Vocabulary and semantics - Essay Example

Hence the phrase, flea market Today, the term is used to describe rent spaces for traders dealing in used goods that are of low quality and at low prices. Morphology Morphology is the study of word structure. Morphology is the process of identifying, analyzing and describing the structures of a language’s morphemes and other linguistic units, such as root words, parts of speech and intonation or stress. The term “flea market” is made up of two words; flea and market, which are the morphemes to this phrase.

A morpheme is the smallest single unit in the grammar of a language and its study is called morphology. A morpheme may not be a word as a morpheme has to stand on its own. There are free and bound morphemes. A free morpheme is a single unit that stands on its own and has meaning, whereas a bound morpheme appear as only parts of words, always supported by the root or by another bound morpheme. The term “flea market” is made up of two free morphemes as the word “flea” can stand on its own and still have meaning and also the word “market” has meaning on its own. . The phrase “flea market” can also be thought to be a place inhabited by dirty traders.

A collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (Durkin, 2009). A collocation can be said to be two or more words that often go together, and may sound correct to a native speaker but be unnatural and sound wrong. The term “flea market” sounds correct to a native speaker but may be very disturbing to a person, who is just learning the language, as that a person can loosely interpret it to be a place where fleas are sold. Semantic relationships Semantics is the study of meanings; the phrase “flea market” can be taken literally to mean a place where fleas are sold, or we can take the meaning where it denotes a place where second-hand items are sold.

There are different semantic relationship types, and they include; Synonyms Synonyms are words that mean exactly the same. According to the Macmillan dictionary, the term “flea” is synonymous to aphid, beetle and black widow, as all are types of insects (Hurford, 1996). The term “market” is synonymous to shop, as both are places where goods are traded. The phrase “flea market” is synonymous to yard sale. Antonyms Antonyms are words pairs whose meanings are opposite and lie in a continuous spectrum.

The term “flea” has no antonym as there are so many things and animals that are opposites of insects. The term “market” is also broad as it involved buying and selling which are opposites of each other. As a modern place of trade dealing in mostly new items, a mall can be used as an antonym to a flea market. Pragmatic usage Pragmatics is a minor field of linguistics and studies ways how context contributes to the