Morphology

LIN200, Lecture 2Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009

Review of last week Yule’s definition (6 features) of language Grammar: the sounds and sound patterns, the basic

units of meaning, such as words, and the rules that areused to combine them to form new sentences.

Prescriptive vs. descriptive rules of language Performance vs. competence

What does your mental grammar model?

Grammaticality judgments Universal grammar and the Innateness Hypothesis Universal vs. language-specific rules Different fields of linguistics

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Morphology Morpheme: one or more sounds combined and

associated, arbitrarily, with a consistent meaning. How many morphemes the words nicer, baker,

water (we’ll come back to this)

Lexicon: our mental list of words and what weknow about them including: meaning, pronunciation, lexical category (parts of

speech, or grammatical category information), andthe rules for expanding the word and creatingrelated words

Orthography (written form of the word) only if literate3

Love is… a manysplendored thing

Noun (with an article)"An Everlasting Love" ~ Andy GibbMy Love Is Your Love ~ Whitney HoustonHer Love Is Innocence ~ Devotchkas

Noun (with a preposition)"A Big Hunk O' Love" ~ Elvis Presley"Accidentally In Love" ~ Counting Crows"Addicted to Love" ~ Robert Palmer

Verb"And I Love Her" ~ The Beatles"And I Love You So" ~ Perry Como"As Long As You Love Me" ~ Backstreet Boys"A Time To Love" ~ Stevie Wonder

???"Avenue Of Stars" ~ Jennifer Love Hewitt 4

Arbitrary relation between sound &meaning, shown by:

Homophones: different words with thesame sounds bare, bear

Synonyms: different words, differentsounds, same meaning couch, chesterfield, davenport, sofa

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Content vs. Function words Content words are an open class —  we can,

and do, add new words to this class all the time. Verbs: take -ed, -ing, -s (with subcategories) Nouns: have number, case (i.e. English possessive,

gendered pronouns) Adjectives: degrees of comparison, agreement Adverbs: hard to recognize, can modify verb,

adjective, adverb, sentence Function words are a closed class

Adposition: prepositions and postpositions Article/determiner: a, an, the Pronoun: personal, demonstrative, interrogative,

relative, indefinite Conjunction

In-class exercise

Give five new words that have been created inyour lifetime, and their lexical categories

1: blog (noun)2: bootylicious (adjective)3: google (verb, noun)4: bling (noun)5: download (noun, verb)

• These are all content words!• Content and function words have differences in

creativity, how we process them, and how welearn them (content words first)

The “F” test (pg. 38)

FINISHED FILES ARE THE

RESULT OF YEARS OF

SCIENTIFIC STUDY

COMBINED WITH THE

EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

The “F” test (pg. 38)

FINISHED FILES ARE THE

RESULT OF YEARS OF

SCIENTIFIC STUDY

COMBINED WITH THE

EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Discreteness in language, shown bymorphological structure. Morphology: the study of the internal structure

of words and the rules by which words areformed. A single word can have more than one morpheme

Morphemes… are discrete units of language. are the smallest meaningful units of language.

They cannot be subdivided. add meaning to a word. can appear in many different words can have any number of syllables

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Types of morphemes Free morphemes can be a word by themselves. (i.e.,

king, berry, kick) Bound morphemes must be attached to another

morpheme (i.e. Affixes: prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix) Prefixes: misrepresent, endanger, inconvenience Suffixes: kindness, loosely, larger, running, dogs In languages other than English? Tabáa Zapotec (in Oaxaca, southern Mexico). Pluralization

indicated only by a verbal prefix, for subjects. Pronouns areambiguously singular or plural.dxe-le'e -nä’ dxe-le-le'e -nä’cont-see 3p. cont-PL-see 3p.“s/he sees” “they see”

(http://www.sil.org/mexico/zapoteca/g025b-zapotecplurals.htm)

InfixesBontocNoun/Adjective Verbfikas 'strong' fumikas 'to be strong'kilad 'red' kumilad 'to be red'fusul 'enemy' fumusul 'to be an enemy'

Tagalog (Philippines)gulay 'greenish vegetables’g+in+ulay 'greenish blue'

An English infix? un-freaking-believeble (limited productivity)

CircumfixesCircumfixes in Chickasaw (Muskogean language spoken in Oklahoma)

Declarative Negativechokma 'he is good' ikchokmo 'he isn't good'lakna 'it is yellow' iklakno 'it isn't yellow'palli 'it is hot’ ikpallo 'it isn't hot'tiwwi 'he opens it' iktiwwo 'he doesn't open it'

Samoanfinau 'to quarrel’ fe+finau+aʔi 'to quarrel with each other’

Dutch verbal morphologyRoot Infinitive Past Participle Glosswandel wandelen gewandeld 'walk'duw duwen geduwd 'push'zag zagen gezagd 'saw'Stofsuig stofsuigen gestofsuigd 'vacuum’

Root: the content morpheme, to whichsomething attaches

Stem or base: a root that has been combined with an affix Free root: able to occur alone as a word by itself e.g. chair, king,

judge, kick Bound root: can never occur alone as whole words, e.g. huckle-,

cran-, boysen- book calls these “huckles and cieves” have no meaning in isolation but acquire meaning once they’ve been

combined with other, specific morphemes. Etymemes: bound morphemes like –ceive and –mit

no longer have a meaning that we understand in isolation found in a lot of English words

Two morphemes that are pronounced (and even spelled) identicallymight not have the same meaning. The meaning of a morphememust be constant. nic+er, bak+er, water? How many -er morphemes? Two (-er in water not

separate morpheme) All morphemes are bound or free. Affixes are bound morphemes.

