Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1
WHY STUDY WORDS?
Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would
not give up words for anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of
words. Communicating our joys, fears, opinions, fantasies, wishes, requests,
demands, feelings and the occasional threat or insult is a very important aspect
of being human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so
many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of
them are not. But we talk anyway-even whenwe know that what we are saying
is totally unimportant. We love chitchat and find silent encountersawkward, or
even oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.
It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind's most
valuable single possession. Itis language that sets us apart from our biologically
close relatives, the great primates. (I would imagine that many a chimp or
gorilla would give an arm and a leg for a few words-but we will probably never
knowbecause they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most of us take words (and
more generally language) for granted. We cannot discuss words with anything
like the competence with which we can discuss fashion , films or football.
We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is
intended to make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about
words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and structure of English
words. It addresses the question 'what sorts I things do people need to know
about English words in order to use them in speech?" It is intended to increase
the degree of sophistication with which you think about words. It is designed to
give you a theoretical grasp of English word-formation, the sources of English
vocabulary and the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind.
I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the
enrichment of your vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very
practical way, your awareness of the relationship between words. You will be
equipped with the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words
and to see in a new light the underlying structural patterns in many familiar
words which you have not previously stopped to think about analytically.
 For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An
understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door
to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general.
Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they
impinge on every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the
ramifications of the fact that words are complex and multi-faceted entities
whose structure and use interacts with the other modules of the grammar such
as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words in
speech, SYNTAX, the study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the
study of meaning in language.
In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access
various types of information from the word-store which we all carry around
with us in the MENTAL LEXICON or DICTIONARY that

is tucked away in the mind. We need to know:

(iii) its meaning.

But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is
nothing about the form of words that would enable anyone to work out their
meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these simply has to be listed in
the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship
between a LINGUISTIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is
ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words to refer to this small
tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouill . In Malay they call it
katak and in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others
to the job of referring to this small reptile.
And of course, within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can
be associated with any meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning
association, they have a kosher word. For instance, convenience originally
meant 'suitability' or 'commodiousness' but in the middle of the nineteenth
century a new meaning of 'toilet' was assigned to it and people began to talk of a
public convenience'. In the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new
meaning of 'easy to use, designed for hassle-free use' as in convenience food.
We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean
whatever we want them to mean. Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out. The
only thing missing from his analysis is the social dimension. Any arbitrary
meaning assigned to a word needs to be accepted by the speech community
which uses the language. Obviously, language would not be much use as a
means of communication if each individual language user assigned a private
meaning to each word which other users of the language did not recognise.
Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the lesson on the nature of
language that Humpty Dumpty gave to Alice (see overleaf).
Let us now consider one further example. All competent speakers of English
know that you can add -s to a noun to indicate that it refers to more than one
entity. So, you say cat when referring to one and cats if there is more than one.
If you encountered in the blank in [1.2a] an unfamiliar word like splet (which I
have just made up), you would automatically know from the context that it must
have the plural form splets in this position since it is specified as plural by all.
Further, you would know that the plural of splet must be splets (rather than
spletren by analogy to children or spleti by analogy to stimuli). You know that
the majority of nouns form their plural by adding the regular plural suffix or
ending -s. You always add -s unless express instructions are given to do
otherwise. There is no need to memorise separately the plural form of most
nouns. All we need is to know the rule that says 'add -s for plural'. So, without
any hesitation, you suffix –s to obtain the plural form splets in [1.2b]:
a. We put all the big______ on the table.
b. We put all the big splets on the table.
The study of word-formation and word-structure is called MORPHOLOGY.
Morphological theory provides a general theory of word-structure in all the
languages of the world. Its task is to characterise the kinds of things that
speakers need to know about the structure of the words of their language in
order to be able to use them to produce and to understand speech.
We will see that in order to use language, speakers need to have two types of
morphological knowledge.

