12. In the light of the remarks made in the lecture 2 explain how the past tense is marked in the following examples:
a. Last week I cut the grass.
Cut-cut-cut
The past tense is marked through “last week”
b. I put those flowers in the vase yesterday.
Put-put-put
The past tense is marked through “yesterday”.
c. Yesterday they shut the factory down.
Shut-shut-shut
The past tense is marked through “yesterday”.
d. The mob hit him last week.
Hit-hit-hit
The past tense is marked through “last week”.
13. Define and give one fresh example of each of the following:
Lexeme: grammatical word; word form
Lexeme: is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain.
Example; lexeme-crown; Word forms would be: crown, crowns, crowned, crowning, Lexeme: walk; Word forms would be: walk, walks, walked, walking
The adjective lexeme good, which has the word forms good, better, and best
Function words(or grammatical words) include determiners (for example, the, that), conjunctions (and, but), prepositions (in, of), pronouns (she, they), auxiliary verbs (be, have), modals (may, could), and quantifers (some, both).
Morpheme: morph, allomorph : portmanteau morph
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.
Example: in a word like mistrustful we have a two bound morphemes, the prefix mis- and the suffix -ful, surrounding the root, trust:
mis-trust-ful
Or in a word like friendliness, we have a root followed by two suffixes:
friend-li-ness
Morph:
A morph is simply the phonetic representation of a morpheme - how the morpheme is said.
For example, the word infamous is made up of three morphs--in-, fam(e), -eous--each of which represents one morpheme.
Allomorph: one of a set of forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts
e
.g.
cat{s} [s]
d
og{s}
[z] Allomorphs
rose{s} [iz]
A portmanteau morph is a single morph that is analyzed as representing two underlying morphemes.
Let us look at some Portmanteau Morpheme examples. The morpheme –s is one of the very widely occuring portmanteau morphemes in English. It occurs in the following cases:
Cat-s (Plural morph that changes singular nouns into plural)
Eat-s (used to mark third person agreement on finitive verbs)
John’s (genetivie morph that is used to mark possession on nouns)
Suppletion: zero morph
• Suppletion: a relationship between forms of a word wherein on form cannot be phonologically or morphologically derived from the other, this process is rare. – am - was; go -went – good - better; bad - worse
suppletion (change the morpheme instead of adding an affix):
bad -> worse, good -> better, go -> went, is -> was, am, is, are
Zero morph:zero morph or null morpheme is something that has no phonetic form but arguably is there because of function. Examples from English include irregular plurals: deer – deer
Sheep-sheep
14. Identify the inflectional affixes, derivational affixes, roots, bases and
stems in the following.
faiths-faith-root; faith-stem;-s is an inflectional affix
faithfully-faith-root; faithfully-stem; ful,ly are derivational affixes unfaithful-faith-root; unfaithful-stem; un-prefix,ful –derivational suffix faithfulness-faith-root; faithfulness-stem; ful,ness are derivational affixes
b. frog marched-frog and march –roots;frog march-stem; ed is an inflectional suffix
bookshops- book and shop-roots;bookshop-stem; s is inflectional suffix
window-cleaners- window and cleaner-roots;window-cleaner-stem;s is an inflectional suffix
hardships- hard and ship-roots; hardship-stem; s is an inflectional suffix