MORPHOLOGY
Words and their parts
Objectives
To introduce key concepts in the study of complex word analysis
To provide a description of some of the morphological phenomena
To illustrate methods used to derive and support linguistic generalizations about word structure
What is a word?
The task of any language learner, including young children acquiring their language, is to figure out how to segment and analyze the talking noise around them into meaningful units – namely, words and their meaningful parts
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: “word is the smallest independent unit of language, or one that can be separated from other such units in an utterance”
What is a word?
Words are “usually separated by spaces in writing and distinguished phonologically, as by accent”
Chinese doesn’t insert spaces between words in writing
People who can’t read and speakers of languages without writing systems know what words are in their languages
What is a word?
Phonology –an important role in identifying the boundaries bewteen words
A. They walked past a GREENhouseB. They walked past a green HOUSE
What is a word? Examples
Is phonology enough to disambiguate a word?
A. Tea’s good for you.B. That shop sells teas from around the
world.C. I asked him not to tease the cat.
What is a word?
Webster: words are “typically thought of as representing an indivisible concept, action, or feeling, or as having a single referent”
Tease – different referent than teasTeas: -s – not an independent word – must be
attached directly to an independent word whose basic meaning it is modifying (plural)
Teas is one word, the –s ending contributes some additional information to its meaning
What is a word?
Word – meaning, grammar, phonologyWord – the smallest grammatically
independent unit of languageSigns – arbitrary (e.g. water, acqua, eau,
voda, Wasser, mizu (Jap.)
What is a word?
The words of one’s language make up its lexicon
Lexicon – a kind of mental dictionary where words are stored
What is a word?
Each word: several kinds of information (e.g. sleep)
How it is pronounced /sli:p/What it meansGrammatical contexts in which the word can
be used: sleep – intransitive verb; can be found in compound words (e.g. sleepwalking and in idioms e.g. let sleeping dogs lie)
Irregular: sleep/slept
What is a word?
New words – continutally addedMeanings might change over time
What is a word?
Study of word formation - not as much about the study of existing, listed dictionary words but the study of possible words in one’s language and the mental rules for constructing and understanding them
Not all words are listed in the lexicon because the number of possible words is infinite
Morphology
Morphology describes the constituent parts of words, what they mean and how they may (and may not) be combined in the world’s languages
The pairing of meaning with a form applies to whole words, like sleep, as well as to parts of words like the ‘past’ meaning associated with the ending -ed
Morphology
Morphology applies within words (cat > cats) but it also applies across words, as when we alter the form of one word so that some part of it matches, or agrees with, some feature of another word:
A. That cat sleeps all day.B. Those cats sleep all day.
Morphology
All languages need a way to signal grammatical roles such as subject and direct object
A. Brutus killed CaesarB. Caesar killed BrutusLat.Brutus Caesarem occidit.Caesarem occidit BrutusOccidit Caesarem Brutus.
Morphemes
Morphemes – the smallest units of language that combine both a form and a meaning
Words – made up of morphemesSimple words – single morpheme (cat)Complex words – two or more morphemes
(cats; unfriendly)
Morphemes
Lexical (content words, open-class words)Grammatical (function words, closed-class
words)
Lexical morphemes (lexemes)
Lexical m. (lexemes): refer to things, qualities and actions
Nouns (N), verbs (V), adjectives (A)Simple lexemes may serve as the root of
more complex words
Grammatical morphemes
The glue that holds the lexemes in a sentence together, shows their relations to each other, and also helps identify referents within a particular conversational context
E.g. Their maniacal little dog attempted to bite the mailman.
Morphemes
Both lexemes and grammatical morphemes can be either free or bound
Bound morphemes must be attached either to a root or another morpheme (-ed, -s; -al); free morphemes can stand alone (dog, bite)
Morphemes
A morpheme performing a particular grammatical function may be free in one language and bound in another (e.g. English infinitive marker to (to win) – a free m.; French gagner: gagn- + -er)
Can you identify the morphemes?
