An Introduction to English Morphology

This is a textbook for students of the English language or of English

literature, not primarily for students of linguistics. Nevertheless, what

I say will be consistent with mainstream linguistic views on word-structure, so any readers who go on to more advanced linguistics will not encounter too many inconsistencies.

A good way of teasing apart the ingredients in the notion ‘word’ is

by explicitly contrasting them. Here are the contrasts that we will be

looking at, and the chapters where they will be discussed:

• words as units of meaning versus units of sentence structure (Chapters 2, 6, 7)

• words as pronounceable entities (‘word forms’) versus more abstract entities (sets of word forms) (Chapters 3, 4, 5)

• inflectionally related word forms (forms of the same ‘word’) versus derivationally related words (different ‘words’ with a shared base) (Chapters 4, 5)

• the distinction between compound words and phrases (Chapters 6, 7)

• the relationship between the internal structure of a word and its meaning (Chapter 7)

• productive versus unproductive word-forming processes (Chapter 8)

• historical reasons for some of the contemporary divisions within English morphology, especially Germanic versus Romance wordformation processes (Chapter 9).

Each of Chapters 2 to 9 inclusive is provided with exercises. This is designed to make the book suitable for a course extending over about ten weeks. Relatively full discussions of the exercises are also provided at the end of the book. For those exercises that are open-ended (that is, ones for which there is no obvious ‘right’ answer), these discussions serve to illustrate and extend points made in the chapter.

As befits a book aimed at students of English rather than linguistics students, references to the technical literature are kept to a minimum. However, the ‘Recommendations for reading’ at the end of each chapter

contain some hints for any readers who would like to delve into this literature, as well as pointing towards more detailed treatments of English morphology in particular. Finally, I would like to encourage comments and criticisms. My choice of what to emphasise and what to leave out will inevitably not please everyone, nor will some of the details of what I say. I hope, however, that even those who find things to disagree with in this book will also find it useful for its intended introductory purpose, whether as students, teachers or general readers.

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