The Study of Words

Lewis Gebhardt is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, USA. As well as teaching morphology for the past decade, his main research interests are syntax, morphology and semantics.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Glossary of Terms

1 Introduction

1.1 Preliminaries

1.2 Words and Grammar and What We Know About Them

1.3 Knowledge of Language

1.4 Spelling Conventions and the International Phonetic Alphabet

1.5 Presentation of Language Data

1.6 Summary

1.7 Exercises

1.8 Arguable Answers to Exercises

2 The Lexicon

2.1 Preliminaries

2.2 Morphemes and the Lexicon

2.3 Kinds of Morphemes

2.3.1 Free and Bound

2.3.2 Lexical and Functional

2.3.3 Productive and Nonproductive Morphemes

2.3.4 Roots, Stems and Affixes

2.3.5 A Few Other Kinds of Morphemes

2.4 Summary

2.5 Exercises

2.6 Arguable Answers to Exercises

3 Words: What They Are and Where They Come From

3.1 Preliminaries

3.2 What’s a Word?

3.3 So, How Many Words?

3.4 Source of the Lexicon

3.4.1 Early and Later Acquisition

3.4.2 Transmission Across Generations

3.5 What’s in the Lexicon?

3.6 Summary

3.7 Exercises

3.8 Arguable Answers to Exercises

4 Inflectional Morphology

4.1 Preliminaries

4.2 Formation of Wordforms

4.3 Noun Inflections

4.3.1 Number

4.3.2 Gender

4.3.3 Definiteness/Indefiniteness

4.3.4 Case

4.3.5 Pronouns

4.3.6 Portmanteau Inflections

4.3.7 Nonconcatenative Inflection

4.4 Verb Inflections

4.4.1 Agreement

4.4.2 A Few Other Verbal Affixes

4.5 Crosslinguistic Generalizations in Inflectional Morphology

4.6 Summary

4.7 Exercises

4.8 Arguable Answers to Exercises

5 Derivation

5.1 Preliminaries

5.2 Creating Lexemes With Affixes: Case Study With -ness

5.3 Derivational Affixes

5.3.1 Zero Derivation

5.3.2 Other Kinds of Derivation

5.3.3 Iterative Derivation

5.3.4 Derivation in Other Languages

5.4 Compounds

5.4.1 Compound or Phrase

5.5 Incorporation

5.6 Putting Together Derivation and Inflection

5.7 Derivation v. Inflection

5.8 Clitics

5.9 Summary

5.10 Exercises

5.11 Arguable Answers to Exercises

6 Final Comments

Bibliography

Index