Root morphemes can be bound or free.

Rules of word formation Derivational morphemes

can be added to words to make new words, whichmay have different meaning or grammatical class.

These morphemes are productive. Examples?

Heirarchical structure Morphemes must be added in a fixed order. A word

has an internal structure, and isn’t simply a sequenceof morphemes.

“unsystematic”un+[system+atic] vs. *[un+system] + atic

English system not the same as languages like Arabic orHebrew, which use interdigitation (see pg. 44).- Arabic root s-l-m ‘peace’, root of words Islam, salaam

Tree and bracket diagrams

Bracket diagram [un+[system noun, root + atic]adjective, stem ]adjective

Tree diagram adjectiveunsystematic

adjective systematic

prefix noun (root) suffixun + system + atic

Ambiguous structures

un+lock+able two different un- prefixes (morphemes)

un- meaning not un- meaning to reverse the results of a specified action

[un + [[lock ]noun, root + able]adjective, stem ]adjective

Meaning? not lockable

[[un + [lock ]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective

Meaning? able to be unlocked

Selectional restrictions on affixes

two different un- prefixes un- meaning not

- generally only attaches to adjectives (and some nouns)- cannot attach to verbs- kind/unkind, happy/unhappy: “not kind, not happy”- but not wash/*unwash: “not wash”, stop/*unstop: “not stop”- undo ≠ “not do”

un- meaning to reverse the results of a specified action- undo = reverse the action of doing

Suffix -able Attaches to verbs to form adjectives: stoppable, doable Can’t attach to adjectives: *kindable, *happyable

Selectional restrictions on affixes

unusable — how to diagram this? Two ways?No, only one:

[un + [[use]verb, root + able]adjective, stem ]adjective

Meaning? not usable

*[[un + [use]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective

Meaning? *able to be unused (*unuse + -able)

Selectional restrictions on affixes

Prefixes re-, meaning “again, or return to aprevious condition” only attaches to verbs

- redo, reuse, *rehappy, *rekind- cannot attach to useable (adj.)- can attach to use (v.)- only one possible structure for the word

[re + [use]verb, root ]verb

Meaning? to use again

[[re + [use]verb, root ]verb, stem + able]adjective

Meaning? able to be used again

Inflectional morphology

Inflectional morphemes: mark tense, number, gender, case, degree (on

adj.)... agreement don't add lexical information Inflectional affixes never change the syntactic

category of what they're attached to Always attach to complete words (not to

something like huckle- or -able.)

English Inflectional morphemes

English has only eight inflectional morphemes. What arethey? third person singular present –s past tense –ed progressive –ing past participle –en plural –s possessive –‘s comparative –er superlative –es

irregular = suppletive, also what your book callsexceptions

English Inflectional morphemes

In English, inflectional forms are added afterderivational ones. un+like+ly+hood +s *un+like+ly+s+hood hierarchic order, not linear

Morphology vs. Syntax

Languages differ in whether they use morphology orsyntax for certain grammatical constructions / relationships Case

- English uses both (see examples on p. 66):

the queen of England/England’s Queen (genetive).

- Russian (see examples on p. 67) “Maxim defends Victor”:

Makism zasčisčajet Viktora.Makism Viktora zasčisčajet.Viktora Makism zasčisčajet.Viktora zasčisčajet Makism.Zasčisčajet Makism Viktora.Zasčisčajet Viktora Makism.

Identifying morphemes

Zulu data for exercise, pg. 73 #5 (answers on pg. 666)umfazi “married woman” abafazi“married women”umfani “boy” abafani “boys”umzali “parent” abazali “parents”umfundisi “teacher” abafundisi “teachers”umbazi “carver” ababazi “carvers”umlimi “farmer” abalimi “farmers”umdlali “player” abadlali “players”umfundi “reader” abafundi “readers”

fundisa “to teach” funda “to read”lima “to cultivate” baza “to carve”

Word coinage (making new words) Derivation Compounding

Syntactic compounds Lexical compounds

Acronym Initialism Blend Clipping/abbreviation Back-formation Hypocorism Inventing Eponyms Conversion

Functional shift vs. semantic shift vs. generification Borrowing

More exercises at end of chapter: #8 Swahili (answers in book pg. 667, long but very systematic) #9 Samoan (for more practice) #13 Inuktitut (for more practice)

HW for Monday/Tuesday Sept. 21–22 is: Fromkin textbook (Chapter 2), #1, #3, #4, three other exercises. The entire assignment is posted as a downloadable PDF on Blackboard

under the “Course Documents” tab in the Week 2 folder. The file is alsolinked on the syllabus in “Course Information”