The musicians reconsidered their director’s unusual proposal.
Neologisms: how are new words created?
Acronyms: AIDS < acquired immunity deficiency syndrome
Alphabetic abbreviations: CD< compact disk
Clippings: prof < professorBlends: camcorder < camera + recorderGenerified words: xerox (<the name of the
corporation that produces photocopying machines)
Proper nouns (guillotine – named after its inventor, Dr. Joseph Guillotin)
Neologisms: how are new words created?
Borrowings: Direct (avocado – Aztec word)Borrowings: Indirect
(grattacielo<skyscraper)Changing the meaning of words
Affixation
Most languages use affixing to indicate grammatical information about a word or its relation to other words
Any form an affix attaches to - a base (or a stem)
Affixes which attach to the left, or front, of a base – prefixes
The simplest way to build word structure – to add suffixes or prefixes to derive a more complex word (e.g. uninterpretability)
Other types of affixation
Infix – an affix that is inserted inside a lexical root
(Croatian balati – balavati; prokuhati < prokuhavati)
Circumfixing – a two-part or discontinuous morpheme surrounds a root (e.g. past participles in German: ge-kann-t (‘known’): a one-to-one correspondence between a morpheme and a grammatical function
Root change: Ablaut and suppletion
Ablaut – a grammatical change by substituting one vowel for another in a lexical root: fall fell; give gave
Suppletion – nearly the entire root appears to have been replaced by a completely different form, leaving only the original root onsets: catch caught
Go went - total suppletion – went shares nothing at all with go
Tone and stress
Some languages use changes in syllable stress to indicate grammatical information
Verb Nouncon’vict ‘convictper’mit ‘permit
Two purposes of morphology: derivation and inflection
Derivational morphology creates new lexemes from existing ones, often with a change in meaning
Inflectional morphology adds grammatical information to a lexeme in accordance with the particular syntactic requirements of a language
Derivation and inflection often co-occur within the same word (e.g. dehumidifiers: 3 derivational operations and 1 inflectional operation
(humid – humidify – dehumidify – dehumidifier – dehumidifiers)
Derivation
Derivational affixes German: erb-lich (‘hereditary’)French faibl-esse (‘weakness’)English sing-erOften: a category change: in German, -ung
applies to verbs to derive a noun indicating a result (zerstör- ‘destroy’ > Zerstörung ‘destruction’)
Derivation
Not all affixes can attach to any root: -er can only attach to verbs (to write > writer), -ist attaches also to nouns or adjectives (to type > typist) , -ian attaches only to nouns, especially of Greek origin (politician)
Some affixes – very productive (-able: read>readable))
Some occur in only a small number of words and are not productive: -dom (kingdom, wisdom, boredom)
The meaning of complex words
readable - well written, good styleA bill is payable – doesn’t mean that it can be
paid but it must be payedIf a theory is questionable, it doesn’t mean
that it can be questioned but that it is dubious and suspect
Meanings of many complex words – not merely composites of the meanings of their parts (semantic drift)
Compounding
Concatenation of two or more lexemes to form a new lexeme
English: greenhouse, moonlight, download
Compounding: writing conventions
Often, the hyphen is used when a compound has been recently created (black-board)
When it has gained a certain currency or permanence, spelled without a hyphen (black board)
Spelled as one word (blackboard)
Inflection
PersonGenderCaseTenseAspectMood
Person
Distinguishes entities referred to in an utterance
1st person: speaker2nd person: addressee3rd person: a default category that refers to
everything elsePerson – often combined with number
Person
Agreement relations (most often S – V agreement)
Languages which distinguish grammatical persons require that a verb agree with its subject’s person feature, and occasionally with that of its object as well
Subject-verb agreement helps to indicate which noun in a sentence is “doing” what; valuable in languages with free word order; English: fixed word order – only 1 inflectional agreement marker: 3sg -s
Number
A grammatical property of nounsSingular – plural (some languages also dual)Uncountable nouns cannot be pluralized
