xviii

4.
SMALL CAPITALS
Small capitals are used for technical terms when first introduced and occasionally thereafter to highlight
their technical sense.
 Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1
WHY STUDY WORDS?
Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would not give up words for
anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of words. Communicating our joys, fears, opinions,
fantasies, wishes, requests, demands, feelings—and the occasional threat or insult—is a very important
aspect of being human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things we
want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway—even when
we know that what we are saying is totally unimportant. We love chitchat and find silent encounters
awkward, or even oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.
It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind’s most valuable single possession. It
is language that sets us apart from our biologically close relatives, the great primates. (I would imagine that
many a chimp or gorilla would give an arm and a leg for a few words—but we will probably never know
because they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most of us take words (and more generally language) for
granted. We cannot discuss words with anything like the competence with which we can discuss fashion,
films or football.
We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is intended to make explicit
some of the things that we know subconsciously about words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and
structure of English words. It addresses the question ‘what sorts of things do people need to know about
English words in order to use them in speech?’ It is intended to increase the degree of sophistication with
which you think about words. It is designed to give you a theoretical grasp of English word-formation, the
sources of English vocabulary and the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind.
I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the enrichment of your
vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very practical way, your awareness of the relationship between
words. You will be equipped with the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words and to
see in a new light the underlying structural patterns in many familiar words which you have not previously
stopped to think about analytically.
For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An understanding of the nature of
words provides us with a key that opens the door to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of
language in general. Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they impinge
on every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the ramifications of the fact that words are
complex and multi-faceted entities whose structure and use interacts with the other modules of the grammar
2 ENGLISH WORDS

such as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words in speech, SYNTAX, the
study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the study of meaning in language.
In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access various types of information
from the word-store which we all carry around with us in the MENTAL LEXICON or DICTIONARY that
is tucked away in the mind. We need to know:

[1.1]
(i) its shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/frg/ which enables us to pronounce it, and its
ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION frog, if we are literate and know how to spell it (see the Key to
symbols used on page xix);
(ii) its grammatical properties, e.g. it is a noun and it is countable—so you can have one frog and two frogs;
(iii) its meaning.

But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing about the form of
words that would enable anyone to work out their meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these
simply has to be listed in the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship between
a LINGUISTIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words
to refer to this small tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouille. In Malay they call it katak and
in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others to the job of referring to this small
reptile.
And of course, within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can be associated with any
meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning association, they have a kosher word. For
instance, convenience originally meant ‘suitability’ or ‘commodiousness’ but in the middle of the nineteenth
century a new meaning of ‘toilet’ was assigned to it and people began to talk of ‘a public convenience’. In
the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new meaning of ‘easy to use, designed for hassle-free use’
as in convenience food.
We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean whatever we want them to mean.
Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out. The only thing missing from his analysis is the social dimension.
Any arbitrary meaning assigned to a word needs to be accepted by the speech community which uses the
language. Obviously, language would not be much use as a means of communication if each individual
language user assigned a private meaning to each word which other users of the language did not recognise.
Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the lesson on the nature of language that Humpty Dumpty
gave to Alice (see overleaf).
Let us now consider one further example. All competent speakers of English know that you can add -s to
a noun to indicate that it refers to more than one entity. So, you say cat when referring to one and cats if
there is more than one. If you encountered in the blank in [1.2a] an unfamiliar word like splet (which I have
just made up), you would automatically know from the context that it must have the plural form splets in
this position since it is specified as plural by all. Further, you would know that the plural of splet must be splets
(rather than spletren by analogy to children or spleti by analogy to stimuli). You know that the majority of
nouns form their plural by adding the regular plural suffix or ending -s. You always add -s unless express
instructions are given to do otherwise. There is no need to memorise separately the plural form of most
nouns. All we need is to know the rule that says ‘add -s for plural’. So, without any hesitation, you suffix -s
to obtain the plural form splets in [1.2b]: