Morphology Materials

1. 2.5 Non-words with
Unpredictable Meanings

2. It is possible for a linguistics item
to be a basic building-block of
syntax. The item is clearly not itself
a sentence or a phrase and yet to
have a meaning that is predictable.
*Syntax is the study of the description of the classes
of word.

3. • Considering these 2 sentences :
1. I keep notes on all my expenditure.
2. I keep tabs on all my expenditure.
 Native speakers will instinctively interpret keep
tabs on as a single unit which has meaning pay
close attention to ,or monitor carefully.
Keep tabs on an idiom
• It consist of three (3) words.
• It functions as a single unit semantically

4. Idioms
 Idiom is a combination of words that have
meaning owing to its common usage.
Idiom are enormously various in length,
structure and function.
verb (ex. :kick the bucket (die) )
Idioms
noun (ex. :dark horse (competitor whose
strength is unknown))

5.  Akin to idioms, but distinguishable from them , are
phrases in which individual words have
collocationally restricted meanings.
• Consider the following phrases :
1. White wine
2. White coffee
3. White noise
4. White man
 In a broad sense they may count as idiomatic, because the
meaning that white has in them is not usual meaning; rather,
when collocated with wine, coffee, noise and man.

6. • If a typical idiom is a phrase, then a word with
collocationally restricted meaning is smaller
than a typical idiom. It provokes the question
whether there are linguistic item with
unpredictable meaning that are larger than
phrases.
The answer is yes , because many proverbs
fall into this category.
 A proverb is a traditional saying, syntactically a sentence,
whose conventional interpretation differs from what is
suggested by the literal meaning of the words it contains.

7. Example :
1. It’s no use crying over spilt milk.
(After an accident one should look to the future, rather than
waste time wishing the accident had not happened.)
 Spilling milk is a kind of accident, but in the proverb
at the sentence above, it is used metaphorically to
stand for any accident.
What is important about proverbs is that they
constitute a further example of a linguistic unit
whose use and meaning are in some degree
unpredictable , but which is larger than a word.