a Verb.)
(ii) Take some water. (Here water is a Noun.)
(iii) We saw a water bird. (Here water is an Adjective.)
A word used for naming anything is called a Noun, as ship, fox, house, man. Hence a noun is the naming word. (The words noun and name are the same basically. But they are differently spelt. The word noun comes from the Latin nomen — name)
To know more about The Noun, CLICK HERE !
A word used instead of a noun is called a Pronoun.
A ship went out to sea and she had all her sails up.
Here the pronoun SHE is used instead of the noun ship and saves its being mentioned twice. Hence a pronoun is a substitute word and its chief use is to avoid the repetition of a
noun.
1. To know more about Pronouns, CLICK HERE !
2. To know more about Pronouns, CLICK HERE !
If we wish to qualify a noun….that is to add something to the meaning of noun, the word used for such a purpose is called an Adjective.
A fine ship went out to sea.
The word Adjective means adding and is so called because it adds something to the meaning of a noun.
The word FINE is an adjective here.
To know more about The Adjective, CLICK HERE !
Words used for predicating (that is, saying something about some person or thing) are called Verbs.
A fine ship went out to sea.
Here the word which predicates or says something about a ship is WENT. This is therefore a verb and thus the predicate of a sentence must be a verb or it must at least contain one.
To know more about Verbs, CLICK HERE !
In the phrase TO SEA, the word TO is called a Preposition. The word expresses the relation in which the thing denoted by SEA stands to the event denoted by WENT OUT.
The noun, pronoun or other noun-equivalent that follows the preposition is called its Object.
The use of a preposition, then, is to show the relation in which the person or thing denoted by its Object stands to something else.
To know more about The Preposition, CLICK HERE!
A Conjunction is a joining word. It joins words and phrases to one another, one clause to another clause or one sentence to another sentence.
(a) He was tall and of distinguished appearance.
(b) May he live long and (may he) die happy!
(c) This is a thing which we all regret but which cannot be helped.
In (a) the adjective TALL is joined to the phrase OF DISTINGUISHED APPEARANCE by the conjunction AND.
In (b) the sentence, ‘may he live long’ is joined by the same conjunction to the sentence ‘may he die happy’.
In (c) the clause, ‘which we all regret’ is joined to the clause ‘which cannot be helped’ by the conjunction BUT.
AND and BUT are Conjunctions.
To know more about The Conjunction, CLICK HERE!
Adverbs, like adjectives, are qualifying words. An adjective, as we have shown, qualifies a noun whereas an adverb usually qualifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb or a preposition.
That very fine ship has already sailed right round the world.
Here VERY is an adverb qualifying the adjective FINE. ALREADY is an adverb qualifying the verb HAS SAILED and RIGHT is an adverb qualifying the preposition ROUND.
As a general rule Adverbs do not qualify Nouns or Pronouns. But such sentences as the following are exceptions.
Qualifying a noun : Even elephants have flown in aeroplanes.
Qualifying a pronoun : Only you can tell us what happened.
To know more about The Adverb, CLICK HERE!
Interjections are not words connected, as other words are, with other parts of a sentence, but mere sounds standing by themselves and thrown into a sentence to express some feeling of the mind.
My son, alas! is not industrious.
Here ALAS is a sound thrown into the sentence to express regret.
To know more about The Interjection, CLICK HERE!
Kinds of Words :
Kinds of Words To HOME PAGE
The Sentences Index
kind of word — перевод на русский
kind of word — за слово
— What kind of word is that?
— А что это за слово такое?
What kind of a word is that?
Что это за слово такое?
No! What kind of word is Yang?
Что это за слово Янь?
What kind of a word is «goof»?
Что за слово такое?
What kind of word is that?
Что за слово такое?
Показать ещё примеры для «за слово»…
Отправить комментарий
Текст комментария:
На основании Вашего запроса эти примеры могут содержать грубую лексику.
На основании Вашего запроса эти примеры могут содержать разговорную лексику.
What kind of word is that?
What kind of word is that?
What kind of word is «hair»?
What kind of word is that?
Its powerful search functions let you find just what you are looking for and even allow you to specify what kind of word you are looking for.
Мощные функции поиска позволяют найти именно то, что Вы искали и даже уточнить, слова какой части речи Вы ищете.
what kind of word is «upsetment»?
Результатов: 6. Точных совпадений: 6. Затраченное время: 52 мс
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#1
I’d like to ask a question about the structures «what kind of….» and «what …like».
I have some answers and I have to write the questions. That’s what I think:
— What kind of person is Ann? / What is Ann like? (my questions, I think I can use either?)
— She is open, kind and sympathetic. She is always ready to help.
—What kind of dress is it? (my question)
-It’s an expensive evening dress.
— What is the dress like? (my question)
— It’s an elegant black dress without sleeves.
Many thanks
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#3
Thank you, PaulQ! My coursebook wants us, learners, to differentiate between ‘what is she like’ (personality) and ‘what does she look like’ (appearance) Now I see real English allows some freedom
Есть вопросительные слова, которые имеют несколько значений, причем некоторые из этих значений совпадают по форме с другими вопросительными словами, однако совпадают по форме, но не по смыслу. Одно из таких вопросительных слов-это WHICH.
Рассмотрим еще одно вопросительное слово WHAT = КАКОЙ, которое тоже вносит некоторую путаницу. Рассмотрим несколько примеров.
