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English Morphology (Unit 7: Sound and shapes (Verbal prefix boundaries (In…
English Morphology
Unit 7: Sound and shapes
Phonological boundaries in the generative model
Standard generative phonology applies several different kinds of boundary markers.
The syllable boundary, as we have seen, is different form the others in that it is phonological in its nature
its location is not (fully) dependent on the morphological structure of the word.
The phonological phrase boundary is the strongest of all.
Morpheme boundaries
The morpheme boundary (represented by ‘+’) is found between the morphemes that make up the word.
In some cases a free stem and a suffix are joined by a morpheme boundary, though in most cases such stems are bound.
Rules applying in a given context, that is, to a segment occurring before and/or after certain segments, apply irrespective of the presence of a morpheme boundary in that string.
This means that any phonological change that occurs within a morpheme also occurs across the morpheme boundary
Verbal prefix boundaries
In English the stress rule stresses the ult of a verb if it is heavy
Another property of stress in English also necessitates reference to the verbal prefix boundary.
In verbs of three (or more) syllables, stress regularly falls on the penult if the ult is light (just like in regular shorter verbs)
but on the antepenult if the ult is heavy
In some of these verbs, the boundary can be detected by other phonological tests like
Word boundaries
The problem is that it is far from obvious what it means to be a word in linguistics.
A word is a free form, that is, a free morpheme.
Word boundaries occur between words.
Bound morphemes (affixes, like re-, un-, -ing, -ness: bound stems
Identifying boundaries
We now face a more practical problem: how to determine whether a certain morpheme boundary is to be represented with the morpheme boundary proper (+), or with the word boundary.
One criterion might be whether the stem is free or not. If not, we are strongly persuaded to posit a morpheme boundary.
once a morpheme-boundary suffix, always a morpheme-boundary suffix.
Another useful test for boundary types is phonotactic constraints.
There are very few such constraints about cluster separated by a word boundary, phonotactic constraints typically regulate TAUTOMORPHEMIC clusters (clusters not separated by a word boundary).
Clitics
For people growing up in a literate society, it always comes as a surprise to learn that orthography is a very unreliable indicator of phonological structures.
there are a number of ‘words’ that orthographically appear to be full-fledged words, but are not free forms.
Phonologically there is little if any difference between clitics and affixes. The reason the two categories are distinguished terminologically (and also orthographically) is syntactic.
Types of phonological rules
We have seen that rules like velar softening and trisyllabic laxing, as well as stress rules are blocked by a word boundary.
One can only hope that the properties listed above characterize each phonological rule, that each rule shows properties of either only the lexical, or only the postlexical type. (We return to the cryptic-sounding property.
Aspiration
The rule of aspiration is sensitive to three factors: stress on the following vowel, a word boundary preceding the voiceless stop, and a fricative preceding the voiceless stop.
The peculiarity of -ize
The suffix –ize embarrasses the analyst. The fact that it causes velar softening (e.g., criti[s]ize, Catholi[s]ize) categorizes it as a lexical affix.
that the g is pronounced at all implies a lexical suffix.
The comparative -er
Recall that comparative forms like stronger strɒŋgǝ were analysed as counterexamples to the generalization that postnasal g is dropped before a morpheme boundary.
The superlative –est has the same properties, thus it may also be analyzed as a lexical suffix.
The velar softening and -ic
The suffix -ic, as has been argued up to now, is clearly a lexical suffix.
Since it begins with i, we expect velar softening to apply before it.
In some cases, it indeed does (e.g., pedago[g]~ pedago[$]ic), but in others it does not (e.g., mónar[k] ~ monár[k]ic).
A more promising solution is offered in the next section.
The status of lexical rules
It was noted that words containing only a morpheme boundary behave like monomorphemic forms.
that is, crimin + al and animal are not different from the viewpoint of phonology.
Words containing a morpheme boundary are monomorphemic phonologically.
The phonology cannot tell whether such a word is morphologically simplex or complex, it is not sensitive to the morpheme boundary, +, at all. The repercussions of this claim are far reaching.
Word and syllable boundaries
We already have seen that certain phonological rules are well describable by reference to syllable boundaries
some phonological changes occur in coda (others in onset) position.
The contradiction is only apparent: breaking and broadening are lexical rules
The remaining of paradoxes
Some of them will be listed here, without any attempt at an explanation.
The categorization of comparative and superlative suffixes is made dubious by the ‘breaking test’.
There remain some unslovable paradoxes.
Unit 6: Words and word formation process
Processes of word-formation
Depending on the language, some of these processes might be available in particular languages, whereas others may not.
But the result is the same: new words are always created and added to the lexicon of the language.
There are systematic word-formation processes that take place across human languages.
Conversion
the extension of the use of one word from its original grammatical category to another category. Technically it is called a change of paradigm.
Conversion from one category to another is very common in some languages
Conversion is the change of function of the word.
Borrowing
The English language has been borrowing words from ‘nearly a hundred language in the last hundred years’
The other way round, many countries also have taken many English words into their dictionaries, such as the well-know ‘OK’ or ‘Internet’
Borrowing is the process of actually borrowing words from foreign languages.
