Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1
Why study words?
Imagine a life without words! Trappist 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. (I would imagine that many a chimp or gorilla would give an arm and a leg
for a few wors —but we will probably never know because they cannot tell us.) Yet,
surprisingly, most of us take words (and more generally language) for granted. We cannot
discuss words with anything like 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 entire
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 patterns in many familiar words which you have not previously
stopped to think about analytically.
 For the student of language, words are 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 other modules of the
grammar such as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words 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:

[1.1]

(i) Its shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/frg/ which enables us to

pronounce it, and its ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION frog, if we literate and know
how to spell (see the key to symbols used on page xix);
(ii) Its grammatical properties, e.g. it is a noun and it is countable—so you can have one
frog and two frogs;
(iii) Its meaning.

But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing
aboutthe 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 lexion and commited to
memory by bruteforce. For the relationship between a LINGUISTIC 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 pronounciation can be
associatd awith any meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning
association, they have a kosher word. For instance, convenience oroginally 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 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. The only thing missing from
his analysis is the social dimension. Any arbitrary meaning assigned to a word needs to
be accepted by the speech community which uses the language. Obviously, language
would not be much use as a means of communication if each individual language user
assigned a private meaning to each word which other users of the language did not
recognise. Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the lesson on the nature of
language that Humpty Dumpty gave to Alice (see overleaf).
Let us now consider