morphemes

 What is a word? Most non-linguists would say that a word is the smallest chunk of meaningful language. This is a unit made up only of individually meaningless sounds (if spoken) or letters (if written). Certainly, most linguists would agree that phonemes (speech sounds, introduced in A1) and graphemes (written letters) in themselves usually do not have a meaning: the phonemes /t/, /a/, the diphthong /ai/, the cluster /lt/, the grapheme ‘g’, and the digraphs ‘th’ and ‘gh’ are meaningless in isolation. However, there are many words in this paragraph that are not neatly unitary. For example, the word ‘themselves’ seems to be made up of at least two smaller words, namely, ‘them’ + ‘selves’ – here, the two composite words are proper words in their own right. ‘Certainly’, though, seems to be made up of a word in its own right (‘certain’) and another odd addition (‘-ly’) that cannot really stand on its own. ‘Meaningless’ can similarly be divided into two (‘meaning’ + ‘-less’); we could even go further and divide it into three (‘mean’ + ‘-ing’ + ‘-less’), though not four (the unit ‘mean’ here is not composed of the senses of ‘me’ and ‘an’). By contrast, again, ‘however’ can be divided into two other words that can stand on their own (‘how’ + ‘ever’), but it does not seem clear how the meaning of ‘however’ can exactly be determined by the meanings of these two words.

verbification is particularly common in English, from Shakespeare’s first usage of ‘knife’ as a verb rather than a noun (see B4 for definitions of terms), to more recent ‘ access the file’, ‘ chair the meeting’ or ‘ green your politics’. The combination of two or more free morphemes is known as compounding , and this phenomenon of word-formation is very common in English – as it is in other basically Germanic languages. Formulaic phrases (‘red herring’, ‘head waiter’, ‘climate change’), hyphenations (‘self-harm’, ‘role-play’, ‘after-effects’), true compounds (‘horsebox’, ‘whiteboard’, ‘sportscar’) and lexical blends (‘digibox’, ‘cyborg’, ‘smog’) are all examples of compounding. Notice that the compounded elements can be from different parts of speech (noun + noun, or noun + verb, or adjective + noun, and so on, see A4), and can even be from two different languages (‘über-chic’ – German and French, ‘teleport’ – Greek and Latin).

French, Latin, and the Germanic languages account in almost equal measures for most common English words, with everyday speech weighted towards Germanic sources and with formal or technical language leaning more towards French and Latin sources. Other borrowings include ‘caravan’ (Persian), ‘juggernaut’ (Sanskrit), ‘sushi-bar’ (Japanese), ‘lager’ (German), as well as ‘safari’, ‘zombie’, ‘jumbo’ and ‘a-go-go’ (Bantu languages), ‘alcohol’, ‘algebra’, ‘zero’, ‘tariff ’ and ‘magazine’ (Arabic), ‘teak’, ‘zebra’, ‘marmalade’ and ‘palaver’ (Portuguese), and ‘papoose’, ‘shack’, ‘barbecue’, ‘canoe’ and ‘cocaine’ (native American languages). When borrowing from other languages, English has tended to anglicise the pronunciation, which is often reflected in the spelling: ‘vindaloo’ curry from the Portuguese ‘carne de vinha d’alhos’; ‘cafe’ often appears without the French acute accent on the final letter (‘café’) and sometimes gets pronounced [kaf] or [kafi], without a French accent at all (see B1 for further details on how to write in phonetic notation). There are some exceptions, of course, such as ‘chic’, which retains its French sound (perhaps because of both its haute couture sense and also because of a clash with ‘chick’). When words are borrowed into English, they usually tend to become grammatically fixed for inflections too: so we might order two ‘pizzas’ rather than ‘pizze’, eat two mint ‘Magnums’ (ice lollies) instead of ‘Magna’, and talk about ‘schemas’ not ‘schemata’. There is even a great deal of debate over whether the plural of the computer ‘mouse’ is the modern inflection ‘mouses’ rather than the medieval ‘mice’. Words often carry their origins, though, as demonstrated by the fact that a ‘wireless mouse’ no longer looks like a mouse at all.