Какие книги ты любишь читать,
Какой это фильм?
Этот стол какой?
Какой это цвет?
Какой размер вы хотите?
Какие статьи ты прочитал по этому предмету?
Какой формы эта ваза?
В ответах на такие вопросы, которые можно так и назвать “what-questions” предполагается прилагательное, ведь именно о нем и задается вопрос. Вариантов может быть ТРИ, и это зависит от того, что именно вас интересует, когда вы задаете вопрос.
1. Когда речь идет у существительных, которые обозначают предметы, то рядом с многими из них можно поставить слова — СОРТ, ВИД, РАЗНОВИДНОСТЬ, КЛАСС и т.д. Действительно, ведь многие существительные обозначают предметы, которые не существуют в одном экземпляре, а их очень много, и их можно классифицировать.
Например, возьмем слово “КНИГА”. Книг очень много, и их можно классифицировать по жанрам, например: фантастика, приключения, исторические романы, документальная проза, сказки, путешествия, книги о животных, детективы, женские романы и т.д. И если я спрашиваю именно о “сорте” книги, тогда вопрос и будет строиться так: WHAT KIND OF …?
What KIND of books do you like to read? И предполагаемый ответ на такой вопрос: I like detective stories.
What KIND of film is this? — It’s a thriller.
What KIND of table have you bought? — I’ve bought a tea-table.
What KIND of weather do you like? — I like sunny weather.
What KIND of jacket is this? — It’s a wollen jacket.
2. Если вы хотите спросить о цвете, размере и форме предмета или узнать название предмета, то вопрос строится так: WHAT…?
What film is this? — This film is about students.
What colour are the walls in the room? — Yellow.
What book is this? — Martin Eden by Jack London.
What city is this? — London.
What size do you want? — Thirty-six.
3. Если вопрос задается о свойствах или качествах предмета, то есть вы просите его описать, то вопрос задается так: WHAT…LIKE?
What is this table LIKE? — It is round.
What is this book LIKE? — It is thick and torn.
What was the weather LIKE yesterday? — The weather was rainy and windy.
What was this house LIKE? — It’s modern.
What is the dress LIKE? — It’s ugly and old.
This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various
levels of linguistic analysis.
Words are the most accessible (and maybe the most important)
aspect of human language, and so we’ll start with
morphology, which deals with morphemes (the minimal units of
linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words.
We’ll then head towards the physical embodiment of words, and
discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the
meaningless elements that «spell out» the sound of morphemes), and
phonetics, which studies the way language is embodied in the
activity of speaking, the resulting physical sounds, and the
process of speech perception..
Then we’ll head in the other direction, towards meaning and
communication, starting with syntax, which deals with the
way that words are combined into phrases and sentences. Finally,
we’ll take up two aspects of meaning, namely semantics,
which deals with how sentences are connected with things in the
world outside of language, and pragmatics, which deals with
how people use all the levels of language to communicate.
The peculiar nature of morphology
From a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of
the levels of linguistic analysis. Whenever I give this lecture to
an introductory class, I’m always reminded of what the particle
physicist Isidor Rabi said when he learned about the discovery of
the muon: «Who ordered that?» Here’s a version of the
story from a NYT
review of a book The Hunting of the Quark:
In the fifth century B.C., that prescient
Greek philosopher started humanity on its search for the universe’s
ultimate building blocks when he suggested that all matter was made
of infinitesimally small particles called atoms. In 1897, the
British physicist J. J. Thomson complicated the issue when he
discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. Later,
others recognized the proton and neutron. As atom smashers grew in
the next few decades, myriads of ephemeral particles appeared in
the debris, a veritable Greek alphabet soup of lambdas, sigmas and
pions. »Who ordered that?» exclaimed the theorist Isidor I. Rabi
when the muon was identified.
Given the basic design of human spoken language, the levels of
phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are arguably
unavoidable. They needn’t look exactly the way that they do,
perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of
these levels.
But morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and
irregular: anything that a language does with morphology, it
usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax; and there
is always some other language that does the same thing with
syntax.
For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify
plurality: thus dogs means «more than one dog». This
inflection lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the
distinction between one and more-than-one. Of course, we could
always say the same thing in a more elaborated way, using the
resources of syntax rather than morphology: more than one
dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: one
or more dogs; a number of dogs greater than one;
etc.
Modern Standard Chinese (also known as «Mandarin» or
«Putonghua») makes exactly the opposite choice: there is no
morphological marking for plurality, so we can be succinctly vague
about whether we mean one or more of something, while we need to be
more long-winded if we want to be specific. Thus (in Pinyin
orthography with tone numbers after each syllable):
| 1. | na4er5 | you3 | gou3 | ||
| there | have | dog | |||
| «there’s a dog or dogs there.» |
|||||
| 2. | na4er5 | you3 | ji3 | zhi1 | gou3 |
| there | have | several | CLASSIFIER | dog | |
| «there’s dogs there» |
As an example of another kind of morphological packaging,
English can make iconify from icon and -ify,
meaning «make into an icon.» Perhaps it’s nice to have a single
word for it, but we could always have said «make into an icon.» And
many languages lack any general way to turn a noun X into a verb
meaning «to make into (an) X», and so must use the longer-winded
mode of expression. Indeed, the process in English is rather
erratic: we say vaporize not *vaporify, and
emulsify not *emulsionify, and so on.
