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Introduction1.1WHY STUDY WORD?Imagine a life without words! Trappi monks opt for it. But most of us would not give up words for anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of words. Communicating our joys, fears, opinions fantasies, wishes, requests, demands, feelings – and the occasional threat or insult – is a very important aspect of being human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway – even when we know that what we are saying is totally unimportant. We love chitchat and find silent encounters awkward, or even oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind’s most valuable single possession. It is language that sets us apart from our biologically close relatives, the great primates.for granted. We cannot discuss words with anything like the competence with which we can discuss fashion. Films or football.We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is intended to make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and structure of English words. It addresses the question ‘what sorts of things do people need to know about English words in order to use them in speech?’ it is intended to increase the degree of sophistication with which you think about words. It is designed to give you a theoretical grasp of English word – formation, the sources of English vocabulary and the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind.I hope a desirable side effect of working through English words will be the enrichment of your vocabulary. This book will help to increase. in a very practical way, your awareness of the relationship between words. You will be equipped with the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words and to see in a new light the underlying structural pa11erns in many familiar words which you have not previously stopped to think about analytically.For the student of language. Words are a very rewarding object of study. An understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general. Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they impinge on every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the ramifications of the fact that words are complex and multi-faceted entities whose structure and use interacts with the other modules of the grammar.2 ENGLISH WORDSsuch as PHONOLOGY , the study of bow sounds are used to represent word in speech, SYNTAX, the study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the study of meaning in language.In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access various types of information from the word-store which we all carry around with us in the MENTAL LEXICON or DICTIONARY that is tucked away in the mind. We need to know:ts shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/frg/ which enables us to pronounce it, and its ORTIIOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION fro g . if we are literate and know how to spell it (see the Key to symbols used on page xix):its grammatical properties. e.g. it is a noun and it is countable ? so you can have one frog and two frog: (iii) its meaning . But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing about the form of words that would enable anyone to work out their meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these simply has to be listed in the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship between a LINGUSITIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words to refer to this small tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouille . In Malay they call it katak and in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others to the job of referring to this small reptile.And of course. within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can be associated with any meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning association, they have a kosher word For instance, com•1mience originally meant ‘suitability’ or ‘commodiousness’ but in the middle of the nineteenth century a new meaning of ·toilet" was assigned to it and people began to talk of ·a public convenience’. In the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new meaning of ·easy to use, designed for hassle-free use· as in convenience food.We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean whatever we want them to mean. Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out