Shortening in the form of acronyms is very common especially in technological innovation: the LP was replaced by the CD and DVD, then by the MP3. Acronyms can be atomic if each element is pronounced separately (FBI, BBC, EU, RAF) or molecular if pronounced as a genuine word (‘laser’, ‘radar’, ‘NASA’). Occasionally, a combination of processes of word-formation results in historical oddities. The most famous is the ‘hamburger’, originally invented in Hamburg, New York, and made from beef with coffee and spices between bread. The ‘ham’ morpheme is wrongly associated with meat and so is regarded as detachable from the whole word, producing the back-formation ‘burger’. This free morpheme is then available to be compounded with many other prefixes: ‘cheeseburger’, ‘veggie-burger’, ‘BBQ-burger’, ‘tofu-burger’, plain ‘burger’ and even the wrongly corrected ‘beefburger’.

the pronoun ‘it’ (from Old English ‘hit’) was originally a useful option between ‘he’ and ‘she’ (originally ‘he’ and ‘heo/seo’ in Old English), but today ‘it’ has a sense of inanimacy. It would be very useful in Modern English to have a less clumsy neutral option than ‘he or she’, the written ‘s/he’, or the increasingly common but odd non-agreement of ‘they’ in a sentence like: ‘when the reader gets to this point, they will have finished the unit’. Transgender people have been struggling to find an alternative for years. Perhaps you might try to invent or import a useful alternative pronoun yourself.

A classic example to help illustrate the distinction between the two terms is consideration of the noun phrases ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ (see A4 for a definition of noun phrase). Both can be defined as having the same reference – they both refer to the planet Venus – but they clearly have different senses. This example also neatly illustrates the crucial role of context in determining reference. Whilst there are some terms in the English language that have constant reference, such as ‘the moon’ (at least while on this planet) or ‘Great Britain’, most often terms which express reference are reliant upon context for their meaning. 

Sense is more difficult to define than reference, as it does not refer to a particular person or thing – it is a much more abstract concept. The best way to consider the sense of a linguistic form, and thus define its central meaning, is to compare it with other entities. For example, if we compare a dog to a cat or a giraffe, we get a better understanding of the semantic features of the lexical term ‘dog’. By making such comparisons, we are defining the senses of the linguistic form ‘dog’. It is important to remember that all expressions which have meaning can be defined as having sense, but not all expressions of meaning will have reference. 

A key concept to keep in mind when defining reference is referring expression , denoting a word or phrase that specifically defines a particular entity in the world. Noun phrases are classic examples of referring expressions. However, as we have seen above, it is important to bear in mind that reference cannot be ascribed in a vacuum. Reference is context-dependent, and ascertaining the meaning of particular referents depends entirely upon who is speaking, who they are speaking with, and in what setting the interaction is taking place. 

Some utterances may be referring expressions in one context but cease to be referring expressions in another. For example, indefinite noun phrases need to be viewed in context – on some occasions, they will be referring expressions, but on other occasions they will not fulfil this function. Compare the utterance ‘a woman was just staring at you’ with the utterance ‘this apartment needs a woman’s touch’. In the former, ‘a woman’ is a referring expression, but in the latter it has indefinite reference: it does not refer to one particular woman, and so it is not operating as a referring expression in quite the same way. 

Can you think of other, similar examples where the same phrase has different reference, depending upon context? The contextual difference between the same referring expression can be exploited for humorous purposes. In the Irish television situation comedy Father Ted , Father Ted comments to Father Dougal that their parochial house is in need of ‘a woman’s touch’. Unable to understand the indefinite reference, Father Dougal accuses the only woman who is present, a visiting nun, of physically touching Father Ted – making the accusatory statement ‘Ted said you’ve been touching him’. Dougal has failed to understand Ted’s indefinite, metaphorical meaning, resulting in humour through his interpretation of ‘a woman’ as having literal, definite reference.

LEXICAL SEMANTICS

A word will also, of course, have very many looser and perhaps more culturally defined associations : ‘red’ and ‘reds’ associates, in different places around the world, with several British soccer teams wearing red shirts, with communists, with US Republican states, with roads of a particularly high accident rate, with embarrassment, with Marlboro strong cigarettes, with food labelling of a high fat and sugar content, with air squadron identifiers, with ginger hair, with prostitution, with a certain type of civic university, with the car maker Ferrari, and many others. Some associations might be very personal and idiosyncratic. However, all of these senses can be said to be part of the meaning of the word. The study of the meanings of words and their relationships is known as lexical semantics .

Mullany, Louise, and Peter Stockwell. Introducing English Language : A Resource Book for Students, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nottingham/detail.action?docID=2129000.