English Language 2

2014

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Morphology

Morphology:
is interested in the internal structure of words. We can define the word
Morphology as: it is the branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words.

In English and many other languages, many words can be broken down into parts.
For example:

* Unhappiness un-happi-ness

*horses horse-s

*walking walk-ing

*kicked kick-ed

Morphemes:
Is the smallest unit which has a meaning or grammatical function that words can
be broken down into. It is the smallest bit of language that has its own meaning,
either a word or a part of a word.

For example:

"Worker" contains two morphemes "work" and "-er".

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Note:
1- A sound sequence is not always regarded as a morpheme. Eg: man-*woman
*under
2- If we try to break up a morpheme, it loses its identity and it left with
meaningless noises.

There are several important distinctions that must be made when it comes to
morphemes:

lexical
free (open classes)

Morphemes functional
(closed classes)

bound derivational
(affixes) inflectional

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Free Morpheme:
Free morpheme can occur by itself, not attached to other morphemes. It can
stand alone. However, we can add other morphemes in it.
Examples:
girl, teach, book, class, the, of, etc…

** There are two kinds of free morphemes:

1- Lexical morpheme ( open class )
It has a lexical meaning; new examples can be freely added
examples: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs (content words)

2- Functional morpheme (closed class)

New examples are rarely added (but not impossible to add)
Exemples: Pronouns, Prepositions, Conjunctions, Articles. (Function words)

Note: It is important to note the difference between morphemes and

phonemes: morphemes are the minimal meaning-bearing elements that a
word consists of and are principally independent from sound.

** For example
Zebra only one morpheme but two syllables
Ze- and bra are not independent meaning bearing components of the word
zebra, making it monomorphemic word. In other words monomorphemic
word is a word that cannot be divided into morphemes. It will be meaningless

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Bound morphemes:

Bound morphemes are those that cannot be used independently but have to
be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.

**For example:
The word "teacher" consists of two morphemes.
Teach free morpheme -er bound morpheme

Bound morphemes come in two varieties, derivational and inflectional, the

core difference between the two being that the addition of derivational
morphemes creates new words while the addition of inflectional words
merely changes word form.

1- Derivational morphemes :
 In derivation a new word is formed by adding an affix to the root or stem
 Derivational morphemes form new words either:
a) By changing the meaning of the base to which they are attached. E.g. kind
 unkind (adjectives), obey  disobey (verbs)
b) By changing the word-class that a base belongs to. E.g. kind kindly,
simple simply

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 2- Inflectional morphemes :
There are different forms of the same word and they don’t alter words the meaning
or word class. Instead they only refine and give extra grammatical information
about the word's already existing meaning.
Only 8 kinds in English: -’s, -s (plural nouns), -ing, -ed/-en, -est, -er, -s (S-V
agreement)

Examples:
-s 3rd person sg. present
“He waits”
-ed past tense
“He waited”
-ing progressive
“He is waiting”
-en past participle
“I had eaten”
-s plural
“Both chairs are broken”
-’s possessive
“The chair’s leg is broken”
-er comparative
“He was faster”
-est superlative
 “He was the fastest”

Affixes :
Linguistits use the term affix to describe where exactly a bound morpheme is
attached to a word.
English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Prefixes
Affix

Suffixes

Prefixes are attached at the onset of a free morpheme.

E.g. "untie- recover- defrost"

Suffixes are attached to the end.

E.g. "teacher- slowly- apples- kicked "
While in English suffixes can be either derivational or inflectional (teacher-
slowly Vs. apples- kicked), prefixes are always derivational (untie-
recover- defrost).

Base, stem and root:

 Root: is the irreducible core of a word, with absolutely nothing else attached
to it. E.g. jump- jumps, jumping, jumped. Here, jump is the root.
 Stem : is the base with all inflectional suffixes removed. E.g. reaction(s).
 Base: is any unit of a word where any kind of affixes can be added. It could
be both inflectional and derivational. E.g. boy  boys, boy  boyish, boy 
boyhood

Word Formation

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
While derivation is generally assumed to be the most productive word formation
process, there are several others.

Compounding:
Compounds are words that we most readily identify as consisting of several parts.
In a compound several free morphemes are combined, resulting in a word that often
derives its meaning from the combination of its components.
E.g.
Classroom = class+ room
Wallpaper = wall+ paper
In English, compounds are often not written as single words but separated or
combined by a hyphen (E.g. dry cleaner, on-line).
1- Noun + Noun =Noun
Class + room = classroom
2- verb + Noun =Noun
Talk + show = talkshow
3- Adj + Noun = Noun
Tight + rope =tightrope
4- Prep+ Noun = Verb
Over + Shadow = overshadow
 Endocentric: the meaning of the compound is derived from the meaning of the
parts. E.g. raincoat
 Exocentric: the meaning is not strictly contained in the components.
E.g. redhead is not a type of head but a person with red hair.

Conversion:
Is a term used to describe a word class change without any morphological marking.
English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
E.g.1- party (noun) – party (verb)
We will be at the party.
They like to party.
2- must (noun) – must (verb)
You must eat your sandwich.
It is a must that you call him .

