Vocabulary Unit

Vocabulary Unit
In this summary I am going to contrast the texts of two important linguistic: Scott Thornbury and Michael McCarthy. Both authors speak more or less about the same topics, but McCarthy´s text is significantly longer than Thornbury´s. The two start their text talking about words. Thornbury says that when we first start learning a language by learning words and he also says that wenever stop learning new words. McCarthy also speaks about words; he says that English has several hundred thousand words. He makes some questions about the vocabulary and how it is organized.
MacCarthy says that “the vocabulary of a language is primarily the word” and he extends talking about this subject. He says that a word is a freestanding item of language that has meaning by itself. Aword most of the times can be divided into morphemes and at least one morpheme in a word has to be freestanding. When it’s time to classify the words, Thornbury divides them into word classes. He mentions two important classes: Grammatical words (or function words) that is a close set because you cannot add more words into it, part of this group are prepositions, conjunctions, determiners andpronouns. The other group is made of content words these words are an open set because more words can be added to this group. Content words are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Thornbury mentions a term that McCarthy does not mention word families. He defines a word family as the group made of “the base word or root plus its inflections and its most common derivates”. After this, two moreterms come out: affixation which is the use of suffixes and prefixes. Both authors use these terms to start talking about word formation. MacCarthy calls these words derived words but Thornbury says that when the use of affixation does not change the meaning of the root it is called inflexion and when it does is called derivative. Both authors mention more or less one similar concept; McCarthytalks about compound words that are the ones which have more than one root but refer to a single concept. Thornbury on the other hand, talks about compounding, it is the combination of more than one independent words or free morphemes. Another thing he mentions is blend words which are two words blended or mixed to make a new word. For example: “brunch” from “breakfast” and “lunch”. Clipping is thelast thing he mentions in this part, it is use to shorten long words like “flu” from “influenza”.
McCarthy says that “when morphemes are combined to form words” their sound, spelling and stress may change. For example: Irregular verbs change almost completely “sing”, “sang” and “sung”. He thinks that word formation can be used to explain learners, grammatical rules or pronunciation rules and toencourage them to create new words. New creations can be already found in the language or can be non-established words. He says that “creative word-formation” can have literary value, be humorist or simply used to filling “gaps” in the language.
We can found all the different types of units they describe us in language, but there is other type of structure. McCarthy and Thornbury mention the sameconcept multi-word units which are words that are always together and we cannot separate them and keep the same meaning because they are fixed. We can call these fixed forms, idioms. Examples of idioms are “out of the blue” and “to bite the dust” we cannot change any word in these chunks without altering the sense of meaning. McCarthy takes this theme beyond; he divides idioms from being opaqueand semi-opaque. The first one, its meaning is not very clear, it has no clues to understand it; for example: “to kick the bucket” if you have never heard this idiom, you cannot guess its meaning. The second one is easier to understand like “to see the light” we can guess it has a positive meaning.
McCarthy also divides multi-word units into binomials and trinomials. As its names said are pairs...