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Linguistics week 13

Morphology 3

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Morphology, then What is it? It’s the study of word forms, and the changes we

make to words It’s part of the grammar of languages?

– What is the other important part? Some languages are morphologically more

complex than others– What guess could you make about languages which are

not morphologically complex?

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Words. How many words are there in this utterance?

She was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went.

That was easy. How did you determine the number? Now answer two further questions

– How many different word-forms are there?– How many different lexemes are there?

And another question:– What do you think “lexeme” means?– Lexemes and word-forms are very like phonemes and allophones,

actually.

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Word segmentation In English, words are conveniently separated by white

space, in writing This is not true of Chinese And it is not true of spoken English either

– If you know a language, you can separate the stream of continuous speech into words

– Adults who never learned to read are equally aware of words Words are sound + meaning units Words (lexemes) are the units stored in dictionaries (and

in your head)– With their pronunciation, meaning, and morphological structure

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Two kinds of words Function words

– Restricted in number– A closed class– Have a grammatical function– Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical morpheme)

Content words– An open class– New content words often come into use in every

language Which words on this slide …? Chinese examples?

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You think English is hard? Ha! When I was at school I had to do Latin

– See if you can find out what this is:amo amamusamas amatisamat amant– Or thisannus annianne anniannum annosanni annorumanno annisanno annis

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They were Latin inflections That means

– The two lists each show the different word-forms, for a Latin noun or verb

In English, inflection includes things like– Number– Tense

BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme– So sleepy is not an inflection of sleep

Write down 10 roots (like sleep)– Give one or more inflected forms (eg sleeps) for each– And one or more derived forms (like sleepy)

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Inflectional vs derivational morphology

Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic category, part-of-speech, 詞類 )

– Derivation may or may not change word class Derivation makes a new lexeme

– create creative Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the origi

nal lexeme– create creates

Inflection is productive– You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural

Derivation is not necessarily productive– You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb

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Roots and affixes Unbelievable contains

– One free morpheme– A root and two affixes

» One prefix and one suffix In English, there are derivational prefixes and suffixes There are no inflectional prefixes Suffixes are more common in the world’s languages

– But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes– Plural in the Zapotec language is realized by a prefix, not a suffix

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Infixes In Tagalog

– sulat = write– sumulat = wrote– sinulat = was written

What is the root morpheme here? What are the affixes? Yule describes a kind of infix used in English

– I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?

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Reduplication Afrikaans

– dik = ‘thick’; dikdik = ‘very thick’ Motu (Papua New Guinea)

– mero = boy; memero = boys– meromero = little boy– How do you say ‘little boys’ in this language?

And – you guessed it – what uses does reduplication have in Mandarin?

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Reading

Read Chapter 7 Answer the Study Questions Don’t look at the answers until you have

finished!

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Conversion to a different POS Related words with different POS share the same

form– Bank: He banked the money– Better:

» You should respect your elders and betters» His performance is difficult to better

– Empty: He emptied his glass in one gulp Sometimes the stress changes See how many examples you can think of

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Zero morphs (in inflectional morphology)

What’s the plural of sheep? We can either say

– {SHEEP}:{Ø} (the root plus a zero morph), or– The morpheme {SHEEP} realizes both singular and plur

al meanings The same applies to the past and present tense of

hit A lot of linguists don’t like the idea of zero morph

s, because it implies– {羊 } singular, {羊 };{Ø} plural (!)

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Shortening processes Backformation (you usually need to know the history of th

e word)– Babysitter babysit– Editor edit

Clipping (this doesn’t involve complete morphemes)– Science-fiction sci-fi– Information info

Chinese stump compounds– 台大– 網咖– Are these backformations or clipped forms?

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Neo-classical compounds: two bound morphemes

Biology {LIFE}+{WORDS} Telephone {DISTANT}+{SOUND} Introduce {IN}+{LEAD} In a way, these are the closest English equi

valent to Chinese words like 朋友 Group activity

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Reading

Read Chapter 7 Answer the Study Questions Don’t look at the answers until you have

finished!