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A word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made with suffixes and prefixes [1] plus its cognates, i.e. all words that have a common etymological origin, some of which even native speakers don't recognize as being related (e.g. "wrought (iron)" and "work(ed)"). [2]
A word sum shows how a word is built. [10] [11] A word sum is a "necessary tool to allow falsification of hypotheses of orthographic morphological structure."[3] [6]The following are examples of word sums:
[2] [3] The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes.
It is claimed that 70 grammatical words constitute 50% of the communicatives sentence, [12] [13] while 3,680 words make about 95~98% of coverage. [14] A list of 3,000 frequent words is available. [15] The French Ministry of the Education also provide a ranked list of the 1,500 most frequent word families, provided by the lexicologue Étienne ...
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [22] [23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...
A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to the vowels or to the consonants of the root word. For example unhappy, happily, and unhappily are all derivatives of the root word happy.
Grammatical categories are indicated by word order (for example, inversion of verb and subject for interrogative sentences) or by bringing in additional words (for example, a word for "some" or "many" instead of a plural inflection like English -s). Individual words carry a general meaning (root concept); nuances are expressed by other words.
For example, the negating prefix un-is more productive in English than the alternative in-; both of them occur in established words (such as unusual and inaccessible), but faced with a new word which does not have an established negation, a native speaker is more likely to create a novel form with un-than with in-. The same thing happens with ...