In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from
syntax is its combinatoric irregularity. Words are mostly combined
logically and systematically. So when you exchange money for
something you can be said to «buy» it or to «purchase» it — we’d
be surprised if (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could
only be «purchased,» while clothing, automobiles and pencils could
only be «bought,» and things denoted by words of one syllable could
only be «acquired in exchange for money.»
Yet irrational combinatoric nonsense of this type happens all
the time in morphology. Consider the adjectival forms of the names
of countries or regions in English. There are at least a half a
dozen different endings, and also many variations in how much of
the name of the country is retained before the ending is added:
| -ese | Bhutanese, Chinese, Guyanese, Japanese, Lebanese, Maltese, Portuguese, Taiwanese |
| -an | African, Alaskan, American, Angolan, Cuban, Jamaican, Mexican, Nicaraguan |
| -ian | Argentinian, Armenian, Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Iranian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Serbian |
| -ish | Irish, British, Flemish, Polish, Scottish, Swedish |
| -i | Afghani, Iraqi, Israeli, Kuwaiti, Pakistani |
| -? | French, German, Greek |
And you can’t mix ‘n match stems and endings here:
*Taiwanian, *Egyptese, and so on just don’t work.
To make it worse, the word for citizen of X and
the general adjectival form meaning associated with locality
X are usually but not always the same. Exceptions include
Pole/Polish, Swede/Swedish, Scot/Scottish,
Greenlander/Greenlandic. And there are some oddities about
pluralization: we talk about «the French» and «the Chinese» but
«the Greeks» and «the Canadians». The plural forms «the Frenches»
and «the Chineses» are not even possible, and the singular forms
«the Greek» and «the Canadian» mean something entirely
different.
What a mess!
It’s worse in some ways than having to memorize a completely
different word in every case (like «The Netherlands» and «(the)
Dutch»), because there are just enough partial regularities to be
confusing.
This brings up former president George W. Bush. For years, there
was a web feature at Slate magazine devoted to «Bushisms», many
if not most of them arising from his individual approach to English
morphology. Some of the early and famous examples, from the 1999
presidential campaign, focus on the particular case under
discussion here:
«If the East Timorians decide to revolt,
I’m sure I’ll have a statement.» —Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New
YorkTimes, June 16, 1999«Keep good relations with the Grecians.»
—Quoted in the Economist, June 12, 1999«Kosovians can move back in.» —CNN Inside
Politics, April 9, 1999
President Bush, if these quotes are accurate, quite sensibly
decided that -ian should be the default ending, after
deletion of a final vowel if present. This follows the common model
of Brazil::Brazilians and Canada::Canadians, and gives Bush’s
East Timor::East Timorians,
Greece::Grecians and
Kosovo::Kosovians, instead of
the correct (but unpredictable) forms East
Timorese, Greeks and
Kosovars. And why not? The
President’s method is more logical than the way the English
language handles it. (Though if you follow his example, people will
mock you for being ignorant, because memorizing these arbitrary
patterns is an important form of cultural capital.)
Despite these derivational anfractuosities, English morphology
is simple and regular compared to the morphological systems of many
other languages. One question we need to ask ourselves is: why do
languages inflict morphology on their users — and their
politicians?
What is a word?
We’ve started talking blithely about words and morphemes as if
it were obvious that these categories exist and that we know them
when we see them. This assumption comes naturally to literate
speakers of English, because we’ve learned through reading and
writing where white space goes, which defines word boundaries for
us; and we soon see many cases where English words have internal
parts with separate meanings or grammatical functions, which must
be morphemes.
In some languages, the application of these terms is even
clearer. In languages like Latin, for example, words can usually be
«scrambled» into nearly any order in a phrase. As Allen and
Greenough’s New Latin Grammar says, «In connected discourse the
word most prominent in the speaker’s mind comes first, and so on in
order of prominence.»
Thus the simple two-word sentence facis
amice «you act kindly» also occurs as amice facis with essentially the same meaning,
but some difference in emphasis. However, the morphemes that make
up each of these two words must occur in a fixed order and without
anything inserted between them. The word amice combines the stem /amic-/ «loving,
friendly, kind» and the adverbial ending /-e/; we can’t change the
order of these, or put another word in between them. Likewise the
verb stem /fac-/ «do, make, act» and the inflectional ending /-is/
(second person singular present tense active) are fixed in their
relationship in the word facis,
and can’t be reordered or separated.
Among many others, the modern Slavic languages such as Czech and
Russian show a similar contrast between words freely circulating
within phrases, and morphemes rigidly arranged within words. In
such languages, the basic concepts of word and
morpheme are natural and inevitable analytic categories.
In a language like English, where word order is much less free,
we can still find evidence of a similar kind for the distinction
between morphemes and words. For example, between two words we can
usually insert some other words (without changing the basic meaning
and relationship of the originals), while between two morphemes we
usually can’t.
Thus in the phrase «she has arrived», we treat she and has as separate words, while the /-ed/
ending of arrived is treated as
part of a larger word. In accordance with this, we can introduce
other material into the white space between the words: «she
apparently has already arrived.» But there is no way to put
anything at all in between /arrive/ and /-ed/. And there are other
forms of the sentence in which the word order is different — «has
she arrived?»; «arrived, has she?» — but no form in which the
morphemes in arrived are
re-ordered.
