2.

Words, sentences and dictionaries

2.1. Words as meaningful building-blocks of language

We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begind to speak, the way the
excited mother reports what has happened is. ‘Sally ( or Tommy ) has said her (or his) first
word!’ We would suprisedat a mother who described little Tommy’s or Sally’sfirst utterance as a
sentence. Sentence come later, we are inclined to feel , when words are strung together
meaningfully. That is not say that a sentence must always consistof more thanone word. One
word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’,althought they crop up relatively seldom in everyday
conversation or reading, are not in any way odd or un-English. Nevertheless, learning to talk in
early chillhood seem to be a matter of putting word together, not of taking sentence apart.

There is a clear sense, then, in which words seem to the building-block of language. Even as
adult, there are quite a few circumstances in which we use single words outside the context of
any actual or recon-structable sentence. Here are some example.

. warning shout, such as ‘fire!’

.conventional command, such as ‘Light!’, Camera!’, Action!’

.Items on shopping lists, such as ‘carrots’, ‘chesse’, eggs’.

It is clear also that words on their own, outside sentences, can be sorted and classified in various
ways. A comprehensive classification of English words according to meaning is a thesaurus,
such a roget’s Thesaurus. But the kind of conventional classification that we are likely to refer to
most often is dictionary, in which words are listed according to their spelling in alphabetical
order.

2.2. Words as types and words as tokens

How many words are there in the following sentence?

(1) Mary goes to Edinburgh next week, and she intends going to Washington next month.

If we take as guide the English spelling convention of placing a space between each word, the
answer seems cearly to be fourteen. But there is also a sense in which there are fewer than
fourteen words in the sentence, because two of them (the words to and next) are repeated. In this
sense, the third word is the same as the eleventh, and the fifth word is the same as the thirteenth,
so there are only twelve words in the sentence. Les us say that third and the eleventh word of the
sentence at (1) are distinct tokens of a single type, and likewise the fifth and thirteenth word.
(Inmuch the same way, one can say that two performances of the same tune, or two copies of the
same book, are distinct token of one type.)
 The type-token distinction is relevant to the notion ‘word’ in this way Sentences (spoken and
wreiten) may be said to be composed of word-token, bu it is clearly not word-token that are
listed in dictionaries.It would be absurd to suggest that each occurrence of the world next in (1)
merits a separate dictionary entry. Words as a listed in dictionaries entries are, at one level, types,
not token – even though, at another level, one may talk of distinct tokens of the same dictionary
entry, inasmuch as the entry for month in one copy of the Concise Oxport Dictionary is a
different token from the entry for month in another copy.

2.3 Words with predictable meaning

It is true that there are some words whose sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly direcly.
These include so-called onomatopoeic words, such as words for animal cries : how-wow, miaow,
cheep, cook-a-doodle-doo. But even here convention plays a large part. Onomatopoeic words
are not the same in all languages; for example, a cook-crow in German is kikeriki, and a dog’s
bark in French is ouab ouab (pronounced roughly ’wah’wah’). There are also sets of words in
which some similarity in sound (say, in the cluster of consonant at the beginning) seems to
reflect a vague similarity in meaning, such as smoothness or wetness or both in the set of words
slip, slop, slurp, slide, slither, sleek, slick, slaver, slug. A technical term for this situation is
sound symbolism. But in sound symbolism, quite apart from the role of convention, the sound –
meaning relationship is even less direct then in onomatopoeia. The Fact that a word begins with
sl-does not guarantee that it has anything to do with smoothness or wetness (consider slave, slit,
slow), and conversely there are many words that relate to smoothness and wetness but do not
begin with sl-.

What kinds of word do have predictable meaning, then? The answer is: any words that are
composed of independently identifiable parts, where the meaning of the part is sufficient to
determine the meaning of the whole word. Here is an example. Most readers of this book have
probably never encountered the word dioecious (alsospelled diecious), a botanical term meaning’
having male and female flowers on separate plants’. (It contrasts with monoecious, meaning
‘having male and female flowers, or unisexual flowers, on the same plant’). If you had been
asked the meaning of the word dioecious before today, you would probably have had to look it
up in the dictionary. Consider now sentence(2:).

2.4 Non-words with unpredictable meaning

In section 2.3 we saw that it possible for a linguistic item to br a basic building-block of syntax-
that is, an item that is clearly not itself a sentence or a phrase-and yet to have a meaning that is
predictable. We saw, in other words, that characteristic 2.does not necessarily entail
characteristic 1. In this section we will see that characteristic 1.does not necessarily entail
characteristic 2.: that is, something that clearly larger than a word (being composed of two or
more words) may nevertheless have the meaning that not entirely predictable from the meaning
of the words that compose it.
 Consider these two sentences from the point of view of a learner of English who is familiar
with the usual meaning of the words expenditure, note and tab:

