Since the chapter has to do with morphology, the most important concept
to understand is 'morphemes.' A morpheme is to linguistics what a
sub-atomic particle is to Physics or Chemistry. It is to be understood
as the smallest brick with which a whole
building--or a house--can be built, when the appropriate amount and
kind of bricks are available. So a morpheme can stand by itself because
it has meaning by itself, contains only one unit of meaning, and can be
used with the same meaning within other words
or as a word itself. In English there are morphemes that are
spelled/pronounced differently but contain the same meaning, and these
are called allomorphs.
The author also introduces the reader into inflectional and
derivational morphemes. Inflectional morphemes create new words such as
skate -> skater; on the other hand, inflectional morphemes are used
to show certain grammatical relationships such as house
-> house's. English possesses only 8 kinds of inflectional
morphemes, which makes it a very simple language at least in this
particular aspect considering that other languages have very complicated
systems.
Verb, noun, adjective, and adverb inflections are presented in detail
under chapter 3. It seemed to me a lot of information and although most
of it already makes sense in my mind, there is a lot of specific
details, vocabulary, structure relationships, and
technical stuff that need to be learned.
My question about morphology:
Is there more content under morphology for the English language? or did the authors thoroughly cover everything?
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