Tests of this kind don’t entirely agree with the conventions of
English writing. For example, we can’t really stick other words in
the middle of compound words like swim
team and picture
frame, at least not while maintaining the meanings and
relationships of the words we started with. In this sense they are
not very different from the morphemes in complex words like
re+calibrate or consumer+ism, which we write «solid», i.e.
without spaces. A recent (and controversial) official spelling
reform of German made changes in both directions, splitting some
compounds orthographically while merging others: old radfahren became new Rad fahren, but old Samstag morgen became new Samstagmorgen.
As this change emphasizes, the question of whether a morpheme
sequence is written «solid» is largely a matter of orthographic
convention, and in any case may be variable even in a particular
writing system. English speakers feel that many noun-noun compounds
are words, even though they clearly contain other words, and may
often be written with a space or a hyphen between them:
«sparkplug», «shot glass». These are common combinations with a
meaning that is not entirely predictable from the meanings of their
parts, and therefore they can be found as entries in most English
dictionaries. But where should we draw the line? are all noun
compounds to be considered words, including those where
compounds are compounded? What about (say) government tobacco price support program?
In ordinary usage, we’d be more inclined to call this a phrase,
though it is technically correct to call it a «compound noun» and
thus in some sense a single — though complex — word.
Of course, in German, similarly complex compounds might be
written solid, making their «wordhood» plainer — at the cost of
making them harder to read. The champion of German compound-word
length used to be
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
rind+fleisch+etikettierung+s+über+wachung+s+aufgaben+über+tragung+s+gesetz
cattle+meat+labelling+/+over+seeing+/+duty+transfer+/+law
«the law concerning the delegation of duties for the supervision of
the labelling of beef»
…at least until the
regulation in question was withdrawn in 2013. (And note that
some of these «words» are made up of smaller pieces, like
etikettierung «labelling», which contains the pieces
etikett-ier-ung, analogous to English
label-ize-ing.
There are a number of interesting theories out there about why
morphology exists, and why it has the properties that it does. If
these theories turn out to be correct, then maybe linguistics will
be as lucky with the complexities of morphology as physics was with
«Greek alphabet soup» of elementary particles discovered in the
fifties and sixties, which turned out to be complex composites of
quarks and leptons, composed according to the elegant laws of
quantum chromodynamics.
Universality of the concepts «word» and «morpheme»
Do the concepts of word and morpheme then apply in
all languages? The answer is «(probably) yes». Certainly the
concept of morpheme — the minimal unit of form and meaning
— arises naturally in the analysis of every language.
The concept of word is trickier. There are at least two
troublesome issues: making the distinction between words and
phrases, and the status of certain grammatical formatives known as
clitics.
Words vs. phrases
Since words can be made up of several morphemes, and may include
several other words, it is easy to find cases where a particular
sequence of elements might arguably be considered either a word or
a phrase. We’ve already looked at the case of compounds in
English.
In some languages, this boundary is even harder to draw. In the
case of Chinese, the eminent linguist Y.R. Chao wrote (1968), ‘Not
every language has a kind of unit which behaves in most (not to
speak all) respects as does the unit called «word» … It is
therefore a matter of fiat and not a question of fact whether to
apply the word «word» to a type of subunit in the Chinese
sentence.’
On the other hand, other linguists have argued that the
distinction between words and phrases is both definable and useful
in Chinese grammar. The Chinese writing system has no tradition of
using spaces or other delimiters to mark word boundaries; and in
fact the whole issue of how (and whether) to define «words» in
Chinese does not seem to have arisen until 1907, although the
Chinese grammatical tradition goes back a couple of millennia.
Status of clitics
In most languages, there is a set of elements whose status as
separate words seems ambiguous. Examples in English include the
‘d (reduced form of «would»),
the infinitival to, and the
article a, in I’d like to buy a dog. These forms
certainly can’t «stand alone as a complete utterance», as some
definitions of word would have it. The sound pattern of
these «little words» is also usually extremely reduced, in a way
that makes them act like part of the words adjacent to them. There
isn’t any difference in pronunciation between the noun phrase
a tack and the verb
attack. However, these forms
are like separate words in some other ways, especially in terms of
how they combine with other words.
Members of this class of «little words» are known as
clitics. Their peculiar properties can be explained by
assuming that they are independent elements at the syntactic level
of analysis, but become part of adjacent words at the phonological
level.
That is, they both are and are not words.
Some languages write clitics as separate words, while others
write them together with their adjacent «host» words. English
writes most clitics separate, but uses the special «apostrophe»
separator for some clitics, such as the reduced forms of
is, have and would (‘s ‘ve
‘d), and possessive ‘s.
The possessive ‘s in English
is an instructive example, because we can contrast its behavior
with that of the plural s.
These two morphemes are pronounced in exactly the same variable
way, dependent on the sounds that precede them:
| Noun | Noun + s (plural) | Noun + s (possessive) | Pronunciation (both) |
| thrush | thrushes | thrush’s | iz |
| toy | toys | toy’s | z |
| block | blocks | block’s | s |
And neither the plural nor the possessive can be used by itself.