.(6) I Keep notes on all my expenditure

.(7) I Keep tabs on all my expenditure

Will this learner be able to interprer both these sentences accurately? The answer , surely, is no.
sentence(6) present no problem; the learner should be able to interpret it correctly as meaning ‘I
write down a record of everything I spend’. But faced with sentences (7), on the basis of the
usual meaning af tab, the leaner is likely to be puzzled. Does it mean something like ‘I attach
small flaps to all the not and coins that I spend, and keep them’? Neither interpretation make
much sense! Native speakers of English, however, will have no difficulty with (7). They will
instinctively interpret keep tab on as a single unit, meaning ‘pay close attention to’or’ monitor
carefully’. Thus, keep tab on, although it consists of three words, functions as a single unit
semantically, its meaning not being predictable fro that of these three words individually. In
technical term, keep tab on is idiom. Even though it is not a word, it will appear in any dictionary
that takes seriously the task of listing semantic idiosyncrasies, probably under the tab.

3.2 Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free

The morphemes in the word helpfulness, just discussed, do not all have the same status. Help,
-fuland -ness are not simply strung together like beads on a string. Rather, the core, or starting-
point, for the formation of this word is help; the morpheme -fulis then added to form helpful,
which in turn is the basis for the formation of helpfulness. In using the word ‘then’ here, I am not
referring to the historical sequence in which the words help, helpful and helpfulness came into
use; I am talking rather about the structure of the word in contemporary English – a structure that
is part of the implicit linguistic knowledge of all English speakers, whether or not they know
anything about the history of the English language.

There are two reasons for calling help the core of this word. One is that help supplies the most
precise and concrete element in its meaning, shared by a family of related words like helper,
helpless, helplessness and unhelpful that differ from one another in more abstract ways. (This is
an aspect of word structure that we will look at in more detail in Chapter 5.) Another reason is
that, of the three morphemes in helpfulness, onlyhelp can stand on its own – that is, only help
can, in an appropriate context, constitute an utterance by itself. That is clearly not true of -ness,
nor is it true of -ful. (Historically -fulis indeed related to the word full, but their divergence in
modern English is evident if one compares words like helpful and cheerful with other words that
really do contain full, such as half-full and chock-full.) In self-explanatory fashion, morphemes
that can stand on their own are called free, and ones that cannot are bound.

A salient characteristic of English – a respect in which English differs from many other
languages – is that a high proportion of complex words are like helpfulness and un-Clintonishin
that they have a free morpheme (like help and Clinton) at their core. Compare the two column of
words listed at (1), all of which consist uncontroversially of two morphemes,
separated by a hyphen:
(1) a. read-able hear-ing
en-large
perform-ance
white-ness dark-en
seek-er
b. leg-ible
audi-ence
magn-ify
rend-ition
clar-ity
obfusc-ate
applic-ant
The rationale for the division is that the words in column a. all contain a free morpheme,
respectively read, hear, large, perform, white and dark. By contrast, in the words in column b.,
though they are similar in meaning to their counterparts in a., both the morphemes are bound. If
you know something about the history of the English language, or if you know some French,
Spanish or Latin, you may know already that most of the free morphemes in (1a) belong to that
part of the vocabulary of English that has been inherited directly through the Germanic branch of
the Indo-European language family to which English belongs, whereas all the morphemes in (1b)
have been introduced, or borrowed, from Latin, either directly or via French. We will return to
these historical mattersin Chapter 9. Even without such historical knowledge, it may strike you
that the words in (1b) are on the whole somewhat less common, or more bookish, than those in
(1a). This reflects the fact that, among the most widely used words, the Germanic element still
predominates. It is thus fair to say that, in English, there is still a strong tendency for complex
words to contain a free morpheme at their core.
3.3 Kinds of morpheme: root, affix, combining form
In Section 3.2 I have used the term ‘core of a word’ in a rather vague way, to denote the
morpheme that makes the most precise and concrete contribution to the word’s meaning. I have
also refrained so far from using two terms that may be already familiar to you: prefix and suffix.
It is time now to bring those two terms into the discussion, and also introduce the term root for
what I have been calling the ‘core’.

From Section 3.2 it emerged that, in the native Germanic portion of the vocabulary, the root of a
complex word is usually free. Of the non-root morphemes in the words that we have looked at so
far, those that precede the root (like en- in enlarge) are called prefixes, while thosethat follow it
are called suffixes (like -ancein performance, -ness in whiteness, and -able in readable). We
have encountered far more suffixes than prefixes, and that is not an accident: there are indeed
more suffixes than prefixes in English. An umbrella term for prefixes and suffixes (broadly
speaking, for all morphemes that are not roots) is affix.

Only root morphemes can be free, so affixes are necessarily bound. We have already noticed that
the morphemes -fuland -ness of helpfulness cannot stand on their own. It is easy for anyone who
is a native speaker of English to check that the same is true of all the morphemes that I have
identified as prefixes and suffixes in (1a) – that is, all the morphemes in these words other than
the roots.