Most of the loan words are nouns, only some of them are verbs or adjectives.
Ways of borrowing: 2 ways
Through oral speech (by immediate contact between the people).
They took place in the early periods of history.
Through written speech (by indirect contact through books, etc.)
They gained importance in recent times.
They preserve their spelling and some peculiarities of their sound-form, their assimilation is long and laborious process.
Types of borrowing:
Direct borrowing
Indirect / Less direct borrowing
Back-formation
results when a word is formed from another word by taking off what looks like a typical affix in the language.
A noun enters the language first and then a verb is “back-formed” from it. This is the case with the verbs edit and televise
Creative reduction due to incorrect morphological analysis.
Types of words
Agential Nouns
Adjectives
Abstract Nouns
Compounding
New words are also created through the common process of compounding.
We may also combine more than two words.
Synonyms: words with same meanings
Homonyms: words with same sound but different meanings
Antonyms: words with opposite meanings
Coinage
the invention of totally new words.
The typical process of coinage usually involves the extension of a product’s name from a specific reference to a more general one.
Where can we see coinage?
Coinages appear in virtually all social domains of our society.
arts and entertainment, technology, politics, health and fitness, social relationships, food, economy, and advertising.
Clipping
which is the shortening of a longer word, is a word formed by dropping one or more syllables from a longer word or phrase with no change in meaning.
Clipping in English gave rise to words
is the formation of new words by cutting a part off the orginal and using what remains intead.
Clipping is of a character of using words precisely and conveniently.
Four common types
Back Clipping
Front and Back Clipping
Front Clipping
Phrase Clipping
words are not so formal as original words, so they’re usually used orally or in informal occasions
Eponyms
A word based on or derived from proper names or things.
Extension as Metaphor
With frequent use the metaphoric origin can be forgotten
Often enough extensions of meaning are metaphors
Acronyms
an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself forms a pronounceable word.
An acronym is an initial abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word
The term acronym is the name for a word formed from the first letters of each word in a phrase (such as sonar created from sound navigation and ranging).
Blending
Blending is another way of combining two words to form a new word.
The difference between blending and compounding
however, is that in blending only parts of the words, not the whole words, are combined.
Blending is the process of forming a word by combining parts of words.
Blending is one of the many ways new words are made in English.
Formation
The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other.
The beginning of two words are combined.
Two words are blended around a common sequence of sounds.
Multiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly preserving the sounds’ order.
Function
To shorten words
Can increase our ability to enrich vocabulary
To enrich the language and getting the language will evolve and grow
Unit 5: Derivation
Relationship between lexemes
if any verb appears, it must carry the third person singular suffix –s.
But there are no contexts where, if a noun appears, it must carry the suffix -ance.
Variants of lexeme PERFORM
There are grammatical factors that determine the choice between perform, performs and performed (in appropriate contexts)
The suffix -ance is not one of the small class of suffixes whose use is tightly determined by grammar.
It must be derivational
How lexemes can be related?
concerned mainly with relationships involving affixation, and the grammatical and semantic tasks that such affixation can perform. As we will see, both the affixes and their tasks are quite diverse (vary).
An encyclopedic is impossible to cover all the English derivational processes.
Word classes and conversion
word classes
many contemporary linguists call lexical categories
in traditional terminology are called parts of speech
such as ‘adjective’, ‘noun’, ‘verb’ and etc.
What about Lexeme PERFORM?
It looks like a ‘doing word’, meaning something that actors and musicians do.
The lexeme PERFORMANCE means the same activity, surely.
PERFORMANCE is a noun and PERFORM is a verb. And indeed meaning may be positively misleading, (a performance is not obviously a ‘thing’.)
Adverbs derived from adjectives
simple or monomorphemic adverbs, include some very common words (OFTEN, SELDOM, NEVER, SOON), and some other adverbs are morphologically complex without containing -ly (NOWHERE, EVERYWHERE, TODAY, YESTERDAY).
there are common adverbs that are formed by conversion: FAST and HARD, derived from the adjective FAST (as in a fast car) and HARD (as in hard work).
Nouns derived from members of other word classes
Nouns derived from adjectives and from verbs are extremely numerous, and it should be easy for you to think of many other examples on the lines of those given here.
Adjectives derived from adjectives
In this category, prefixes predominate.
The only suffix of note is -ish, meaning ‘somewhat X’,
GRENNISH, SMALLISH, ROMOTISH ‘rather remote’
By contrast, the prefix un- meaning ‘not’ is extremely widespread:
UNHAPPY, UNSURE, UNRELIABLE, UNDISCOVERED
Because it is so common, most dictionaries do not attempt to list all un- adjectives.
This does not mean, however, that un- can be prefixed to all adjectives, for example,
‘UNGOOD’ with the meaning ‘bad’
Adjectives derived from members of other word classes
Some of the processes that derive adjectives from verbs straddle the divide between derivation and inflection in a way that we have not yet encountered.
We met the suffixes -ed, -en and -ing, and vowel change, in passive and progressive participle forms of verbs.
