Readings for Week 6

I hope this doesn't make me a complete nerd when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed the reading for this week. I have been looking for a general summary of the different parts of English. As a native speaker, I have no idea what the different parts of speech are I just know how and when to use them. It is important to know exactly what a preposition is or how exactly an adverb is used and formed. I ashamed to say that I was not very familiar with any of these terms until this Chapter.

The book also broke down morphemes and how they are used and categorized. There are two types of morphemes, bound and free. A free morpheme would be "tree" and the bound morpheme would be the "s" that makes "trees" plural. I think it is interesting that words such as, hippopotamus have what seem to be many syllables but only contain one morpheme! How cool is that!? It is interesting that a prefix can completely change the meaning of a word such as "true" + "un" = "untrue" which is the antonym of "true" . Suffixes change the type of word but not the meaning of it. For example, "arrange" is a verb and when the suffix "ment" is added it becomes an noun of "arrangement".

The chapter also talked about how new words can be added to any language and it lists three ways:

• new words can derive from existing ones
• words can be borrowed from a different language
• words can be made up

I liked reading about how metaphors are created. It appears that they are almost created by accident.

One question I have is about Inflectional Morphology. Can someone explain it a little bit better than the book did. It was a little confusing to me and if it is explained a different way with better examples perhaps I can retain what it means.

Another question I have is about paradigm. Does that mean an inflection in the voice can change the form of a word? I guess I am a little confused about that one too.