We use words all day long without paying much attention to them. We seem to know so much about them, but if somebody asked “what is a word?”, most people would look rather puzzled and won’t be able to find a satisfying answer to such a seemingly easy answer.
In this class we will not only answer the question what a word is, but also how a word can be structured internally. We will look at word elements (root and affixes) and how we can combine them to create new words. We will investigate the difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes. Further topics will be the mental lexicon compared to a dictionary, (historical) word formation processes and productivity of individual morphological elements. In this course, you will also acquire technical skills that will help you search for and analyze morphological elements. |
