Referral/Deferral Sounds and Structures of English

Component 1 Referral/Deferral Sounds and Structures of English
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Component 1 Referral/Deferral Sounds and Structures of English
Component One
The sentence sourced from an online dataset and which will form the basis of various analyses in this component is: ‘This girl in the red coat will put a picture of Bill on your desk before tomorrow’ (Datawhale, 2022). Argument structure denotes the simplest specification of a sentence’s semantics by illustrating the number and form of parameters linked with the lexical item as a verb. For instance, in the sentence, the girl in the red coat and a picture of Bill are semantic participants of the verb ‘put’ and they are also its primary syntactic arguments: the subject and the direct object, correspondingly. The verb put assigns theta roles to the girl in the red coat as the entity doing the action while the theme is the picture of the bill. On the other hand, the goal in the sentence is to put a picture of Bill on the desk before tomorrow morning. ‘This girl in the red coat will put a picture of Bill on your desk’ is the main clause because it does not require the extra information ‘before tomorrow’ to make sense by itself. ‘This girl in the red coat is a subordinate clause as it does not communicate a complete thought and requires 'will put a picture of Bill on your desk’ to make any sense to the reader. It is also a noun clause because it can be replaced with a noun and it would still make sense. For instance, ‘The girl in the red coat’ can be replace with she. Clauses can also help in identifying the constituents in the sentence: those sections of the sentence that can be replaced with a pronoun are units. For instance, in addition to the possibility of replacing ‘The girl in the red coat’ with with she, it is also possible to replace the section ‘girl in the red coat’ with one, ‘coat’ with one, ‘a picture of Bill’ with the pronoun it, ‘on your desk’ with it, and ‘your desk’ with it. All these sequences are constituents. The constituents of the sentence are ‘This girl in the red coat’, ‘girl in the red coat’, ‘coat’, ‘a picture of Bill’, ‘on your desk’, and ‘your desk’. Having identified the constituents in the sentence, the case assignment of the sentence using the tree structure will appear in the following manner. The constituent ‘The girl in the red coat’ is a determiner phrase that contains ‘girl in the red coat’ as well as ‘coat’ as noun phrases: ‘in’ is a preposition, ‘the’ is a determiner, and ‘red’ is an adjective. The constituent ‘a picture of Bill’ is a determiner phrase where ‘a’ is a determiner, ‘picture’ is a noun, ‘of’ is a preposition, and ‘Bill’ is a noun. The constituent ‘on your desk’ is a preposition phrase containing the other constituent ‘your desk’ as a determiner phrase and ‘on’ as a preposition. ‘Will’ indicates tense (when the goal will be attained), ‘put is the verb’, ‘before’ is a preposition, and ‘tomorrow’ is an adverb. One of the possible transformations between D- and S-structures is topicalization, where the section ‘before tomorrow’ is moved to the front of the sentence so that it reads: ‘Before tomorrow, this girl in the red coat will put a picture of Bill on your desk’. This distorted sentence is grammatically acceptable although it has a different structure. For instance, the original sentence focuses on the action of putting the picture of Bill on the desk while the distorted sentence emphasizes ‘before tomorrow’ as if it is the primary focus of interest. The topicalization of ‘before tomorrow’ results in a different sentence meaning that is slightly misleading. The X bar theoretic tree for the sentence is as follows:
Component Two
A single well-formed English sentence from the internet that will form the basis of morphological and phonological analyses is: Mrs. Drummond waved well-formed fingers tipped with flawless ovals of strawberry pink enamel (Collinsdictionary, 2022).
This sentence contains free morphemes and bound morphemes. Free morphemes refer to those morphemes that are capable of standing by themselves as single words. On the other hand, bound morphemes are those morphemes that cannot usually stand alone and are therefore fixed to another form. The free morphemes in the sentence include Drummond, with, of, strawberry, pink, and enamel: all these morphemes can be identified as separate English word forms unattached to other forms like basic nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Conversely, the bound morphemes are Mrs., waved, well-formed, fingers, tipped, flawless, and ovals. Unlike the basic word forms, these bound morphemes contained attached forms such as -ed, -s, and -less, usually referred to as affixes (prefixes and suffixes). The free morphemes contained in the sentence can be categorized into two groups: lexical morphemes and functional morphemes. Lexical morphemes are a set of common nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that contain the content of the meaning conveyed by the words. Examples include tiger, car, ball, sing, large, quick, house, look, yellow, break, sincere, and etcetera.
New lexical morphemes can be integrated into the language quite effortlessly and they are therefore considered to be an open category of words. On the other hand, functional morphemes are basically the functional words of a language such as articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and prepositions. It is rare to integrate new functional morphemes into a language and therefore this category is generally labeled as a closed class of words. In the same manner that free morphemes can be categorized into two groups, bound morphemes can be classified into derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes. Derivational morphemes are bound morphemes whose affixes turn them into new words or words with dissimilar grammatical meanings from the basic word form. For instance, the addition of the affix -less to the verb care changes the latter into the adjective careless. The adjective good is turned into the noun goodness after the addition of the affix -ness or the verb fear is turned into the adjective fearful after the addition of the affix -ful.
On the other hand, inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes that contain affixes that do not result in new words but instead serve to show features of the grammatical function of the word. Inflectional morphemes indicate if a word is singular or plural, past tense or not, or even if the word is a possessive or comparative noun. For instance, the affix -s in the word Lora's indicates possessiveness while in the word brothers it shows the plural word for brother. The affix -en indicates the past participle tense while the affix -ing marks the present participle tense. Consequently, the morphological analysis of the sentence, Mrs. Drummond waved well-formed fingers tipped with flawless ovals of strawberry pink enamel, can be shown as follows:
Mrs. – Inflectional morpheme
Drummond – Lexical morpheme
wave – Lexical morpheme
ed – Inflectional morpheme
well – Lexical morpheme
form – Lexical morpheme
ed – Inflectional morpheme
finger – Lexical morpheme
s – Inflectional morpheme
tip – Lexical morpheme
ed – Inflectional morpheme
with – Functional morpheme
flaw – Lexical morpheme
less – Derivational morpheme
oval – Lexical morpheme
s – Inflectional morpheme
of – Functional morpheme
strawberry – Lexical morpheme
pink – Lexical morpheme
enamel – Lexical morpheme
The phonological analysis of this sentence will begin by examining if the sounds contained in the sentence words are phenomes or allophones. The process of identifying if the sounds are different phenomes or different allophones involves determining the existence of minimal pairs. There are no pairs of words or phrases in the sentence that differ in only one phonological element and therefore there are no minimal pairs. This means that the sounds in the sentence words are likely to be allophones of the same phenome. However, the sentence, Mrs. Drummond waved well-formed fingers tipped with flawless ovals of strawberry pink enamel, contains many phones of interest although, for simplicity, the most occurring phones will be chosen. The phonetic transcriptions of the words contained in the sentence are: ˈmɪsɪz, ˈdrʌmənd, weɪvd, wɛl-fɔrmd, ˈfɪŋgərz, tɪpt, wɪð, flɔləs, ˈoʊvəlz, ʌv, ˈstrɔˌbɛri, pɪŋk, and ɪˈnæməl. The
phones of interest are /m/ and /n/. The first phone /m/ is a bilabial nasal sound that is produced by using both lips so that the air comes out of the nose: the flow of the air through the mouth is wholly restricted. It is also a voiced sound in that one must use vocal chords. The second phone /n/ is an alveolar nasal sound that is produced by putting th...