So from this point of view, the possessive acts like a part of the
noun, just as the plural does. However, the plural and possessive
behave very differently in some other ways:
- If we add a following modifier to a noun, the possessive
follows the modifier, but the plural sticks with the head noun:Morpheme stays with head noun Morpheme follows modifier Plural The toys I bought yesterday were on sale. *The toy I bought yesterdays were on
sale.Possessive *The toy’s I bought yesterday price was
special.The toy I bought yesterday’s price was special. In other words, the plural continues like part of the noun, but the
possessive acts like a separate word, which follows the whole
phrase containing the noun (even though it is merged in terms of
sound with the last word of that noun phrase). - There are lots of nouns with irregular plurals, but none with
irregular possessives:Plural (irregular in these cases) Possessive (always regular) oxen ox’s spectra spectrum’s mice mouse’s
Actually, English does have few irregular possessives:
his, her, my, your,
their. But these exceptions prove the rule: these
pronominal possessives act like inflections, so that the possessor
is always the referent of the pronoun itself, not of some larger
phrase that it happens to be at the end of.
So the possessive ‘s in
English is like a word in some ways, and like an inflectional
morpheme in some others. This kind of mixed status is commonly
found with words that express grammatical functions. It is one of
the ways that morphology develops historically. As a historical
matter, a clitic is likely to start out as a fully separate word,
and then «weaken» so as to merge phonologically with its hosts. In
many cases, inflectional affixes may have been clitics at an
earlier historical stage, and then lost their syntactic
independence.
[A book that used to be the course text for
LING001 lists the English possessive ‘s as an inflectional affix,
and earlier versions of these lecture notes followed the text in
this regard. This is an easy mistake to make: in most languages
with possessive morphemes, they behave like inflections, and it’s
natural to think of ‘s as analogous to (say) the Latin genitive
case. Nevertheless, it’s clear that English possessive ‘s is a
clitic and not an inflectional affix.]
Words are nevertheless useful
Important distinctions are often difficult to define for cases
near the boundary. This is among the reasons that we have lawyers
and courts. The relative difficulty of making a distinction is not
a strong argument, one way or the other, for the value of that
distinction: it’s not always easy, for example, to distinguish
homicide from other (and less serious) kinds of
involvement in someone’s death. Despite the difficulties of
distinguishing word from phrase on one side and from
morpheme on the other, most linguists find the concept of
word useful and even essential in analyzing most
languages.
In the end, we wind up with two definitions of word: the
ordinary usage, where that exists (as it does for English or
Spanish, and does not for Chinese); and a technical definition,
emerging from a particular theory about language structure as
applied to a specific language.
Relationship between words and morphemes
What is the relationship between words and morphemes? It’s a
hierarchical one: a word is made up of one or more morphemes. Most
commonly, these morphemes are strung together, or concatenated, in
a line. However, it is not uncommon to find non-concatenative
morphemes. Thus the Arabic root /ktb/ «write» has (among
many other forms)
| katab | pefective active |
| kutib | perfective passive |
| aktub | imperfective active |
| uktab | imperfective passive |
The three consonants of the root are not simply concatenated
with other morphemes meaning things like «imperfective» or
«passive», but rather are shuffled among the vowels and syllable
positions that define the various forms. Still, a given word is
still made up of a set of morphemes, it’s just that the set is not
combined by simple concatenation in all cases.
Simpler examples of non-concatenative morphology include
infixes, like the insertion of emphatic words in English
cases like
«un-frigging-believable», or Tagalog
| bili | ‘buy’ | binili | ‘bought’ |
| basa | ‘read’ | binasa | ‘read’ (past) |
| sulat | ‘write’ | sinulat | ‘wrote’ |
Categories and subcategories of words and morphemes
The different types of words are variously called parts of
speech, word classes, or lexical categories. The
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language gives this list of 8 for
English:
noun
pronoun
verb
adjective
adverb
conjunction
preposition
interjection
This set might be further subdivided: here is a list of 36 part-of-speech
tags used in the Penn TreeBank project. Most of the increase
(from 8 to 36) is by subdivision (e.g. «noun» divided into
«singular common noun,» «plural common noun,» «singular proper
noun,» «plural proper noun,» etc., but there are a few extra odds
and ends, such as «cardinal number.»
Other descriptions of English have used slightly different ways
of dividing the pie, but it is generally easy to see how one scheme
translates into another. Looking across languages, we can see
somewhat greater differences. For instance, some languages don’t
really distinguish between verbs and adjectives. In such languages,
we can think of adjectives as a kind of verb: «the grass greens,»
rather than «the grass is green.» Other differences reflect
different structural choices. For instance, English words like
in, on, under, with are called prepositions, and
this name makes sense given that they precede the noun phrase they
introduce: with a stick. In
many languages, the words that correspond to English prepositions
follow their noun phrase rather than preceding it, and are thus
more properly called postpositions, as in the following
Hindi example:
Ram cari-se kutte-ko mara
Ram stick-with dog hit
«Ram hit the dog with an stick.»
Types of morphemes:
Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own, e.g.
de- in detoxify, -tion in creation,
-s in dogs, cran- in cranberry.
Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car,
yes.
In a morphologically complex word — a word composed of more
than one morpheme — one constituent may be considered as the basic
one, the core of the form, with the others treated as being added
on. The basic or core morpheme in such cases is referred to as the
stem, root, or base, while the add-ons are
affixes. Affixes that precede the stem are of course
prefixes, while those that follow the stem are
suffixes. Thus in rearranged, re- is a prefix,
arrange is a stem, and -d is a suffix. Morphemes can
also be infixes, which are inserted within another form.
English doesn’t really have any infixes, except perhaps for certain
expletives in expressions like un-effing-believable or
Kalama-effing-zoo.
