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