|
Unpaired Word
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite. If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative. Unpaired words can be the result of one of the words falling out of popular usage, or can be created when only one word of a pair is borrowed from another language, in either case yielding an accidental gap, specifically a morphological gap. Other unpaired words were never part of a pair; their starting or ending phonemes, by accident, happen to match those of an existing morpheme, leading to a reinterpretation. The classification of a word as "unpaired" can be problematic, as a word thought to be unattested might reappear in real-world usage or be created, for example, through humorous back-formation. In some cas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prefix (linguistics)
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of the word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category (but playing a different role in the sentence), or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category. Prefixes, like all other affixes, are usually bound morphemes. In English, there are no inflectional prefixes; English uses suffixes instead for that purpose. The word ''prefix'' is itself made up of the stem ''fix'' (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix ''pre-'' (meaning "before"), bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David McCord
David Thompson Watson McCord (November 15, 1897 in New York CityApril 13, 1997) was an American poet and college fundraiser. Life He grew up in Portland, Oregon and graduated from Harvard University. His work appeared in ''Harper's''. He raised millions of dollars as executive director of the Harvard College Fund. Awards * Golden Rose Award * 1954 Guggenheim Fellow * 1961 National Institute of Arts and Letters grant * 1977, the first national award for Excellence in Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English * Rudyard Kipling Fellow at Marlboro College in Vermont * Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London Two collections of poems, ''The Star in the Pail'' and ''One at a Time'' were 1976 and 1978 finalists for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, National Book Award, Children's Literature. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Schott
Ben Schott (born 26 May 1974) is a British writer, photographer, and author of the ''Schott's Miscellanies'' and '' Schott's Almanac'' series. Early life and university Ben Schott was born in North London, England, the son of a neurologist and a nurse. He has one brother, also now a neurologist. He went to school at University College School, Hampstead. Schott went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Social and Political Sciences. He took a double first in 1996. After Cambridge, Schott got a job at the London advertising agency J. Walter Thompson where he was as an account manager on the Nestlé Rowntree account working on Smarties, Kit Kat, and Polo. After only four months he resigned to become a freelance photographer. Photography Schott worked as a photographer from 1996 to 2003, specialising in portraits of politicians and celebrities. He was commissioned by a range of editorial and commercial clients, including ''The Independent'', ''The Sunda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Polarity Item
In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is a licensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a particular type have the same licensing contexts. In English As examples of polarity items, consider the English lexical items ''somewhat'' and ''at all'', as used in the following sentences: # I liked the film somewhat. # I didn't like the film at all. # *I liked the film at all. # *I didn't like the film somewhat. As can be seen, ''somewhat'' is licensed by the affirmative environment of sentence (1), but it is forbidden (anti-licensed) by the negative env ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossilization (linguistics)
In linguistic morphology, fossilization refers to two close notions. One is preserving of ancient linguistic features which have lost their grammatical functions in language. Another is loss of productivity of a grammatical paradigm (''e.g.'' of an affix), which still remains in use in some words.''The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics'', by Robert Lawrence Traskp. 125/ref> Examples of fossilization include fossilized morphemes and fossil words. The term fossilization or interlanguage An interlanguage is an idiolect that has been developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1), and can also overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristic ... fossilization is also used in reference to the observation that most adult second language learners never reach a native-language learners' level of proficiency. These Second language learner routinely suffer from errors that can be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
False Cognate
False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For example, the English word ''dog'' and the Mbabaram word ''dog'' have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. Likewise, English '' much'' and Spanish ''mucho'' came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and same for English '' have'' and Spanish '' haber''. This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, but which may in fact be etymologically related. Even though false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them (for example by phono-semantic matching or folk etymology). Phenomenon The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eggcorn
An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,, sense 2 creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them, as for example replacing " Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease", or Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born". Language change Eggcorns arise when people attempt to use analogy and logic to make sense of an expression – often a stock one – that includes a term which is not meaningful to them. For example, the stock expression "in one fell swoop" might be replaced by "in one foul swoop", the archaic adjective "fell" (for "fierce", "cruel", or "terrible") being replaced with the common word "foul" in order to convey the cruel/underhand meaning of the phrase as the speaker unders ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defective Verb
In linguistics, a defective verb is a verb that either lacks a conjugated form or entails incomplete conjugation, and thus cannot be conjugated for certain grammatical tenses, aspects, persons, genders, or moods that the majority of verbs or a "normal" or regular verb in a particular language can be conjugated for. That is to say, a defective verb lacks forms that most verbs in a particular language have. English Common defectives The most commonly recognized defective verbs in English are auxiliary verbs—the class of preterite-present verbs—''can/could'', ''may/might'', ''shall/should'', ''must'', ''ought'', and ''will/would'' (''would'' being a later historical development). Though these verbs were not originally defective, in most varieties of English today, they occur only in a modal auxiliary sense. However, unlike normal auxiliary verbs, they are not regularly conjugated in the infinitive mood. Therefore, these defective auxiliaries do not accept each other as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cranberry Morpheme
In morphology (linguistics), linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an ''independent'' meaning and grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from another. Etymology The eponymous archetype, archetypal example is the ''cran'' of ''cranberry''. Unrelated to the homonym ''wikt:cran#English, cran'' with the meaning "''a case of herrings''", this ''cran'' actually comes from ''Crane (bird), crane'' (the bird), although the connection is not immediately evident. Similarly, ''mul'' (from Latin ''wikt:morus#Latin, morus'', the mulberry tree) exists only in ''mulberry''. Phonetics, Phonetically, the first morpheme of ''raspberry'' also counts as a cranberry morpheme, even though the word "rasp" does occur by itself. Compare these with ''blackberry'', which has two obvious free morpheme, unbound morphemes ("black" + "berry"), and to ''loganberry'' and ''boysenber ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Back-formation
In etymology, back-formation is the process or result of creating a new word via inflection, typically by removing or substituting actual or supposed affixes from a lexical item, in a way that expands the number of lexemes associated with the corresponding root word.Crystal, David. ''A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth Edition'', Blackwell Publishers, 2008. The resulting is called a ''back-formation'', a term coined by James Murray in 1889. ('' Oxford English Dictionary Online'' preserves its first use of 'back-formation' from 1889 in the definition of ''to burgle''; from ''burglar''.) For example, the noun ''resurrection'' was borrowed from Latin, and the verb ''resurrect'' was then back-formed hundreds of years later from it by removing the ''-ion'' suffix. This segmentation of ''resurrection'' into ''resurrect'' + ''ion'' was possible because English had examples of Latin words in the form of verb and verb+''-ion'' pairs, such as ''opine/opinion''. These becam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman (a relative of French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As the Germanic settlers became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
