Tuesday, 2 April 2024
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Hello. All is well. Yesterday, I said infixes are prefixes and suffixes. I meant to say affixes. Infixes are another type placed in between words, but not common in English.

In chapter six, we learn about morphology, the study of forms. In linguistics, the forms of words. 

Words are made up of smaller elements, known as morphemes. There's four types of morphemes. Lexical, functional, derivational, and inflectional. They convey meaning or a grammatical function. 

Lexical and functional morphemes are free morphemes. They can stand alone as one word.

Lexical morphemes are nouns (bird), verbs (fly), adjectives (blue), and adverbs (today). They are the stem of a word, e.g. 'bird' in 'birds', 'fly' in 'flying'. They're the part of a word that conveys the principal meaning. There's exceptions to their openness. Some, typically from Latin, can't stand alone, e.g. 'ceive' in 'receive'.

Functional morphemes are articles (the), conjunctions (because), prepositions (near), and pronouns (me). 

Derivational and inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes, they can't stand alone as one word. They attach to open morphemes for grammatical purposes.

Derivational morphemes are affixes. They can change a word's meaning or grammatical category by derivation, as we learned yesterday.

Inflectional morphemes are inflections that serve grammatical functions. In English, there's 8 different types of inflections. For nouns, specify possessiveness (-‘s) and plurality (-s). For verbs, specify third person, singular, present tense (-s), present participle (-ing), past tense (-ed), past participle (-en).

I'm unsure what tense and participle means. I didn't really follow well in school, hehe. From a quick search, I think tense is a specification of the time of an action (verb), e.g. for 'happen', adding '-s' specifies its happening in present time, and adding '-ed' specifies its happened in the past time. Can you see '-ing' and '-ed' was added to happen in front of the pronoun 'it'? It takes participle form when it specifies a continuous state, present or past. 
But wait you say, what do you mean by a continuous state? Think of the difference between "it happened" vs "its happened". The first talks of an absolute time period, whereas the latter talks of a relative time period. But hold on you say, why isn't it 'happen-en' in past participle? That's because there's lots of exceptions. One must learn to dance with uncertainty it seems. But 'be' follows the rule. I'm being serious. Anyway, how have you been? Notice how time is relative here, there's no limit, in present or past time, but we may intuitively apply a limit. Everything is relative, there's infinity between 1 and 2. 1.1, 1.01, 1.001...

The last two inflections are for adjectives, to specify its comparative (-er), or superlative (-est). What's a loud sound? What's a louder sound? What's the loudest sound? 

There's exceptions to the standard rules of morphemes. Similar to how phonemes have allophones, sets of phones, morphemes have allomorphs, sets of morphs. 

Holy moly. I just had a profound realization. I'm a monkey. Okay, not exactly. But my perception is more akin to a monkey's perception, than it is for the average human. So, I'm half human, half monkey. Simplistically, practically speaking at least. I know I may sound crazy, but it explains a lot, there's something to it. 

I'm experientially (perceptually) a monkey, and intellectually (conceptually) a human. Why I act like a monkey, but think like a human. Why I seem like a human in writing, but seem like a monkey in person. To be a monkey, or to be a monk, that is the question.

You may sense what I'm getting at here. I think this is why I never understood the fascination with religion, tradition, or tales. It's starting to interest me more, on an intellectual level at least. I'll write more about this later.