Prefixes and suffixes are almost always bound, but what about
the stems? Are they always free? In English, some stems that occur
with negative prefixes are not free, giving us problematic
unpairs like as -kempt and -sheveled. Bad jokes about some of these
missing bound morphemes have become so frequent that they may
re-enter common usage.
Morphemes can also be divided into the two categories of
content and function morphemes, a distinction that is
conceptually distinct from the free-bound distinction but
that partially overlaps with it in practice.
The idea behind this distinction is that some morphemes express
some general sort of referential or informational content,
in a way that is as independent as possible of the grammatical
system of a particular language — while other morphemes are
heavily tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic
relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily-marked
categories such as number or tense.
Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs, adjectives are typically
content morphemes: «throw,» «green,» «Kim,» and «sand» are
all English content morphemes. Content morphemes are also
often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to
categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items.
People are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these
categories.: «smurf,» «nuke,» «byte,» «grok.»
By contrast, prepositions («to», «by»), articles («the», «a»),
pronouns («she», «his»), and conjunctions are typically
function morphemes, since they either serve to tie elements
together grammatically («hit by a truck,» «Kim and
Leslie,» «Lee saw his dog»), or express obligatory (in a
given language!) morphological features like definiteness
(«she found a table» or «she found the table» but not «*she found
table»). Function morphemes are also called
«closed-class» morphemes, because they belong to categories
that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing — it is very
difficult to add a new preposition, article or
pronoun.
For years, some people have tried to introduce non-gendered
pronouns into English, for instance «sie» (meaning either «he» or
«she», but not «it»). This is much harder to do than to get people
to adopt a new noun or verb.
Try making up a new article. For instance, we could try to
borrow from the Manding languages an article (written «le») that
means something like «I’m focusing on this phrase as opposed to
anything else I could have mentioned.» We’ll just slip in this new
article after the definite or indefinite «the» or «a» — that’s
where it goes in Manding, though the rest of the order is
completely different. Thus we would say «Kim bought an apple at
the-le fruit stand,» meaning «it’s the fruit stand (as opposed to
anyplace else) where Kim bought an apple;» or «Kim bought an-le
apple at the fruit stand,» meaning «it’s an apple (as opposed to
any other kind of fruit) that Kim bought at the fruit stand.»
This is a perfectly sensible kind of morpheme to have. Millions
of West Africans use it every day. However, the chances of
persuading the rest of the English-speaking community to adopt it
are negligible.
In some ways the open/closed terminology is clearer than
content/function, since obviously function morphemes also always
have some content!
The concept of the morpheme does not directly map onto the units
of sound that represent morphemes in speech. To do this, linguists
developed the concept of the allomorph. Here is the
definition given in a well-known linguistic workbook:
Allomorphs: Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that
have the same function and are phonetically similar. For example,
the English plural morpheme can appear as [s] as in cats,
[z] as in dogs, or [‘z] as in churches. Each of these
three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same
morpheme.
Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology
Another common distinction is the one between
derivational and inflectional affixes.
Derivational morphemes makes new words from old ones.
Thus creation is formed from create by adding a
morpheme that makes nouns out of (some) verbs.
Derivational morphemes generally
- change the part of speech or the basic meaning of a word. Thus
-ment added to a verb forms a noun (judg-ment).
re-activate means «activate again.» - are not required by syntactic relations outside the word. Thus
un-kind combines un- and kind into a single
new word, but has no particular syntactic connections outside the
word — we can say he is unkind or he is kind or
they are unkind or they are kind, depending on what
we mean. - are often not productive or regular in form or meaning —
derivational morphemes can be selective about what they’ll combine
with, and may also have erratic effects on meaning. Thus the suffix
-hood occurs with just a few nouns such as brother,
neighbor, and knight, but not with most others. e.g.,
*friendhood, *daughterhood, or *candlehood.
Furthermore «brotherhood» can mean «the state or relationship of
being brothers,» but «neighborhood» cannot mean «the state or
relationship of being neighbors.» Note however that some
derivational affixes are quite regular in form and meaning, e.g.
-ism. - typically occur «inside» any inflectional affixes. Thus in
governments, -ment, a derivational suffix, precedes
-s, an inflectional suffix. - in English, may appear either as prefixes or suffixes:
pre-arrange, arrange-ment.
Inflectional morphemes vary (or «inflect») the form of
words in order to express the grammatical features that a given
language chooses, such as singular/plural or past/present tense.
Thus Boy and boys, for example, are two different
forms of the «same» word. In English, we must choose the singular
form or the plural form; if we choose the basic form with no affix,
we have chosen the singular.
Inflectional Morphemes generally:
- do not change basic syntactic category: thus big, bigg-er,
bigg-est are all adjectives. - express grammatically-required features or indicate relations
between different words in the sentence. Thus in Lee love-s Kim,
-s marks the 3rd person singular present form of the verb, and
also relates it to the 3rd singular subject Lee. - occur outside any derivational morphemes. Thus in
ration-al-iz-ation-s the final -s is inflectional,
and appears at the very end of the word, outside the derivational
morphemes -al, -iz, -ation. - In English, are suffixes only.
