Chapter 5

Chapter 5

1. Word Formation

   • Morphology
     • describes the area of linguistics that deals with word forms
   • Inflections
     • changes in the form of a word according to the word’s grammatical function (e.g. ‘shoe’ (singular)/‘shoes’ (plural)
   • Morpheme
     • a minimal and indivisible morphological unit that cannot be analysed into smaller units
   • Prefix
     • letters/sounds added to the beginning of an existing word in order to create a new word with a different meaning (e.g. ‘un’ + ‘happy
   • Suffix
     • letters or sounds added to the end of an existing word to create a new word with a different meaning

2. Conversation

   • Interlocutor
     • refers to the person or persons being spoken to in a conversation
   • Accommodation
     • people’s tendency to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor, for example, by changing their accent or avoiding words that might be misunderstood. 

3. Sentence Formation

   • Declension
     • the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun or adjective, by which its grammatical case is identified. For example, Latin and German have declensions for nouns; this means that nouns have one form when they are the subject of a verb (nominative form) and another for the object (accusative form).
   • Case
     • in a declension, each of the different forms that nouns, adjectives or pronouns can adopt in order to express their semantic relation to other words in the sentence, e.g. as subject or object of a verb, object of a preposition, etc. For example, ‘he left’ (subject) but ‘I saw him’ (direct object). Terms such as ‘nominative’, ‘accusative’, ‘genitive’ and ‘dative’ refer to different cases.

4. Discourse

   •  the set of rules that are used for connecting sentences or utterances together into meaningful texts or conversations
   • Cohesion
     • a text, a conversation or a speech is cohesive when the elements within it are linked together. 
   • Coherence
     • a text, a conversation or a speech is coherent when the sum of its elements makes sense.