Word-Formation -1
What Is Word???
Word can be either a sound or a sequence of sounds that makes one kind of word. At this stage word can be called as phonological word .We use the term’ word’ to refer the written or orthographic representation of phonological word . Phonological and orthographic words are made up of sounds and spellings respectively.
Lexeme or laxical
Words occurring as headword in a dictionary are called as lexemes. e.g. write, wrote, written and writing are four separate words. But dictionary entry will only count for the word ‘write’. So ‘write’ is a lexical word .Lexemes also includes multi – verbs words e.g. ‘to catch up on’.
Function Word
These words belong to the categories of article (a,an,the), pronouns (he,she,its…), auxiliary (is,are…), conjunctions (and,but…), prepositions (on.upon…).They have no lexical meaning but only perform grammatical functions.
Grammar Words
Grammatical words are words that occur in a grammatical paradigm e.g.the forms of write are write, wrote, written, writes, writing.
Write Come with present indefinite tense with plural subject.
Eg. You write a book. (‘You’ can be replace with i/we/they/plural noun).
Writes Come with present indefinite tense with singuler subject.
Eg. He writes a book. (‘He’ can be replace with she/it/singular noun).
Writing Comes with continuous present/past/future tense with any subject.
Eg. I am writing a letter.
Wrote Comes with past indefinite tense with any subject.
Eg. He wrote a letter.
Morpheme
Morphemes are defined as the smallest element that have meaning, or that can perform a grammatical function.. Morphemes can be bound or free. Individually bound morpheme has no meaning, whereas free morpheme doesn’t depend on other words for meaning. Pay attention on following words:
Nation Can be realizes as independently meaningful word. It can’t be broken down
further. It doesn’t depend on other words for meaning. So it is a free
morpheme.
National It can be broken down as ‘nation + al ‘.Meaning of ‘al ‘is depend on
National. Individually ‘al ‘has no meaning. So ‘al’ is a bound morpheme.
Similarly, words like old/older, young/ younger, nice/nicest. Meaning of er, est depends
on main word.
Affixes, Stems , Roots
The basic internal structure of words divides into affixes(divided into prefixes and suffixes),stems and roots. Have a look on following words.
‘impenetrable’ = IM + PENTER + ABLE
‘recharge’ = RE + CHARGE
‘moralless’ = MORAL + LESS
‘deindustrializing’ = DE + INDUSTRY+IAL+ IZ(E)+ING
‘hopeful’ = HOPE + FUL
‘hopefully’ = HOPE + FUL +LY
Elements that are attached in front of base or root is called prefix .Elements that are attached at the end of base is called suffix. Thus, im-.re- are prefixes while –able.ly are suffixes.
The term stem is use to describe any element or elements , to which an affix is attached. It is similar with the term ‘base’.In the word ‘hopeful’ hope is stem to which suffix ‘-full’ is attached. In word ‘hopefully’ hopeful is stem to which suffix ‘ly’ is attached. A stem consisting of one free morpheme is called root.
Word                   ROOT                        STEM
Deregulation             Regulate                   Regulation
Disinformation          Inform                  Information
These were only few tip-off about word formation hypothesis. A lot has schedule to come in upcoming blogs so stay tuned. If you will understand word formation well then you will learn word easily. Do get back to us with queries in case you have any.
Wishing you all, success!!
Regards,
Shipra srivastava
Learnwordlist.com
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Thanks a lot shirpa. It was an interesting and informative article. Awaiting egaerly for more schedules. Well, i have one query; it is as follows:
Do the terminologies “free morpheme” and “stem/base” denotes the same aspect of the word, also is that same with “affixes” and “bound morpheme” too?
Looking forward for more information on this.
Hi Jagan thanks for your comment .See jagan a word can contain free morpheme or combination of free and bound morphemes but individual bound morpheme has no identity.Same affixes can be pefixes or sufixes (you can call them bound morpheme ) they can have meaning but they will realize as a word only when then they will attach to same root or stem.
How to speek good English?
I always speek English but I donot speek floountly
Kidan, do practice more and more with friends to improve your communicative English..
Kidan, do regular practice this only the key.
I always face difficulty in learning words even though I use them most of the time, is there any trick to learn how to remember the words.
Prabal, kindly visit following link .Read more:http://learnwordlist.com/blog/how-to-improve-vocabulary-in-a-limited-time/2010/06/gre-word-list-test-blog-barrons-vocabulary.In this link you will find many techniques to remember words.
how to improve the score in error correction type questions please tell some tricks and also how to learn the complete word list in short time of 1 month
Mohini, error correction requires very solid grammar base, try to learn word list with its contextual meaning .i think 1 month is too short time to learn all the word list.;
[...] Word-Formation -1 [...]
I live with GRE.
Massod, kindly keep visiting us..
I am currently a student at USF and the ESOL class does no where near the job you just did. AWESOME article. This helps me with my midterm I have to take on morphology! I was in a fog up to this point. I knew the gist of things but didn’t clearly understand. Thanks!
Thanks USF, kindly keep visiting us..
i’ve not been receiving your post as frequent as before. is there a reason for this
Thanks for your comment Jerry, we will try to send you as frequently as it is possible.
how to improve english
i am a-new person; just GRE.