We will see that in order to use language, speakers need to have two types of
morphological knowledge. First, they need to be able to analyse existing words
(e.g. they must be able to tell that frogs contains frog plus -s for plural).
Usually, if we know the meanings of the elements that a word contains, it is
possible to determine the meaning of the entire word once we have worked out
how the various elements relate to each other. For instance, if we examine a
word like nutcracker we find that it is made up of two words, namely the noun
nut and the noun cracker. Furthermore, we see that the latter word, cracker is
divisible into the verb crack and another meaningful element -er (roughly
meaning an instrument used to do X), which, however, is not a word in its own
right. Numerous other words are formed using this pattern of combining words
(and smaller meaningful elements) as seen in [1.3]:

[tea]Noun-[strain-er]]Noun

[lawn]Noun-[mow-er]]Noun

[can]Noun-[open-er]]Noun

Given the frame [[ ___ ]Noun- [ _er ]] Noun, we can fill in different words
with the appropriate properties and get another compound word (i.e. a word
containing at least two words). Try this frame out yourself. Find two more
similar examples of compound words formed using this pattern.
Second, speakers need to be able to work out the meanings of novel words
constructed using the word- building elements and standard word-construction
rules of the language. Probably we all know and use more words than are listed
in dictionaries. We can construct and analyse the structure and meaning of old
words as well as new ones. So, although many words must be listed in the
dictionary and memorised, listing every word in the dictionary is not necessary.
If a word is formed following general principles, it may be more efficient to
reconstitute it from its constituent elements as the need arises rather than
permanently commit it to memory. When people make up new words using
existing words and wordforming elements, we understand them with ease-
providing we know what the elements they use to form those words mean and
providing the word forming rules that they employ are familiar. This ability is
one of the things explored in morphological investigations.
In an average week, we are likely to encounter a couple of unfamiliar words.
We might reach for a dictionary and look them up. Some of them may be listed
but others might be too new or too ephemeral to have found their way into any
dictionary. In such an event, we rely on our morphological knowledge to tease
out their meanings. If you heard someone describe their partner as a great list
maker and a ticker-off, you would instantly know what sort of person the
partner was-although you almost certainly have never encountered the word
ticker-off before. And it is certainly not listed in any dictionary. The -er ending
here has
The following chapter continues the discussion of the role of the lexicon. It
attempts to answer questions like what is the lexicon for? What items need to be
listed in the dictionary? What is the difference between idioms (like to nail
one's colours to the mast) and syntactic phrases (like to nail a notice to the
door)?" The next two chapters highlight the fact that the English word-store is
vast and infinitely expandable. First, in Chapter 9 we consider the ways in
which, using the internal resources of the language, speakers are able to produce
an indefinitely large number of words. In Chapter 10 attention shifts to the
expansion of English vocabulary through the importation of countless words
from other languages. The story of imported words is in many ways also the
story of the contacts that speakers of English have had with speakers of other
languages over the centuries.
Most of the space in this book is devoted to an examination of the structure of
English words. But the analysis of word-structure is seen not as an end in itself,
but rather as a means to an end. And that end is to understand what it means to
know a word. What sorts of information about words do you need to have in
order to use them in communication? So the final chapter is devoted to the
MENTAL LEXICON. It addresses the question, how is it that people are able
to store a vast number of words in the mind and to retrieve the right one so fast
in communication?" We will see that words are not piled in a muddle in the
mind. Rather, the mental lexicon is very highly organised. This concluding
chapter will also pull together the various strands developed in the earlier
chapters.
I have already stressed the point that morphology is not a selfcontained
module of language. Any discussion of word-formation touches on other areas
of linguistics, notably phonology and syntax, so I have provided a key to the list
of pronunciation symbols at the beginning of the book. I have also included at
the end glossary of linguistic terms (many of them other branches of linguistics)
which might unfamiliar. But still I may have missed out some terms. If you
encounter any unfamiliar technical terms that are not explained in this book, I
suggest that you consult a good dictionary of linguistics like Crystal (1991).
Sometimes it is useful to present data using phonetic notation. A key to the
phonetic symbols used is to be found on pp. xix-xx.
 After this introductory chapter, all chapters contain exercises. Several of the
analytical exercises require you to look up words and parts of words in a good
dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary. Access to such a dictionary is
essential when you study this book. This is a practical way of learning about the
structure of English words (and may also be a useful way of enriching your
vocabulary).