![]() ![]() What does it mean for a word to be free? One observation that leads us to say that words are free is that they can appear in isolation, on their own. In ordinary conversation, we don’t often utter just a single word, but there are plenty of contexts in which a single word is indeed an entire utterance. Here are some examples:Įach of those single words is perfectly grammatical standing in isolation as the answer to a question.Īnother reason we say that words are free is that they’re moveable: they can occupy a whole variety of different positions in a sentence. I love to eat soup when it’s cold outside. ![]() The word soup can appear as the last word in a sentence, as the first word, or in the middle of a sentence. The other important observation we can make about words is that they’re inseparable: We can’t break them up by putting other pieces inside them. But that bit of information can’t go just anywhere: it can’t interrupt the word carrot: The word carrot has a bit of information added to the end of it to show that there’s more than one carrot. This might seem like a trivial observation – of course, you can’t break words up into bits! – but if we look at a word that’s a little more complex than carrots we see that it’s an important insight. That’s fine, but it’s totally impossible to say:Įven though she probably uses the peeler to peel multiple vegetables. It’s not that a plural -s can’t go on the end of the word vegetable it’s that the word vegetable peeler is a single word (even though we spell it with a space between the two parts of it). And because it’s a single word, it’s inseparable, so we can’t add anything else into the middle of it. So we’ve seen that a word is a free form that has a meaning. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning. Some morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation.īut you’ve probably already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them seem to be smaller than whole words. (This means that some words are also morphemes.) But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to something else these are called bound morphemes. It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. ![]() We can make the observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, moveability, and inseparability to provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a word. But there are more than four units of meaning in the sentence. The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that the cooking happened in the past. And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit that tells us that there’s more than one carrot. That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on the environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense. We can easily think of several other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned, kicked, kissed. This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this meaning, but it never appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. For example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s not grammatical to answer “-ed” to indicate that you already walked the dog. ![]()
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