Handouts
- DQ #7 (was not distributed as a handout, since there’s only one question)
Today we continued with the morphologically complex words from the last class and I introduced tree diagrams for representing their structure. The words we used were: ex-disobeyer, prelengthenable, demagnetized, unjoyfully, and rehospitalization, along with undoable, unzipable, untieable, unlockable, and unfriendable. All of the affixes used in these words illustrate derivational morphology, because they serve to derive new words based on old ones. We talked about the “rule” or “formula” for each affix that indicates what category it can attach to and what category it creates. For example, the rule for -able is V + able = A, which means that adding the suffix -able to a verb creates an adjective. And then we discussed the ambiguity present in the un-/-able words listed above; they each have two different meanings and a different tree structure corresponds to each one.
On Monday we’ll do a little bit of review of the new stuff (namely, the tree diagrams and morphological ambiguity), and then hopefully have time to start talking about phonetics.