Imagine walking

Imagine walking into a dance club and feeling like you are floating through the door and hovering over the crowd. As you enter the dance floor the music and the lights slam your senses and send your body into overload. The music sounds more real, as if it was inside your head playing only for you. The lights are unbelieveably bright and they seem to hypnotize you. You step on the dance floor and the crowd swallows you in. Your body begins to move to the music without you even thinking about it. The music seems to be perfect and the crown around seems to be in perfect harmony with you and the music and lights. You dance with many people and you seem to have the perfect moves to go with any song that is played. Your mouth in constantly dry and you find yourself drinking gallons of water to keep from dehydrating. You dance all night long, loving every minute of your roll. Your senses are in a state of complete magnification and you love every minute of it. This is ECS! There is a new drug taking over in this millennium. This drug is different than drugs of the past. It is used by the younger generation, by clubbers, and generally by young people looking for a good time and a great high. Ecstasy has changed the way we look at drugs. Its not physically addictive and for the most part it is only used when people go out, to a party or a dance club. This drug is very popular and it has many people worried. No one really knows what it does to the body yet, and there are always rumors of death from taking these pills. Throughout this paper I will give the facts on ecstasy, its role in society, and its effects on human body. First off Im going to tell what ecstasy really is. The chemical makeup of ecstasy is, (C11H15NO2). The name for this compound is Methylenedioxy Methamphetamine or MDMA. One of the most challenging things that law enforcement is facing is the fact that this drug is easy to make and distribute. ...

Definition and Examples of Inflectional Morphology

Definition and Examples of Inflectional Morphology Inflectional morphology is  the study of the processes (such as affixation and vowel change) that distinguish the forms of words in certain grammatical categories. In comparison to many other languages, the inflectional system of Modern English is fairly limited.   Inflectional  morphology is customarily distinguished from derivational morphology (or word formation). As A.Y. Aikhenvald points out, Derivational morphology results in the creation of a new word with a new meaning. In contrast, inflectional morphology involves an obligatory grammatical specification characteristic of a word class (Typological Distinctions in Word-Formation in Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 2007). This distinction, however, is not always clear-cut. Examples and Observations Inflectional Categories and Derivational CatgeoriesThe prototypical inflectional categories include number, tense, person, case, gender, and others, all of which usually produce different forms of the same word rather than different words. Thus leaf and leaves, or write and writes, or run and ran are not given separate headwords in dictionaries. Derivational categories, in contrast, do form separate words, so that leaflet, writer, and rerun will figure as separate words in dictionaries. In addition, inflectional categories do not, in general, alter the basic meaning expressed by a word; they merely add specifications to a word or emphasize certain aspects of its meaning. Leaves, for instance, has the same basic meaning as leaf, but adds to this the specification of multiple exemplars of leaves. Derived words, by contrast, generally denote different concepts from their base: leaflet refers to different things from leaf, and the noun writer calls up a somewhat different concept from th e verb to write.That said, finding a watertight cross-linguistic definition of inflectional which will let us classify every morphological category as either inflectional or derivational is not easy. . . . [W]e define inflection as those categories of morphology that are regularly responsive to the grammatical environment in which they are expressed. Inflection differs from derivation in that derivation is a lexical matter in which choices are independent of the grammatical environment.​(Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols, Inflectional Morphology. Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 2nd ed., edited by Timothy Shopen. Cambridge University Press, 2007) Dictionaries and Inflectional Morphology[I]t is not correct to say that dictionaries never have anything to say about inflectional morphology. This is because there are two reasons why a word form such as pianists does not have to be listed, and these reasons are interdependent. The first is that, once we know that an English word is a noun denoting a kind of thing that can be counted (if the noun is pianist or cat, perhaps, but not astonishment or rice), then we can be confident that it will mean simply more than one X, whatever X may be. The second reason is that, unless otherwise specified, we can be confident that the plural form of any countable noun will be formed by adding to the singular form the suffix -s (or rather, the appropriate allomorph of this suffix); in other words, suffixing -s is the regular method of forming plurals.That qualification unless otherwise specified is crucial, however. Any native speaker of English, after a moments thought, should be able to think of at least two or three nouns that form their plural in some other way than by adding -s: for example, child has the plural form children, tooth has the plural teeth, and man has the plural men. The complete list of such nouns in English is not long, but it includes some that are extremely common. What this means for the dictionary entries for child, tooth, man and the others is that, although nothing has to be said about either the fact that these nouns possess a plural form or about what it means, something does have to be said about how the plural is formed.(Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure. Edinburgh University Press, 2002) Eight Regular Morphological InflectionsThere are eight regular morphological inflections, or grammatically marked forms, that English words can take: plural, possessive, third-person singular present tense, past tense, present participle, past participle, comparative degree, and superlative degree. Most have phonologically sensitive realizations. . . .Modern English has relatively few morphological inflections in comparison with Old English or with other European languages. The inflections and word-class clues that do remain help the listener process incoming language.(Marianne Celce-Murcia, Donna M. Brinton, and Janet M. Goodwin, Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge University Press, 1996)Irregular Inflectional MorphologyThe so-called irregular inflectional morphology or morphological processes (such as internal vowel change or ablaut (sing, sang, sung)) today represent limited historical remnants of former grammatical inflectional systems which were probably semantically based and are now acquired lexically for frequently used lexical items rather than as grammatical systems (Tobin 1993:Ch. 12).​(Yishai Tobin, Phonology as Human Behavior: Inflectional Systems in English. Advances in Functional Linguistics: Columbia School Beyond Its Origins, ed. by Joseph Davis, Radmila J. Gorup, and Nancy Stern. John Benjamins, 2006)