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      What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph? The “morpheme” is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. The word “boxes”, for example, has two morphemes: “box” and “-es”, neither of which permits further division or analysis if we don’t wish to sacrifice meaning. Therefore a morpheme is considered the minimal unit of meaning. Allomorphs, like allophones vs. phones, are the alternate shapes (and thus phonetic forms) of the same morphemes. Some morphemes, though, have no more than one invariable form in all contexts, such as “dog”, “cat”, etc. The variants of the plurality “-s” make the allomorphs thereof in the following examples: map-maps, mouse-mice, sheep-sheep etc
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      What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme? A “free morpheme” is a morpheme that constitutes a word by itself, such as ‘bed”, “tree”, etc. A “bound morpheme” is one that appears with at least another morpheme, such as “-s” in “beds”, “-al” in “national” and so on. All monomorphemic words are free morphemes. Those polymorphemic words are either compounds (combination of two or more free morphemes) or derivatives (word derived from free morphemes)
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      What is a root ? What is a stem? What is an affix? A “root” is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. In other words, a “root” is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “Internationalism” is a four-morpheme derivative which keeps its free morpheme “nation” as its root when “ inter-”, “-al” and “-ism” are taken away. A “stem” is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as, and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word “friends”, “friend” is both the root and the stem, but in the word “friendships”, “friendships” is its stem, “friend” is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e. g., “mailman” , “girlfriend” ,ect. An “affix” is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used, only when added to another morpheme(the root or stem). Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes: prefix, suffix and infix, e. g. , “mini-”, “un-”, ect.(prefix); “-ise”, “-tion”, ect.(suffix)
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      What are open classes? What are closed classes? In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. They are “open-class words”, since we can regularly add new lexical entries to these classes. The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, closed classes, or closed-class words. The number
of them is hardly alterable, if they are changeable at all
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      What is lexicon? What is word? What is lexeme? What is vocabulary? Lexicon? Word? Lexeme? Vocabulary? “Lexicon”, in its most general sense, is synonymous with vocabulary. In its technical sense, however, lexicon deals with theanalysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. “Word” is a unit of expression which has universal intuitive recognition by native-speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. This definition is perhaps a little vague as there are different criteria with regard to its identification and definition. It seems that it is hard, even impossible, to define “word” linguistically. Nonetheless it is universally agreed that the following three senses are involved in the definition of “word”, none of which, though, is expected to cope with all the situations: (1) a physically definable unit, e.g. [it iz ‘w   ] (phonological), “It is wonder” (orthographic); (2) the common factor underlying a set of forms (see what is the common factor of “checks”, “checked”, “checking ”, etc.); (3) a grammatical unit (look at (1) again; every word plays a grammatical part in the sentence). According to Leonard Bloomfield, a word is a minimum free form (compare: a sentence is a maximum free form, according to Bloomfield). There are other factors that may help us identify words: (1) stability (no great change of orthographic features); (2) relative uninterruptibility (we can hardly insert anything between two parts of a word or between the letters). To make the category clearer we can subclassify words into a few types: (1) variable and invariable words; (2) grammatical and lexical words (e. g. to, in, etc., and table, chair, etc. By “lexical words” we mean the words that carry a semantic content, e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs; (3) closed-class and open-class words. In order to reduce the ambiguity of the term “word”, the term “lexeme” is postulated as the abstract unit which refers to the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be distinguished from other smaller units. A lexeme can occur in many different forms in actual spoken or written texts. For example, “write” is the lexeme of the following words: “write”, “write”, “wrote”, “writing”, and “written.” “Vocabulary” usually refers to all words or lexical items a person has acquired about technical or/and untechnical things. So we encourage our students to enlarge their vocabulary. “vocabulary” is also used to mean word list or glossary
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      What is collocation? “Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates
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      What is syntax? “Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements
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      What is a sentence? L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is
not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form
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      What are syntactic relations? “Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence. “Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”. “Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”. By “relations of co-occurrence”, one means that words of different sets of clauses may permit o require the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations
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      What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents (and ultimate constituents)? “IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two (or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are. What remain of the first cut are called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”