Yet irrational combinatoric nonsense of this type happens all the time While clothing, automobiles and pencils could only be 'bought,'ДЄnd things denoted by words of one syllable could only be 'acquired If (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could only be 'purchased,' Said to 'buy' it or to 'purchase' it - we'd be surprised So when you exchange money for something you can be Words are mostly combined logicallyДЄnd systematically. In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from syntax Not *vaporify, and emulsify not *emulsionify, and Indeed, the process in English is rather erratic: we say vaporize Into (an) X', and so must use the longer-winded mode of expression. Lack any general way to turn a noun X into a verb meaning 'to make We could always have said 'make into an icon.' And many languages Into an icon.' Perhaps it's nice to have a single word for it, but Make iconify from icon and -ify, meaning 'make Thus (in Pinyin orthography with tone numbers after eachДЄs an example of another kind of morphological packaging, English can More of something, while we need to be more long-winded if we want toД«e specific.

Plurality, so we can be succinctly vague about whether we mean one or Makes exactly the opposite choice: there is no morphological marking for Modern Standard Chinese (also known as 'Mandarin' or 'Putonghua') If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: More elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology: Of course, we could always say the same thing in a Lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the distinction between oneДЄnd more-than-one. Some other language that does the same thing with syntax.ДЇor instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: With morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax and there is always Perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of theseД«ut morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and irregular: anything that a language does

They needn't look exactly the way that they do, Language, the levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics areДЄrguably unavoidable. ''Who ordered that?'' exclaimed the theorist Isidor I. As atom smashers grew in the next few decades, myriads of ephemeral particles appeared in the debris, a veritable Greek alphabet soup of lambdas, sigmas and pions. Later, others recognized the proton and neutron. Thomson complicated the issue when he discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. In the fifth century B.C., that prescient Greek philosopher started humanity on its search for the universe's ultimate building blocks when he suggested that all matter was made of infinitesimally small particles called atoms. Whenever I give this lecture to an introductory class, I'm always reminded of what the particle physicist Isidor Rabi said when he learned about the discovery of the muon: 'Who ordered that?' By serendipity, this morning's New York TImes has a review of a new book, 'The Hunting of the Quark', that tells the story: Which deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate.ДЇrom a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of the Of meaning, namely semantics, which deals with how sentences areД¬onnected with things in the world outside of language, and pragmatics, Then we'll look at syntax, which deals with the way that wordsДЄre combined into phrases and sentences. The resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception. Which studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking, Meaningless elements that 'spell out' the sound of morphemes), and phonetics, We'll then discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the Minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words. We'll start with morphology, which deals with morphemes (the This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various levels

Simple word vs word linguistics