Theories of Inflection and Derivation

forms of the two words are identical except for initial consonants. [s] and [z] can therefore distinguish or contrast words. They are distinctive sound in English called phonemes. Phonemes are not physical sounds. Victoria Fromkin defines a phoneme as the smallest unit of the language that distinct the meaning of words. A phoneme may create the different words and also will produce the different meaning. For example in the words bill and pill, they have different meaning because they consist of different phonemes. The word bill consists of phonemes b. I, l. While in the word pill consist of phonemes p, I, l. From the example above we can see that phoneme b and p are the distinctive sounds or phonemes that distinct between the word bill and pill. They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units of a language. One phoneme may be realized phonetically as more than one phone or phonetic segment. The different phones that are the realizations of a phoneme are called the allophones of that phoneme. To distinguish between a phoneme and its allophones, a phoneme will be signaled with slashes while allophones with bracket []. The sound in languages is divided into two general classes. The first class is the consonant while the second category is the vowel. Consonants are still categorized into two sub-classes based on places of articulation and manner of articulation. In the knowledge of English, there are certain strings of phonemes which are permissible and other are not. For example, after a consonant such as [b], [g], [k], or [p], another stop consonant is not permitted by the rules of the grammar. It is stated that no more than three sequential consonants can occur at the beginning of a word and these three are restricted to [s] + [p, t, k] + [l, r, w, y]. These constraints on sequences of segments are called phonotactic constraints. Phonetic constraints limit the possible phonological shapes of the stems and words. At their most basic, phonetic constraints determine the minimum length of content words in particular languages. For example, in Mohawk, each content word contains at least two syllables Michelson 1988, cited by Hayes 1995:47. Other languages require that content words consist of at least a heavy syllable, where heavy means that the syllable contains a long vowel, diphthong, or a vowel and a weight bearing consonant. Words in some language may also be phonemically distinguished by prosodic or suprasegmental features, such as pitch, stress, and segment duration or length. Languages in which syllables or words are contrasted by pitch are called tone languages. Intonation languages may use pitch variations to distinguish meanings of phrases and sentences. In English, words and phrases may be differentiated by stress, as in the contrast between the noun ‘pervert in which the first syllable is stressed, and the verb per’vert in which the final syllable is stressed. The relationship between the phonemic representation of words and sentences and the phonetic representation the pronunciation of these words and sentences is determined by general phonological rules. there are some of phonological rules such as assimilation rules, deletion rules, etc. Assimilation rules is the process in which a sound takes on the characteristics of a neighboring sound. There are two necessary components that define assimilation which are a sound that changes assimilating sound and the sound that causes the change the conditing sound while deletion rules is rule that delete phonemic segments in certain contexts. The example of assimilation rule : in+direct :indirect in+potent:impotent in+mature:immature

5. Theory of Word Meaning

A word, as a basic unit of the language, play important rule toward the development of any linguistic field. Rochelle Lieber defined a word as a sequence of one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. Lieber.2009:12, meaning to say, a word is a fundamental element in the term of the use of language. In the book entitled An Introduction to English Morphology Words and Their Structure . Carstairs Carstairs, 2002:5 states: “a word is not just a building-block of sentences: it’s a building-block with a meaning that is unpredictable or at least sufficiently unpredictable that learners of English, and even sometimes native speakers, may need to consult a dictionary in order to discover it.” From the statement above, we can see that the word always has its own meaning when it is used in certain sentence or any linguistic term. A word is constructed with morphemes. However, a word is not constructed only with morphemes but also with the affix. Therefore, the meaning of a word is not only affected by the meaning of morpheme but also the meaning of affix so the meaning will be unpredictable. Consulting the dictionary can be a way to find out