Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

‘Language is nothing but a set of human habits, the purpose of which is

to give expression to thoughts and feelings, and especially to impart,

announce them to others.

As with other habits it is not to be expected that they should be

perfectly consistent (…)

Otto Jaspersen’s ‘Essentials of English Grammar’

‘Language is a body of words and systems for their use common to a

people of the same community or nation (…); it is communication by voice,

using arbitrary symbols in conventional meanings (…);

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

‘A language is a system of communication which consists of a set of sounds

and written symbols which are used by the people of a particular country or

region for talking or writing in (…)

Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary

‘Language is human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas,

feelings, and desires by means of a system of sound symbols.’

OUP Dictionary of Current English

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

PHONOLOGICAL LEVEL GRAMMATICAL LEVEL

SEMANTIC LEVEL

Morphological

sub-level

Syntactic

sub-levelPhoneme Morpheme Word Phrase Clause Sentence Lexeme

LINGUSTIC UNITS

GRAMMATICAL UNITSLINGUISTIC

UNITS

Linguistics

Linguistics (also called philology) is the science that studies language. There are

applied l., sociolinguistics, theoretical l., computational l., historical l., theoretical, etc.

Language strata (levels):

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Linguistics

Linguistic units:

• Phonemehas no meaning; it is the formal representation of a sound and it is consisted of the distinctive features (kill/kiss – l/s); in the written form of the language it is represented by one or more letters; it belongs to the phonological level of description.

• Lexemeis an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. It is the so-called ‘dictionary word’.

e.g. go consists of words: go, goes, going, went, gone. All these different words represent only one lexeme. It belongs to the semantic level of description.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Morphology

• is a sub-branch of linguistics which deals with the internal structure of words.

• The elementary unit of analysis in morphology is a morpheme and the highest in hierarchy is a word.

• The term ‘morphology’ derives from the Greek words morphe meaning ‘form’ and logia meaning ‘reasoning, learning’, so morphology would mean ‘the study of form’.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Inflectional m.

MORPHOLOGY

Derivational m. (Word-formation)

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Morphology

Morphology is traditionally divided into:

• INFLECTIONAL MorphologyInflection is the process which creates word-forms of a lexeme (and not a new lexeme), it does not change the part of speech of the input word, it has a regular meaning (so that it can be formulated in an algorithmic way) and which is fully productive (with possible minor exceptions) and highly generalized.

• DERIVATIONAL Morphology (WORD-FORMATION)Derivation is the word-forming process that results in the formation of new words by affixation. The output word is called a derived word.Word-form is a form which is an orthographic or phonological representation of a lexeme. The word-forms: do, does, doing, did, done realize and represent the lexeme DO.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Morphology

MORPHEMEis the smallest semantically meaningful unit of any language. According to the position it takes, a morpheme can be:

• a base (or stem; it is free and can stand alone (boy, toy, dog, etc.))

• an affix (which is bound and cannot stand alone (boy’s, toys).

Affixes are divided into:• Prefixes (placed in front of the base (stem) (im-possible)• Infixes (placed inside the base or stem (there are two common IE infixes:

-m-, -n- hidden in many English words: stand/stood, climb/cliff, etc. They have been unproductive for ages)

• Suffixes (placed behind the base or stem (work-er, good-ness))

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Morphology

The meaning of a morpheme can be lexical and grammatical, so all morphemes can be divided in two fundamental groups:

• LEXICAL

• INFLECTIONAL

Lexical morphemes:

water (H2O), moon (a celestial body which moves round the Earth once in a month), ‘pre-‘ in ‘pretested’ (before), ‘-er’ in ‘worker’, etc.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

