Linguistica

Lingüística
Ibarroule Natalia
Practical Assignment Nº 3

2. How does syntax differ from inflection and from morphology?

Syntax and inflection are complementary and constitute theprincipal part of what we are calling grammar jointly, they determine the grammaticality of sentences: the syntax, by specifying how lexemes combine with one another in particular constructions; theinflectional rules, by specifying by which of the forms of the lexeme should occur in one construction rather than another. The distinction between syntax and morphology, according to which syntaxdeals with the distribution of words (i.e. word-forms) and morphology with their internal grammatical structure is very similar to the traditional distinction between syntax and inflection, but itdiffers from it in two respects: first morphology includes not only inflection, but also derivation; it handles both inflection and derivation by means of rules operating upon the same basicunits – morphemes.

3. Distinguish clearly between the base-form and the citation-form of a lexeme.

The base-form is that form, if any, from which all the other forms of the lexeme can bederived by the morphological rules of the language. The citation-form is the form that is employed to refer to the lexeme; it is also the form that is used for the alphabetical listing of lexemes in aconventional dictionary.

4. Morphemes are sometimes defined as minimal meaningful units. How does this definition differ from the one given in the text?

This definition differ from the onegiven in the text because in the text, it is said that syntax became the study of the distribution of morphemes (rather than of word-forms); and word-forms were recognized, not as purelysyntactic units, but as units that could serve (with the appropriate prosodic contour) as minimal utterances and, in certain languages, as the domain of certain suprasegmental phonological features.