(abstract nouns: carelessness, peace; non-individual material: milk, rice); a mass noun in one language may be countable in another: furniture – meuble/meubles
Gender
Genus ‘kind, sort’Gender agreement helps to indicate which
adjectives, determiners etc. are associated with a particular noun
In languages that mark grammatical gender, every noun is assigned to a class
Masculine, feminine, neuterSometimes: gender indicated on the noun itself:
Sp. amigo – amiga; forms of the indefinite article un/una and the adjective americano/a agree with the gender of the noun
Gender
In Bantu languages: 10-20 noun classes (humanness, sex, animacy, body parts, size, shape)
A noun acquires its gender either on the basis of its meaning or form
Case
One of the most important functions of morphology is to distinguish the roles played by the various participants in an event
Case indicates a noun’s relation to some other element in a clause or phrase
Case marking – the relation of the noun to the verb (as its subject, direct or indirect object) or to another noun (possessive or locational relation)
Tense
All human languages have ways for locating situations in time –e.g. through the use of lexical expressions (yesterday, today, tomorrow);
also: tense used to locate an event or state in relation to a point in time
In simple tenses (past, present, future), the reference point is “now”, at the moment of speaking
English – 2 tenses: past and non-past
Aspect
Encodes whether an action is (or was) completed, ongoing, repeated (iterative) or habitual:
John is painting the kitchen.John was painting the kitchen.John painted the kitchen.
Mood
A grammatical category that expresses the speaker’s belief, opinion, or attitude about the content of an utterance
Although often morphologically marked on verbs, mood really applies to entire clauses, to indicate whether the speaker thinks a proposition is true, or likely, or doubtful, or is something he wonders about, or hopes or wishes for
Mood
Indicative - used for making declarative assertions
Interrogative – asking questionsImperative – giving commandsSubjunctive – wishes, thoughts, hopes, doubts
etc.Conditional – expresses what one would or
should do
Inflectional morphology
Noun inflectional suffixesPlural marker –s (girl – girls)Possessive marker ‘s (Mary – Mary’s)Verb inflectional suffixes3rd person present singular marker –s (bake
– bakes)Past tense marker –ed (wait – waited)Progressive marker –ing (sing – singing)
Inflectional morphology
Adjective inflectional suffixesComparative marker –er (nicer)Superlative marker –est (the nicest)
Inflectional vs. Derivational morphology
Inflectional affixes never change the category of the base morpheme
Inflectional suffixes follow derivational suffixes (modernize – modernizes)
Derivational suffixes create new base forms (stems) that other derivational or inflectional affixes can attach to
Semantic relations: inflectional affixes – the meaning of the morpheme and the meaning of the base + affix is regular (tree – trees); derivational affixes: the relation between the meaning of the base morpheme and the meaning of the base + affix – unpredictable (read – readable)
Inflectional suffixes – paradigms (Lat. amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant)
Summary
Morphology – concerned with the relation between form and meaning
The basic unit that combines form and meaning – morpheme
Lexemes (N, V, A)– serve as the root for additional morphological operations
Grammatical morphemes signal a grammatical function
Phonetic forms of morphemes can vary systematically; these variant forms - allomorphs
Summary
Morphological operations: affixation, reduplication, ablaut, suppletion, compounding
Two major functions: derivation and inflection
Derivational morphology creates new lexemes from existing ones, with a change in a word’s lexical category or meaning
Inflectional morphology adds grammatical information to a lexeme: person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, mood
Key terms
AblautAffixAgreementAllomorphanaphoraAspectBaseCaseCompoundderivation
Key terms
GenderInflectionLexemeLexiconMoodMorphememorphology
Key terms
NumberParadigmPersonPrefixReduplicationRootStemsuffix
Key terms
SuppletionTenseWordZero derivation