MorphologyInflective m:- s1 in “boys” (plural, common case)- s2 in “boy’s” (singular, possessive case)- s3 in “works” (person: 3rd, tense – Simple Present Tense, voice – active,

aspect – indefinite, mood – indicative)- ing in “working” (The Present Participle and Gerund)- ed1 in “worked” (tense: Simple Past, voice (stanje) – active, aspect (vid) –

indefinite, mood (način)- indicative, no formal indication of person and number)- ed2 in “worked” (The Past Participle)- er in “taller” (the comparative degree)- est in “tallest” (the superlative degree)Unproductive: - en1 in “oxen” (plural, common case, = -s1) - en2 in “taken” (The Past Participle, = -ed2) - ren in “children” (plural, common case, = -s1)

- O in “deer, put etc.” (-O, = -s1, -ed1, -ed2)

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Contrastiveness

Contrastiveness (Contrastive Analysis) is a detailed synchronic comparison of the structure of a native language and a target language. (see WWE, p.114)

At the level of lexis, contrastive analysis aims at discovering the features of sameness and difference in the semantic structure of correlated words in a pair of languages which are contrasted or in a pair of variants (dialect, register, style) within one and the same language.

Contrastive analysis is based upon two basic principles on which language is based: the principle of structure and the principle of contrastiveness.

e.g. Sat (srp.) – watch, clock

Morphology of the English Language

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Minimal Pairs

Two words identical in all respects but one. (see WWE, p.111)

e.g. bottle-washer (purpose) bottle-washer (agentive)folding-machine (agentive) folding-door (instrumental)

The semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes is referred to as differential meaning.

candle-lighter (agentive) candle-lighter (instrumental)

Morphology of the English Language

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Paradigm

Paradigm is a set of language forms (words or morphemes) which are possible alternatives at every point of a selection axis of language structure. (see WWE. p.155).

e.g. go, goes, going, get, obtain, receiveun-, im-, in-, il-, ir-the book is on the table, the monitor is on the table, the candle is on the

table, the mouse is on the table, the wallet is on the table, etc.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Paradigms can be:

• Inflectional - which refer to all word-forms which share the same grammatical meaning but differ in their endings (e.g. toy-toys, share the grammatical meaning of ‘number’ but they differ as to the presence of a ‘plural’ marker)

• Lexical – which refer to sets of words which share the same root morpheme

(e.g. house (n), house (v), housing, housekeeper, housekeep, housekeeping, houseboat, household, householder, housemaid, housemaster, house-owner, house-party, houseplant, housewife, etc.)- booklet, coverlet, cutlet, droplet, froglet, starlet, etc.; - decentralize, decouple, decommission, demobilize, etc.;- sleep, sleeper, sleepers, sleep-in, sleepiness, sleeping, etc.;- man, mannish, manly, etc.;- tooth, toothache, toothbrush, toothless, etc.;- happy, happiness, happily, happy-go-lucky (careless), happy hour, etc.;

Morphology of the English Language

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Two-member paradigmes

Two members of inflectional paradigm can be realized by homonymous word-forms;

e.g. played – Simple Past and Past Participle; playing – Gerund and Present Participle

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Word meaning

Grammatical meaning is the component of meaning recurrent (reversible) in identical sets of individual forms of different words.

(e.g. the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs: played, ridiculed, interrupted, did, went, made, hit, put, assembled, etc.,the case meaning in: mother’s, generals’, producer’s, women’s, etc.,or number meaning in nouns: toys, stories, dragons, parents, fish, deer, women, geese, teeth, phenomena, curricula, bases, etc.)

Word-forms have one and the same grammatical meaning if they can be found in identical distribution.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Word meaning

Lexical meaning is the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.

e.g. word-forms: push, pushes, pushing, pushed, etc.

Morphology of the English Language

1 Basic Concepts

Word

A rule-of-thumb definition: it is the smallest language unit which has a definite morphological structure and meaning and which can be used in isolation.

Orthographic definition: it is any sequence of letters bounded on either side by a space or punctuation mark.

Pronunciation principle definition: uninterrupted sequence of sounds between potential pauses.

Combinatory principle definition: it is a unit which can freely combine with other units of the same order.

Semantic definition: word is defined as a unit which has particular meaning.

Historical continuity definition: it is something which one generation of language speakers passes on to another generation as a word.