Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xi
IPA Transcription Key xiii
1 What Is a Word? 1
1.1 Explaining Word in Words 1
1.2 Language Is a Secret Decoder Ring 4
1.3 Wordhood: The Whole Kit and Caboodle 7
1.4 Two Kinds of Words 11
1.5 The Anatomy of a Listeme 12
1.6 What Don’t You Have to Learn When You’re
Learning a Word? 14
1.7 A Scientific Approach to Language 16
Appendix: Basic Grammatical Terms 16
Study Problems 18
Further Reading 20
2 Sound and Fury: English Phonology 21
2.1 English Spelling and English Pronunciation 21
2.2 The Voice Box 25
2.3 The Building Blocks of Words I: Consonants
in the IPA 27
2.4 Building Blocks II: Vowels and the IPA 36
2.5 Families of Sounds and Grimm’s Law: A Case in
Point 45
Study Problems 51
Further Reading 53
viii
3 Phonological Words: Calling All Scrabble
Players! 54
3.1 Guessing at Words: The Scrabble Problem 54
3.2 Building Blocks III: The Syllable 58
3.3 Phonotactic Restrictions on English Syllables 61
3.4 From a Stream of Sound into Words:
Speech Perception 71
3.5 Syllables, Rhythm, and Stress 75
3.6 Using Stress to Parse the Speech Stream into Words 78
3.7 Misparsing the Speech Stream, Mondegreens, and
Allophones 80
3.8 Allophony 83
3.9 What We Know about Phonological Words 84
Study Problems 85
Further Reading 89
Notes 89
4 Where Do Words Come From? 90
4.1 Getting New Listemes 90
4.2 When Do We Have a New Word? 91
4.3 New Words by “Mistake”: Back-Formations and
Folk Etymologies 92
4.4 New Words by Economizing: Clippings 95
4.5 Extreme Economizing: Acronyms and Abbreviations 96
4.6 Building New Words by Putting Listemes Together:
Affixation and Compounding 98
4.7 Compounding Clips and Mixing It up: Blends 101
4.8 New Listemes via Meaning Change 102
4.9 But Are These Words Really New? 106
4.10 What Makes a New Word Stick? 107
Study Problems 109
Further Reading 110
5 Pre- and Suf-fix-es: Engl-ish Morph-o-log-y 111
5.1 Listemes 111
5.2 Making up Words 112
5.3 Affixal Syntax: Who’s My Neighbor? Part I 124
5.4 Affixal Phonology: Who’s My Neighbor? Part II 127
5.5 Allomorphy 130
Contents
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5.6 Closed-Class and Open-Class Morphemes: Reprise 136
Study Problems 138
Further Reading 142
Notes 142
6 Morphological Idiosyncrasies 144
6.1 Different Listemes, Same Meaning:
Irregular Suffixes 145
6.2 Root Irregulars 153
6.3 Linguistic Paleontology: Fossils of Older Forms 155
6.4 Why Some but Not Others? 164
6.5 How Do Kids Figure It Out? 166
6.6 Representing Complex Suffixal Restrictions 168
6.7 Keeping Irregulars: Semantic Clues to Morphological
Classes 170
6.8 Really Irregular: Suppletive Forms 173
6.9 Losing Irregulars: Producing Words on the Fly 175
6.10 Productivity, Blocking, and Bushisms 177
Study Problems 180
Further Reading 183
Notes 184
7 Lexical Semantics: The Structure of
Meaning, the Meaning of Structure 185
7.1 Function Meaning vs. Content Meaning 186
7.2 Entailment 189
7.3 Function Words and their Meanings 190
7.4 Content Words and their Meanings 197
7.5 Relationships and Argument Structure: Meaning
and Grammar 204
7.6 Argument Structure 206
7.7 Derivational Morphology and Argument
Structure 209
7.8 Subtleties of Argument Structure 210
7.9 Function vs. Content Meanings: The Showdown 212
7.10 How Do We Learn All That? 214
Study Problems 215
Further Reading 216
Notes 217
Contents
x
Contents
8 Children Learning Words 218
8.1 How Do Children Learn the Meanings of Words? 218
8.2 Learning Words for Middle-Sized Observables 222
8.3 When the Basics Fail 226
8.4 Morphological and Syntactic Clues 226
8.5 Learning Words for Non-Observables 228
8.6 Syntactic Frames, Semantic Roles, and Event
Structure 229
8.7 Agent–Patient Protoroles 231
8.8 Functional Listemes Interacting with
Content Listemes 232
8.9 Simple Co-Occurrence? Or Actual Composition? 233
8.10 Yes, but Where Do the Words Come from in
the First Place? 236
Study Problems 236
Further Reading 237
Notes 238
9 Accidents of History: English in Flux 239
9.1 Linguistic Change, and Lots of It 239
9.2 Layers of Vocabulary and Accidents of History 249
9.3 A Brief History of England, as Relevant to the
English Vocabulary 249
9.4 55 bc to 600 ad: How the English Came to England 250
9.5 600–900 ad: The English and the Vikings 253
9.6 1066–1200: Norman Rule 255
9.7 1200–1450: Anglicization of the Normans 256
9.8 1450–1600: The English Renaissance 259
9.9 1600–1750: Restoration, Expansion 262
9.10 1750–Modern Day 263
9.11 The Rise of Prescriptivism: How to Really
Speak Good 266
9.12 English Orthography: The Latin Alphabet, the Quill
Pen, the Printing Press, and the Great Vowel Shift 267
9.13 Summary 276
Study Problems 276
Further Reading 278
Notes 279
Glossary 281
Works Consulted