Finegan 2 Read & Retell

Chapter 2 of Finegan proved fun to read. I love grammar so it was interesting getting to analyze simpler concepts like parts of speech at a deeper level. This chapter dealt with lexicon and morphology, terms that are now more understandable to me following the reading.

Morphemes are the smallest linguistic unit carrying meaning. They can stand alone (free) or need something to attach to (bound). Bound morphemes tend to carry information regarding plurality, case, tense and person. It was interesting to learn that although English uses bound morphemes in the form of affixes (prefixes and suffixes), other languages have infixes and circumfixes--two terms I had never heard before.

A language can expand itself by manipulating morphemes through compounding, reduplication, affixation and shortening. Again, it was interesting to see how English doesn't really reduplicate like other languages. Having learned German, I very much understoods the reference to German using the concept of compounding to the extreme; it has some very long and complex words.

Languages can also add to themselves by borrowing words from other languages. Again, having learned German, I know German borrowed a great many words from the French, the English and the Americans in the last two centuries. Germans will even try to pronounce most of the words like the borrowed language...like Kusin (a French word for male cousin) and e-Mail (an American word).

The discussion of morphological systems--inflectional, isolating and agglutinatin--proved the most difficult to understand. The inflectional made the most sense to me--again because of my knowledge of German.

I had never heard of corpus study, but it proved interesting to think about distribution verses frequency within a set of texts organized by genre. The most commonly used words did not surprise me. That the most common verbs were "to be" and "to have" also made much sense. Having learned German, those verbs are highly important.