2015م - 1444هـ
Morphology: The

Words of Language

By words the mind is winged.



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Every speaker of every language knows tens of thousands of words. Unabridged

dictionaries of English contain nearly 500,000 entries, but most

speakers don’t know all of these words. It has been estimated that a child

of six knows as many as 13,000 words and the average high school graduate

about 60,000. A college graduate presumably knows many more than that,

but whatever our level of education, we learn new words throughout our lives,

such as the many words in this book that you will learn for the first time.

Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a component

of our mental grammars, but one can learn thousands of words in a

language and still not know the language. Anyone who has tried to communicate

in a foreign country by merely using a dictionary knows this is true. On

the other hand, without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts

through language or understand the thoughts of others.

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Morphology: The

Words of Language

By words the mind is winged.

ARISTOPHANES (450 BCE–388 BCE)

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right

words . . . the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

MARK TWAIN