Lexis and Word Formation in English Lecturer: Rocío Jiménez Briones, Ph. D.
Topic 1 - Page 1
Topic 1
Introduction: Basic concepts
“Morphology happens over time.
It is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Jimenez Lait at [Link]
1. What is morphology?
1.1 What’s a word?
1.2 Words and lexemes.
1.3 The functions of morphology
1.4 The goals of morphology
1.5 Applications of morphology
1.6 Interesting online resources
KEY TERMS
word, simplex, complex, type, token, lexeme, word form, paradigm, word family, morpheme,
lexeme formation, inflection, economy, labelling, recategorization, the Leipzig Glossing Rules,
computational morphology, branding
REFERENCES:
Required (available on Moodle)
- Haspelmath, Martin and Andrea D. Sims. 2010. Understanding Morphology. London: Hodder
Education, pp. 1-9; 14-19.
Recommended
- Booij, Geert. 2012. The Grammar of Words. An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
- Kastovsky, Dieter. 1986. “The problem of productivity in word-formation”. Linguistics 24: 585-600.
- Katamba, Francis and John Stonham. 2006. Morphology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Lieber, Rochelle. 2016. Introducing Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Portero Muñoz, Carmen. 2004. A Course in English Morphology. Córdoba: Servicio de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de Córdoba.
- Pustejovsky, James and Olga Batiukova. 2019. The Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Spencer, Andrew and A. M. Zwicky (eds.) 2001. The Handbook of Morphology. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
Lexis and Word Formation in English Lecturer: Rocío Jiménez Briones, Ph. D. Topic 1 - Page 2
EXERCISES
1. Are the following words simplex or complex? If you have difficulty deciding whether
they are simple or complex, explain why you find them problematic (adapted from Lieber,
2016: 8-9).
a. members complex. Because it has suffix -s.
b. prioritize complex, because it has the suffix -itize. comes from word
prior.
c. handsome complex. comes from "hand".
d. fizzy complex. It has the suffix -y and comes from "fizz".
e. dizzy simplex
f. grammar simplex
g. writer [Link] it has the suffix -er which means people and
comes from "write".
h. rewind complex. Because it has the prefix re-.
i. reject complex. Because it has the prefix re-.
Bound root
j. alligator Simplex.
2. In the following sentence, count lexemes, orthographic, phonological, and word forms.
What sorts of problems does the word can’t pose? (adapted from Jackson, 1988: 8):
1) You can’t tie a bow with the rope in the bow of a boat.
Orthographic words: ______________________________________________
11
12
Phonological words: ______________________________________________
Word-forms: ____________________________________________________
13 can't = can not
Lexemes: _______________________________________________________
13
3. Which ones of the word-forms below belong to the same lexeme? (adapted from Katamba
& Stonham, 2006: 19)
catches taller boy (have)slept catching jumped
sleeps (have)caught woman catch tallest caught
sleeping boys sleep (have)jumped tall jump
women slept jumps jumping boy’s
Lexemes：boy, catch, tall, sleep,
woman, jump 在此处添加文本
Lexis and Word Formation in English Lecturer: Rocío Jiménez Briones, Ph. D. Topic 1 - Page 3
4. Justify why cut, in the sentences below, should be regarded as representing two distinct
word-forms of the verbal lexeme CUT (adapted from Katamba & Stonham, 2006: 19)
a. Usually I cut the bread on the table. a and b sentence
b. Yesterday I cut the bread in the sink. have different time
and place,
What about cut in (c)? Does it belong to the same lexeme CUT seen in (a) and (b)? Why?
Why not?
c. Jane has a cut on her finger.
5. Provide the paradigm of the following English lexemes (adapted from Jackson, 1988: 17-
18):
CHILD RUN (v.) CHEAP SADLY
6. Give the morphological structure of the following English words, specifying the
category and/or meaning changes resulting from the addition of the affixes: (adapted from
Boiij, 2012: 25)
unhappiness: happyA un-happyA: “not happy”; unhappy unhappi-nessN: A N
equalizer: ________________________________________________________________
equal A -> equal-izer N
connect v -> dis- connect A -> disconnecting A ; V-> A
disconnecting: ____________________________________________________________
contradiction: _____________________________________________________________
contradict V -> contradict-ion N ;V->N
blue-eyed: ________________________________________________________________
blue-eye NP -> blue-eye-d NP; N->N
connect V -> connect-ivity N "able to be connect"; V->N
connectivity: _______________________________________________________________
7. GROUP WORK (adapted from Haspelmath and Sims, 2010: 31-32): Take the
following adjectival lexemes: CLEAR, FALSE, HAPPY.
i. For each one, list all the lexemes belonging to its word family/derivational paradigm
that you can think of, e.g., HAPPINESS, HAPPILESS, etc. for HAPPY. You can use a
dictionary if needed.
ii. Compare the three sets. Do the word families in your data set mostly have parallel
content, or mostly not?
iii. Discuss the content of these derivational paradigms in terms of whether it was ever
hard to decide if two lexemes belong to the same word family. If so, why?
iv. What kinds of meanings are expressed by the derivationally related lexemes? How do
these compare to the inflectional meanings that you have seen in this topic?
v. Does it make sense to talk about word families as complete, or at least as potentially
complete? Are paradigms and word families/derivational paradigms similar or
different in this respect? Explain your reasoning.
