Reading Chapter of English Morphology (Freemans)

It is amazing that words can be broken into parts (sometimes many parts), even some of the parts can be individual words, too. Thus, it is difficult to define words and what’s more, it is difficult to count how many words a certain group of learners should master during a certain learning period as well. Morphemes seem to bring some “trouble” to us.

The number of morphemes in a word is different among languages, as Freeman and Freeman states. Chinese language is analytic, since almost each word is one morpheme. Language like Latin is synthetic because of words tend to be added inflections, while languages like Navajo have more inflections on words so they are polysynthetic languages. Turkish has many morphemes in a word so it is agglutinative. This is so interesting.

This chapter talks about that grammar learning starts from very boring and strict experience to a fun process now. As for the parts of speech, a lot of good books are available to the learners. It’s said that phrases are accompanied by colorful illustrations. I think that indicates one important point that is grammar knowledge like parts of speech should be learned in context. For example, when classifying words, we need to base on the meaning of words, while the meaning of the words is determined by the context to some extent. Freeman and Freeman say that morphological evidence can help identify the parts of speech and meaning, while this evidence should be gathered from a group of words, I think. For example, I notice that Freeman and Freeman classify “this” as a determiner in this chapter. It is true when telling people “This is my house/book/blog”, but in the sentence “Look at this backpack. I got this from Staples”, is “this” still a determiner OR it is more like a pronoun. If it is right to say “this” is a pronoun in the second example above, then the importance of a context cannot be denied at all.