Some examples of English derivational and inflectional
morphemes:
| derivational | inflectional |
| -ation | -s Plural |
| -ize | -ed Past |
| -ic | -ing Progressive |
| -y | -er Comparative |
| -ous | -est Superlative |
Properties of some derivational affixes in
English:
| -ation | is added to a verb | to give a noun |
| finalize confirm |
finalization confirmation |
|
| un- | is added to a verb | to give a verb |
| tie wind |
untie unwind |
|
| un- | is added to an adjective | to give an adjective |
| happy wise |
unhappy unwise |
|
| -al | is added to a noun | to give an adjective |
| institution universe |
institutional universal |
|
| -ize | is added to an adjective | to give a verb |
| concrete solar |
concretize solarize |
Keep in mind that most morphemes are neither derivational nor
inflectional! For instance, the English morphemes Melissa, twist, tele-, and ouch.
Also, most linguists feel that the inflectional/derivational
distinction is not a fundamental or foundational question at all,
but just a sometimes-useful piece of terminology whose definitions
involve a somewhat complex combination of more basic properties.
Therefore we will not be surprised to find cases for which the
application of the distinction is unclear.
For example, the English suffix -ing has several uses that are arguably on
the borderline between inflection and derivation (along with other
uses that are not).
One very regular use of -ing is to indicate progressive
aspect in verbs, following forms of «to be»: She is
going; he will be leaving; they had been asking.
This use is generally considered an inflectional suffix, part of
the system for marking tense and aspect in English verbs.
Another, closely related use is to make present
participles of verbs, which are used like adjectives:
Falling water; stinking mess; glowing embers.
According to the rule that inflection doesn’t change the lexical
category, this should be a form of morphological derivation, since
it changes verbs to adjectives. But in fact it is probably the same
process, at least historically as is involved in marking
progressive aspect on verbs, since «being in the process of doing
X» is one of the natural meanings of the adjectival form X-ing.
There is another, regular use of -ing to make verbal nouns: Flying can be
dangerous; losing is painful. The -ing forms in these cases are often called
gerunds. By the «changes lexical categories» rule, this
should also be a derivational affix, since it turns a verb into a
noun. However, many people feel that such cases are determined by
grammatical context, so that a phrase like Kim peeking around
the corner surprised me actually is related to, or derived
from, a tenseless form of the sentence Kim peeked around the
corner. On this view, the affix -ing is a kind of inflection,
since it creates a form of the verb appropriate for a particular
grammatical situation, rather than making a new, independent word.
Thus the decision about whether -ing is an inflection in this case depends on
your analysis of the syntactic relationships involved.
It’s for reasons like this that the distinction between
inflectional and derivational affixes is just a
sometimes-convenient descriptive one, and not a basic distinction
in theory.
What is the meaning of an affix?
The meanings of derivational affixes are sometimes clear, but
often are obscured by changes that occur over time. The following
two sets of examples show that the prefix un- is easily
interpreted as «not» when applied to adjectives, and as a reversing
action when applied to verbs, but the prefix con- is more
opaque.
| un- | untie |
| unshackle | |
| unharness | |
| unhappy | |
| untimely | |
| unthinkable | |
| unmentionable |
| con- | constitution |
| confess | |
| connect | |
| contract | |
| contend | |
| conspire | |
| complete |
Are derivational affixes sensitive to the historical source of
the roots they attach to?
Although English is a Germanic language, and most of its basic
vocabulary derives from Old English, there is also a sizeable
vocabulary that derives from Romance (Latin and French). Some
English affixes, such as re-, attach freely to vocabulary
from both sources. Other affixes, such as «-ation», are more
limited.
| ROOT | tie | consider |
| free form | free form | |
| Germanic root | Latinate root | |
| SOURCE | Old English tygan, «to tie» | Latin considerare, «to examine» |
| PREFIX | retie | reconsider |
| SUFFIX | reties | reconsiders |
| retying | reconsideration | |
| retyings | reconsiderations |
The suffix -ize, which some prescriptivists object to in
words like hospitalize,
has a long and venerable history.
According to Hans Marchand, in The Categories and Types of
Present-Day English Word Formation (University of Alabama
Press, 1969), the suffix -ize comes originally from the
Greek -izo. Many words ending with this suffix passed from
Ecclesiastical Greek into Latin, where, by the fourth century, they
had become established as verbs with the ending -izare, such
as barbarizare, catechizare, christianizare. In Old French
we find many such verbs, belonging primarily to the ecclesistical
sphere: baptiser (11th c.), canoniser (13th c.),
exorciser (14th c.).
The first -ize words to be found in English are loans
with both a French and Latin pattern such as baptize (1297),
catechize, and organize (both 15th c.) Towards the
end of the 16th century, however, we come across many new
formations in English, such as bastardize, equalize,
popularize, and womanize. The formal and semantic
patterns were the same as those from the borrowed French and Latin
forms, but owing to the renewed study of Greek, the educated had
become more familiar with its vocabulary and used the patterns of
Old Greek word formation freely.
Between 1580 and 1700, the disciplines of literature, medicine,
natural science and theology introduced a great deal of new
terminology into the language. Some of the terms still in use today
include criticize, fertilize, humanize, naturalize, satirize,
sterilize, and symbolize. The growth of science
contributed vast numbers of -ize formations through the 19th
century and into the 20th.
The -ize words collected by
students in in this class 25 years ago show that -ize is
almost entirely restricted to Romance vocabulary, the only
exceptions we found being womanize and winterize.
Even though most contemporary English speakers are not consciously
aware of which words in their vocabulary are from which source,
they have respected this distinction in coining new words.
