Final Product - Samoan Language

SLS418-Podcast

Keeping up in class

WOW!  Very informal to start off a sentence/ paragraph like that, but I just wanted to express my emotion after linguistics class this morning.  Let me just remind myself and others to which this applies: "reading the material before hand helps you to keep up with the class discussions.  No ifs, ands or buts; just the fact of life".  Today we continued our discussion from Tuesday on morphology.  We talked a little bit about the different types of transformations occurring with the addition of a morpheme or morphemes to the beginning or the end of a root word.  Processes such as suppletion, cliticization, reduplication etc.  To be continued...  I have to download my Quest Atlantis application.

LING 320 Reflection

Today we talked about morphemes - the smallest unit of meaning within a word.  We first discussed some of the problematic issues with what constitutes a word itself such as the orthography:  in Chinese and Japanese kanji, do individual characters represent a single word or a string/series of words.  In talking about morphology, the study of the form and function of words, we also discussed the types of morphemes there are in the English language.  There are bound morphemes, which are meaningless unless attached to a root or base word and then there are independent or free morphemes - words in the simplest form and have meaning.  In other words, they can't be broken down further.  There are also things called affixes: suffix (appear at the end of a word), prefix (appear before a word) and infix (there is only one in the English language and is considered slang). 

Today I also received my midterm results.  Not as bad as I expected, but I hope to do better on the next one.  The promise after today is: to do better than yesterday.