Borrowing:
When a word is imported from another language, we describe this process as
borrowing. English, like any other language had imported or borrowed many words
from different languages like Latin and Greek.
E.g. strata = street
In addition, English borrowed many words from French.
E.g. Passenger
Coffee- from Arabic via Turkish and Italian.
Candy- from Arabic and possibly Sanskrit via French.

Clipping :
It is a means of creating new words by shortening already existing words-
usually a single syllable. This is usually done to save time and space. E.g.
 Quiz  inquisitive
 prof  professor back clipping
 Bus  omnibus front clipping

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
  Flu  influenza front and back clipping
 Info  information

Blending:
Blends are combinations of two or more words in which the sound patterns overlap.
E.g. Brunch = breakfast + lunch
Smog = smoke + fog

Initialisms and Acronyms:

Are other forms of shortening words and reduce each component word to its initial
letter. The difference between the two types lies in how the resulting word is
pronounced in spoken language, namely letter by letter or without intermission.
E.g. Initialisms: T.V, C.D, Mp3.
Acronyms: UNESCO, FAO, NATO.

Back-information:
A word (usually a noun) is reduced to form another word of a different type
(usually a verb)
E.g. editor edit
Donation donate
Burglar burgle
Zipper zip
English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 Television televise
Babysitter babysit

Synonyms

Synonyms: is a word or phrase which has the same or nearly the same meaning as
another word or phrase in the same language.
E.g. The words "small" and " little" are synonyms.

Homonyms:
English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
Comes from the Greek homo which means "same" and onym which means "name".
So Homonyms can be defined as two or more words that share the same spelling or
the same pronunciation, or both, but have different meanings.
"No" and "Know" are homonyms.
"Bow" and " Bow " are also homonyms.

Homonyms

Homophones Heteronyms
Homographs

Homophones:
Two or more words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings.
They may or may not be spelled on the same way.
E.g. Write and right desert (to abandon) and desert (a thing deserved)

Homographs:
Homonyms that share the same spelling. They may or may not have the same
pronunciation.
English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
E.g. present (a gift) and present (no introduce)
Row (argument) and row ( propel with oars)

Heteronyms:
Those are homonyms that share the same spelling but have different
pronunciations. That is they are homographs which are not homophones.
E.g. desert (to abandon) and desert (arid region).

-With best wishes-

English language (2) Quiz no (1)

Assiut University Academic Number/
Faculty of Science Name: Section/
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

1- In the blanks below, write the antonym of the word indicated, by

adding the proper prefix.

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
Approval
Legal
To behave
Emotional
To direct
Direct (adj)
Centralization
English
To lead
Effective
To judge

2- Define the following terms with illustration:

a- Bound morphemes

b- Monomorphemic words

English language (2) Quiz no (2)

Assiut University Academic Number/
Faculty of Science Name: Section/
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

1- Form nouns from :

English Language for University Students
Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
Pretend
Sale
Approve
Able

2- Give verbs of :

Obedience
Sight
Conquest
Solution

3- Choose the synonym:

a- Hasten
(Crawl – Crush – Accelerate)

b- Apex
(Facet – Zenith – Pier)

c- Launch
(Initiate – persuade – Overcome)

English language (2) Quiz no (3)

Assiut University Academic Number/
Faculty of Science Name: Section/
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

1- Instruction: Read the passage then answer the questions.

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
 With the onset of winter season, man's natural enemies, the common cold and flu, arrive
with full force. It seems that the fluctuations in temperature and weather are guarantees that
coughs and sneezes will spread infecting germs among family and friends. More than 100
different types of bacteria can cause a cold, and doctors sometimes use antibiotics to treat
bacterial colds. However, they are an equal number of viruses that can cause influenza, and
modern science offers no drug capable of curing viral infections. In most cases, the best advice
is the usual prescription: get plenty of rest, drink a lot of fluids, and be prepared to suffer for
three to ten days. Some home cures help to relieve the symptoms of colds and flues. Mother's
chicken soup, rich in fats and oils help to revitalize a tired body and to soothe a sore throat.
Garlic, containing the active ingredient Alicia, has been used to fight off the effects of bacteria
and viruses. Hot toddies consisting of small amounts of liquor mixed with honey, sugar and
that large dose of vitamin C not only boost the immune system before a cold arrives, but also
relieve cold symptoms after they have set in.

Question 1: what is the main idea of the passage?

A- Fluctuations in temperature

B-Man's natural enemies

C-The nature of colds and flu

D-The onset of winter

Question 2; It can be inferred from the passage that germs are spread………….

A-Through the air

B-With great force

C-Only in winter weather

D-With high temperature

Question 3: the word "infecting" can be best replaced by

A-Unavoidable

B-Escaping

C-Contaminating

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI
D-Debilitating

Question 4: It can be inferred from the passage that antibiotic……………..

A-Can not be used to treat influenza

B-Are not yet effective on bacterial colds

C-Have been in the market for a short time

D-May kill beneficial organisms

2- Underline the homograph that matches the definition of the synonym :

1-That creaking sound makes me wonder if this building is sound. (in good condition)

2-The oil well is yours and the gold mine is mine. ( belonging to me )

3-Tracey didn't feel well after falling into the well. ( in good health )

-With best wishes-

___________________________________________________________
Board of Examiners:

1- DR/ Sherif Ali Sherif

2- DR/ Islam Ali Islam

English Language for University Students

Dr/ Sherif Ali & Dr/ Islam ALI