Section 10.4 Morphology and lexical relations
Exercises
- Check how well you know the terminology of morphology and lexical relations:
menu | drag-and-drop
- Check how well you know the WG notation for linguistic units (including some that you won't have met in chapter 10 - see if you can guess them):
menu | drag-and-drop
- Check how good you are at recognising morphs in words: multiple choice
- Check how good you are at recognising morphological structures in simple words: menu | drag-and-drop
- Check how good you are at recognising morphological structures in more complicated words: menu | drag-and-drop
- Check how well you understand lexical relations: multiple choice | feedback
- Check how well you understand variants. (If you haven't already read sections 6.7.2-3, which explain the notion 'variant', I suggest you read them now.) menu | drag-and-drop
Tutorials
Project
Look for lexical relations and morphology in your text, as follows:
- To get you in the mood, and to have some fun, try pasting your text into Wordle.
- Click 'Create', paste your text, click 'Go, click 'Randomize'. Then click 'Randomize' again!
- Here's what it makes of my text: first randomization, second randomization.
- The size of a word shows how often the word was used in the text, but otherwise the picture tells you nothing about how the words are related to each other in the text.
- Notice that Wordle ignores very common little words such as the. That's ok for this kind of activity, but these little words really matter in the grammatical analysis.
- You can improve on Wordle by using Concordle instead.
- Look at the stock example it shows, with a bit of text (about Concordle) in the top box, a pretty 'cloud' of the texts' words (minus the little words listed as 'omitted') in the middle box, and some of the words selected for a 'concordance' treatment in the bottom box. A concordance is a list of words plus their neighbours from the text.
- Click 'Concordle-ordered' (just above the middle box), and look at the long list of words that's now replaced the cloud. This shows the text's words first in order of frequency, and then in alphabetical order. Then click 'Clear concordances' and click any word in the list. You'll see it presented in concordance format, with each token on a separate line between its neighbours.
- Now click the three 'clear' buttons at the top of the page, and paste your own text into the top box. Repeat what you did above, and click on a word that appears more than once to see its concordance entry.
- Here's the list of words that Concordle gave me for my text:
- able (1) advanced (1) also (1) amusement (1) another (1) before (1) book (1) but (1) calling (1) common (1) confine (1) criticisms (1) else (1) eminent (1) finished (1) generally (1) hardly (1) how (1) intense (1) maintained (1) meeting (1) method (1) modestly (1) nothing (1) often (1) once (1) only (1) philological (1) possessed (1) reading (1) realize (1) remember (1) schoolmaster (1) sense (1) society (1) still (1) superfluous (1) teachers (1) themselves (1) thereupon (1) think (1) told (1) unsettled (1) view (1) were (1) when (1) which (1) would (1) written (1) english (2) got (2) had (2) not (2) one (2) paper (2) philologist (2) practical (2) teacher (2) adjective (3) ball (3) grammar (3) that (3) who (3) was (4) cannon (6)
- When I clicked on 'grammar', I got this concordance list:
| often hardly able to realize how unsettled |
grammar |
still is. I remember once reading a |
| I remember once reading a paper on |
grammar |
before the Philological Society, in which I |
| a schoolmaster, but had written an English |
grammar, |
got up, and, to the intense amusement |
Looking at this list, I can see that the first two uses of 'grammar' have the same meaning (the subject-matter of grammar), while the third has a different meaning (a book about grammar). These are very strong lexical links: three uses of the same lexeme, two of them with the same meaning.
- Using these tools as much as possible,
- find three word tokens in your text that involve the same lexeme, and highlight them in the same colour. (If you can't find three, do the same to two tokens.)
- In my text I've highlighted 'grammar'.
- find two word tokens that belong to different lexemes but have the same meaning, and highlight them in the same colour (using a different colour from the one you used before).
- I've highlighted 'teacher' (twice) and 'schoolmaster'; notice how the author chooses to avoid lexical repetition, as recommended by a lot of style manuals.
- find two word tokens that represent distinct lexemes that have a close lexical relation, and highlight them in the same colour.
- I've highlighted 'philologist' (twice) and 'Philological' because both are directly linked, by a general lexical relation, to PHILOLOGY.
- find the word token that contains the most morphs, and copy it to the end of your text.
- Show its morphological structure.
- For each morph, list some other words containing it and give a rough indication of its meaning or function in those words. You may find it helpful to search for other words by either their beginnings or their ends; you can do this online at OneLook.
- I've given this treatment to 'philological', as you can see in the new version of my text.
Puzzle
What is the past tense of the new verb TEXT, as in I'll text you the number? And more importantly, if it's irregular, why?
- Relevant data: for some people, the past tense of TEXT is text, as in I text you the number yesterday.
- Discussion
Entry points for the WG Encyclopedia: Lexical relation, Morphology
Wikipedia links
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