 Back-formation

     Back-formation is the process that creates a new word by dropping a real or supposed suffix. For example, the word televise is back-formed from television. Originally, the word television is formed by putting the prefix tele- (far) to the root vision (viewing). At the same time, there is a suffix –sion in English indicating nouns. Then people consider the –sion in the word television as that suffix and drop it to form the verb televise.

     Acronyms and abbreviations

     Acronyms and abbreviations are formed by putting together the initial letters of all words in a phrase or title.

     Acronyms can be read as a word and are usually longer than abbreviations, which are read letter by letter.

     This type of word formation is common in names of organizations and scientific terminology.

     Eponyms

     Eponyms are words that originate from proper names of individuals or places. For example, the word sandwich is a common noun originating from the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who put his food between two slices of bread so that he could eat while gambling.

     Coinage

     Coinage is a process of inventing words not based on existing morphemes.

     This way of word formation is especially common in cases where industry requires a word for a new product. For example, Kodak and Coca-cola.

    Chapter 5 Syntax

     What is syntax?

     The term syntax is from the ancient Greek word syntaxis, which literally means “arrangement” or “setting out together”.

     Traditionally, it refers to the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflexions, are arranged to show connexions of meaning within the sentence.

     Syntax is a branch of linguistics that analyzes the structure of sentences.

     What is a sentence?

     Syntax is the analysis of sentence structure. A sentence is a sequence of words arranged in a certain order in accordance with grammatical rules.

     A sequence can be either well-formed or ill-formed. Native speakers of a language know intuitively what strings of words are grammatical and what are ungrammatical.

     Knowledge of sentence structure

     Structural ambiguity

     Structural ambiguity is one or more string(s) of words has/have more than one meaning. For example, the sentence Tom said he would come yesterday can be interpreted in different ways.

     Word order

     Different arrangements of the same words have different meanings. For example, with the words Tom, love and Mary, we may say Tom loves Mary or Mary loves Tom.

     Grammatical relations

     Native speakers know what element relates to what other element directly or indirectly. For example, in The boats are not big enough and We don’t have enough boats, the word enough is related to different words in the two sentences.

     Recursion

     The same rule can be used repeatedly to create infinite sentences. For example, I know that you are happy. He knows that I know that you are happy. She knows that he knows that I know that you are happy.

     Sentence relatedness

     Sentences may be structurally variant but semantically related.

     Syntactic categories

     A syntactic category is a class of words or phrases that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality. For example, consider the following sentences:

     The child found the knife.

     A policeman found the knife.

     The man who just left here found the knife.

     He found the knife.

     All the italicized parts belong to the same syntactic category called noun phrase (NP). The noun phrases in these sentences function as subject. The knife, also a noun phrase, functions as object.

     Traditional grammar