Constituent Structure of Words
The constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a
branching or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree
structure. Consider the word unusable. It contains three morphemes:
- prefix «un-«
- verb stem «use»
- suffix «-able»
What is the structure? Is it first «use» + «-able» to make
«usable», then combined with «un-» to make «unusable»? or is it
first «un-» + «use» to make «unuse», then combined with «-able» to
make «unusable»? Since «unuse» doesn’t exist in English, while
«usable» does, we prefer the first structure, which corresponds to
the tree shown below.
This analysis is supported by the general behavior of these
affixes. There is a prefix «un-» that attaches to adjectives to
make adjectives with a negative meaning («unhurt», «untrue»,
«unhandy», etc.). And there is a suffix «-able» that attaches to
verbs and forms adjectives («believable», «fixable», «readable»).
This gives us the analysis pictured above. There is no way to
combine a prefix «un-» directly with the verb «use», so the other
logically-possible structure won’t work.
Now let’s consider the word «unlockable». This also consists of
three morphemes:
- prefix «un-«
- verb stem «lock»
- suffix «-able»
This time, though, a little thought shows us that there are two
different meanings for this word: one corresponding to the
left-hand figure, meaning «not lockable,» and a second one
corresponding to the right-hand figure, meaning «able to be
unlocked.»
In fact, un- can indeed attach to (some) verbs:
untie, unbutton, uncover, uncage,
unwrap… Larry Horn (1988) points out that the verbs that
permit prefixation with un- are those that effect a change
in state in some object, the form with un- denoting the
undoing (!)of that change.
This lets us account for the two senses of «unlockable».. We can
combine the suffix -able with the verb lock to form
an adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix
un- with lockable to make a new adjective
unlockable, meaning «not able to be locked». Or we can
combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a
new verb unlock, and the combine the suffix -able
with unlock to form an adjective unlockable, meaning «able
to be unlocked».
By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a
single word, we can better understand why its meaning might be
ambiguous.
These questions and answers are based on some patterns of error
observed in homeworks and exams in previous years.
Can a word = a morpheme?
Yes, at least in the sense that a word may contain exactly one
morpheme:
| Word (=Morpheme) | Word Class |
| car | noun |
| thank | verb |
| true | adjective |
| succotash | noun |
| gosh | interjection |
| under | preposition |
| she | pronoun |
| so | conjunction |
| often | adverb |
Are there morphemes that are not
words?
Yes, none of the following morphemes is a word:
| Morpheme | Category |
| un- | prefix |
| dis- | prefix |
| -ness | suffix |
| -s | suffix |
| kempt (as in unkempt) |
bound morpheme |
Can a word = a syllable?
Yes, at least in the sense that a word may consist of exactly
one syllable:
| Word | Word Class |
| car | noun |
| work | verb |
| in | preposition |
| whoops | interjection |
Are there morphemes that are not
syllables?
Yes, some of the following morphemes consist of more than one
syllable; some of them are less than a syllable:
| Morpheme | Word Class |
| under | preposition (> syll.) |
| spider | noun (> syll.) |
| -s | ‘plural’ (< syll.) |
Are there syllables that are not
morphemes?
Yes, many syllables are «less» than morphemes. Just
because you can break a word into two or more syllables does not
mean it must consist of more than one morpheme!
| Word | Syllables | Comments |
| kayak | (ka.yak) | neither ka nor yak is a morpheme |
| broccoli | (bro.ko.li) or (brok.li) | neither bro nor brok nor ko nor li is a morpheme |
| angle | (ang.gle) | neither ang nor gle is a morpheme |
| jungle | (jung.gle) | neither jung nor gle is a morpheme |
So (if you were wondering — and yes, some people have trouble
with this) there is no necessary relationship between
syllables, morphemes, and words. Each is an
independent unit of structure.
What are the major differences between
derivational and inflectional affixes?
First, it’s worth saying that most linguists today consider this
distinction as a piece of convenient descriptive terminology,
without any fundamental theoretical status. Then we can point to
the basic meanings of the terms: derivational affixes «derive» new
words from old ones, while inflectional affixes «inflect» words for
certain grammatical or semantic properties.
| derivational | inflectional | |
| position | closer to stem | further from stem |
| addable on to? | yes | not in English |
| meaning? | (often) unpredictable | predictable |
| changes word class? | maybe | no |
Are clitics inflectional or
derivational morphemes?
The answer would depend on your definitions — and
as we explained earlier, the categories of «inflection» and
«derivation» are descriptive terms that really don’t have a strong
theoretical basis. However, based on comparison to typical examples
of inflectional and derivational affixes, the answer seems to be
«neither», in that clitics are not really lexical affixes at
all.
The role of morphology in orthography (= writing systems)
Be careful not to over-interpret writing-system conventions as reliable indications of linguistic analysis.
Thus the NOW corpus of English-language news articles has 2355 instances of «spark plug», 171 of «spark-plug», and 955 of «sparkplug». Those spelling differences don’t reflect a spectrum of variation from phrase to word — all of the occurrences are compound nouns with the same meaning, «a part that fits into the cylinder head of an internal combustion engine and carries two electrodes separated by an air gap across which the current from the ignition system discharges to form the spark for combustion». The different spellings may reflect the editorial policies of different publications, or the personal habits of individual writers, and maybe sometimes reflect the extent to which the writers are focused on the two consituent nouns rather than their combination. But the linguistic analysis of all three written forms is the same.
For more on related issues, see the notes for the lecture on «Reading and Writing».
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