Perhaps the greatest difference among languages and even speakers of the same language lies in the lexicon. Indeed, one definition of the lexicon is the location of all of the idiosyncratic aspects of language.

"The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages. 127....In effect, Kivunjo and languages like it are building an entire sentence inside a single complex word, the verb. 128"

BUT RECALL DISCUSSION OF "STOP!" It too can be interpreted as a single word sentence in English -- but not a very complex or interesting one.

"The engineering trick behind human language--its being a discrete combinatorial system--is used in at least two different places: sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax, and the words themselves are built out of smaller bits by another set of rules, the rules of morphology. 127"

Both words and phrases can have hierarchical structure.

NP->det+N+(S)

Adj->"un"+Adj (prefix+Adj)

Adj->verb stem+"able" (stem+suffix) for example the complex word "unfixable" where the stem is "fix."

While all words in a language share much in common, almost by definition we can assume they are different in form and meaning and that classes of words are distinctive in one or more ways from other classes.

The morphemes like -ed, -s, that do not occur on their own are known as bound morphemes. In contrast, nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. are known as free morphemes since they can appear on their own without modification.

Morphemes known

Inflections are bound morphemes that modify the form of a word. Some languages, for example those with extensive case structure like Russian or Latin, rely more on inflections than does English--which has lost most of its Indo-European inflection heritage.

)

N -> Nstem + Ninflection

N-> dog + (-s)

"A noun can consist of a noun stem followed by a noun inflection. 131" The root of a word is the smallest bit that cannot be cut into smaller parts. Roots combine with inflections to form stems and stems can recursively form other stems..to an extent.

(Kiparsky noted cases like "mice-infested" but not "rats-infested" were probably due the fact that "mice" has its own lexical entry whereas "rats" is derived from "rat" + /pl/.

Other apparent m-rules exist but the meaning is not generally predictable from the structured parts of N roots and their inflections.136-7.

Note the commonality of formation of plurals, 3 person singular verbs, and possessives.

There are several ways to state this rule. Clearly speakers have not memorized plurals since the same phonological processes occur in several inflectional situations including possessives and verb inflections. As Morris Halle points out, how else can we explain how English speakers correctly say "I like Johann Sebastian Bach's music" since there no English final [-ch]. Speakers do recognize it as unvoiced however.

Look at the final phonological segment (phoneme) of the morpheme to be inflected. If that morpheme ends in a phoneme segment that is an affricate (e.g. fish, church, gauge) add [ez], ie. create a new syllable. Otherwise add a short continuous fricative whose voicing is the same as that final phoneme onto the final syllable of the inflected morpheme.

(cat, dog, fish,--> cats, dogz, fishez)

Information about the "arbitrary signs" of language is "stored" in our mental dictionary (a.k.a mental lexicon, vocabulary store).

Details of individual words may be idiosyncratic to a degree.

(The old chemistry model again?)

This coined word is used to indicate that lots of information about words and some phrases just must be memorized in the lexicon. 148.

Each morpheme contributes something, often unique, to the meaning of its phrases and consequently its sentences.

Morphemes themselves do not refer and their only sense is in regard to contribution to their phrases (expressions)

Thus "John", "the instructor in 712", and "father of Kristin and Alexandra" all can be used to refer to John Limber, writer of these words, but these 3 expressions do not MEAN the same thing. The meaning sense of these expressions is given by the meanings of the basic morphemes in their syntactic arrangements (phrases)

See Frege on the "the morning/evening star" and "Venus."

The lexicon can be thought of as a repository for the possible words of a language as defined by the phonology. Unlike combinations of numbers, not all combinations of phonological segments can be meaningful (MIller, 1990). The actual number of words is much, much less than the possible number of combinations because certain combinations are ruled out by that phonology--so-called morpheme structure rules or phonotactic rules of a language. In English, for example, "ftik" or "tsar" are not possible words despite our ability to articulate them; other languages may find them perfectly good forms.

(note that similarities in phonotactic rules may be a major factor in APPARENT similarities across languages since phonetic values "mutate" within those structures.)

Pinker, p.130 points out words are structured like sentences and cannot be generated by a chaining (Markoff) device.

N->Nstem + Ninflection (N-> dog + -s)

Nstem->Nstem +Nstem (N->Yugoslavia report)

Nstem->Nroot +Nrootaffix (N->Darwin + -ian)

Pinker, p.133 notes how this structure can lead to ambiguity, e.g. blackboard vs black board and how one can "test" whether something like Yugoslavia report is a compound word or phrase.

See Burke et al (1990) for an example of "frisbee"

this is the contribution the entire word makes; it is determined combinatorially by its internal structure; a "sense" derived from the lexical entries for its "head" and other component morphemes.

in some cases root-affixe combinations have unpredictable meanings and stems entered meaning entered in the lexicon.

Put another way, the possible words in every language are redundant. Choices in sequences of elements are not completely independent of each other as experienced Scrabble players know. The redundancy of language manifests itself in various places including the structure of words.

One estimate (Nagy and Anderson in Miller, 1990, p.138) puts the vocabulary of high school students at between 45,000 and 60,000 depending on exactly what words are involved. There is of course considerable variability.

A self-rating estimate based on a sample of words carried out in my 712 class in 1993 averaged 45,000 words "used" and 91,000 words "known."

Figure x Exponential growth of English dictionaries

See Semenza and Zettin (1989) They argue from the clinical case of aphasia reported here, that proper names can be pure referring expressions -- they have no "sense" as discussed above.

(Compare to training apes to use symbols or signs.)

See Pinker and 2nd language video--W. Quine's problem.

Word associations were perhaps first used by Francis Galton (1822-1911) as tap into the mind ["They lay bare the foundations of a man's thought..in Miller, p.154]. He measured the time one word gave rise to another idea. Carl Jung (1875-1961) tried to apply the idea to diagnosing psychiatric problems in a famous paper, relating it to some of Freud's ideas. Much research has been done on the topic, from collecting norms to building mental models generating these associations.

Jung, C. G. (1910). "The association method." American Journal of Psychology 21: 219-269.

Jung's 3 Clark lectures, Sept.,1909 translated from the German by Dr. A.A. Brill. CJ references German papers, 1906.

Do we compute the meaning of "unfixable" from its morphemes and structure or just remember it wholistically despite its origins?

Information must be in the lexicon that cannot be derived from the component elements. Since phonetic elements carry negligible "phonetic symbolism," this means the minimal meaningful elements are morphemes. Idiom, however, are word or phrase structures with their own unique meanings.

ENG: That's nothing to write home about

Swedish: "You wouldn't hang that on your Christmas tree" (LINGUIST List: Vol-6-1006.)