The nature of words and word formation Flashcards
What is a word?
Generally considered the basic elements of language.
What is the phonological criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They may be preceded and followed by pauses.
What is the orthographic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They are separated in writing with spaces and punctuation marks.
What is the syntactic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They may be used alone as a single utterance.
What is the semantic criteria for showing the ‘independence’ of words?
They can be assigned ‘meanings’
What is a lexeme?
An abstract unit consisting of one or more word forms.
What are the three main families of words?
- Lexical words
- Function words
- inserts
Lexical words can be divided into how many word classes?
What are these word classes?
4
Nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
What are two key features of lexical words?
Most numerous and their numbers are constantly growing.
What are lexical words?
Main carriers on meaning in a text.
What are function words?
Provide the mortar which binds the text together. (Unusually indicate meaning relations)
What is the difference between lexical and function words?
Function words have no lexical meaning.
How can function words be identified?
- prepositions
- auxiliary verbs
- pronouns
What are inserts?
New category of words, carry emotion and typically used in spoken text.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest linguistic unit of meaning of function.
