Chapter 5 PAER ONE.pptVIP

Chapter 5 Word-Formation in English April 21st I. Lead-In Word-formation or word-building is an important means of vocabulary enlargement. The expansion of the vocabulary is a common and natural phenomenon of any language, including the English language. Task One: Discuss in pairs and divide the following words into several minimal grammatical units. subversive paranormality ascertainable Contents II. Morphemes and the Two Types of Morphemes 1. Definition: A morpheme can be described as a set of equivalent morphs, i.e. linguistic signs that can not be dissected into smaller signs and can thus be glossed “smallest meaningful units”. To be more specific, morphemes can be considered as “the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words”. 2. Two Types of Morphemes: (1) Morphemes are commonly classified into two forms according to their character: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes are the morphemes that can occur as separate words. They can stand alone as a word. Bound morphemes are morphemes which cannot stand alone as words. They are mainly affixes. Task Two: Discuss in groups and fill in the following table. We can realize that “ending” has got grammatical meaning without any lexical meaning, while “suffix” has got lexical meaning. Actually, we can observe that the above-mentioned prefixes, suffixes, and roots are lexical morphemes, and those endings (such as “-s” denoting plurality, “-‘s” denoting case, “-ed” denoting past tense and “-ing” denoting progressive tense) are grammatical morphemes. (2) Morphemes may be classified into two categories according to their lexical and grammatical relationships: lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes. Lexical morphemes include root morphemes and affixes used for the construction of new words. For example: classroom: class + room dishonest: dis- + honest Grammatical morphemes are morphemes used to express gramma