However, such forms (in italics) can also be adjectives
Verbs derived from verbs
This section is unusual in that all the affixes that I will mention in it are prefixes. Most prominent are re- and the negative or ‘reversive’ prefixes un-, de- and dis-
Transitive verbs (or verbs used transitively) are ones with an ‘object’ noun phrase, usually indicating the thing or person that is the goal of the action of the verb, as the book is the object of laid in (36a). Intransitive verbs, such as lay in (36b), lack such an object.
Verbs derived from members of other word classes
Verbs derived from nouns and from adjectives are numerous.
There are also some common verbs that are derived by replacing the final voiceless consonant of a noun with a voiced one
It will be evident by now that suffixes play a larger role than prefixes in English derivational morphology.
Unit 3: Lexeme formation: affixes
What is affix?
are classified according to whether they are attached before or after the form to which they are added.
Prefixes
are attached before the form of word.
The {re‑} of resaw is a prefixes
Suffixes
are attached after the form of word.
The bound morphemes are all suffixes
A root morpheme
the basic form to which other morphemes are attached.
It provides the basic meaning of the word.
roots may be bases, bases are not always roots.
Derivational morphemes
are added to forms to create separate words.
{‑er} is a derivational suffix whose addition turns a verb into a noun, usually meaning the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb.
Inflectional morphemes
do not create separate words.
They merely modify the word in which they occur in order to indicate grammatical properties.
Affixation
Word formation rules:
look more carefully at words derived by affixation. Prefixes and suffixes usually have special requirements for the sorts of bases they can attach to.
Some of these requirements concern the phonology (sounds) of their bases, and others concern the semantics (meaning) of their bases, but the most basic requirements are often the syntactic part of speech or category of their bases.
Word structure:
divide up a complex word into its morphemes, it’s easy to get the impression that words are put together like the beads that make up a necklace.
But morphologists believe that words are more like onions than like necklaces: onions are made up of layers from innermost to outermost.
semantic categories
prepositional and relational affixes
often convey notions of space and/or time.
In English might be prefixes like over- and out- (overfill, overcoat, outrun, outhouse).
quantitative affixes
have something to do with amount.
In English we have affixes like -ful (handful, helpful) and multi- (multifaceted).
negative and privative affixes
Negative affixes add the meaning ‘not’ to their base.
evaluative affixes
consist of diminutives, affixes that signal a smaller version of the base (for example in English -let as in booklet or droplet).
personal affixes
These are affixes that create ‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from nouns.
Unit 1: What is Morphology?
What is morphology?
The study of word formation.
Including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the word.
the way forms of words are varied depending on how they’re used in sentences.
What’s a word?
Smallest independent units of language that has its own meaning.
Words are thus both independent since they can be separated from other words and move around in sentences, and the smallest units of language since they are the only units of language for which this is possible.
Words that consist of only one morpheme
simple or simplex words.
Words that are made up of more than one morpheme
complex words
Words and lexemes, types and tokens
word tokens
count every instance in which a word occurs in a sentence.
word types
count a word once, no matter how many times it occurs in a sentence.
single lexeme
count by using a thought of families of words that differ only in their grammatical endings or grammatical forms.
How to know is it really a word?
it’s a real word it ought to be in the dictionary.
If it consists of morphemes, has a meaning, and can stand alone, doesn't it qualify as a word according to our definition even if it doesn't appear in the dictionary?
Why do languages have morphology?
To form new lexemes from old ones.
lexeme formation can do one of three things
not change category, but they do add substantial new meaning.
both change category and add substantial new meaning.
change the part of speech (or category) of a word.
Word formation
derivation
derivation-the formation of new lexemes.
inflection
the different grammatical word forms that make up lexemes.
Unit 4: Inflection
Introduction of Inflection
Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new lexemes, but rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical contexts.
grammatical meaning can include information about
Person (first, second, third)
Tense (past, present, future)
Number (singular vs. plural)
Other distinctions as well
Inflection in English
what we have
English is a language that is quite poor in inflection. The distinction between singular and plural is marked on nouns
why English has so little inflection
one time English had quite a bit more inflection than it now has.
Old English had three genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter
Paradigms
consists of all of the different inflectional forms of a particular lexeme or class of lexemes.
inflectional classes
all members of a particular category will typically make the same
inflectional distinctions, for example, exhibiting case, number, or tense.
but the actual forms for particular cases, numbers, or tenses might differ
from one group of nouns or verbs to another.
Suppletion
terms that refer to relationships between inflected forms in a paradigm.
occurs when one or more of the inflected forms of a lexeme is built on a base that bears no relationship to the base of other members of the paradigm. (replacing a regular form by an irregular form).
Inflection and productivity
It is often said that inflection differs from derivation in terms of productivity.
rules of inflection are almost always fully productive: every verb in English, for example, has a progressive form with the suffix -ing, and just about every verb can form a past tense.
Inflection versus derivation revisited
both at inflection and at derivation (or
lexeme formation, more generally).
Remember that we distinguished the
two sorts of morphology
One more thing we can add to these differences is that in words that have both inflectional and derivational affixes, the derivational affixes almost always occur inside the inflectional ones.
Unit 2: Morpheme and their Composition
Morphemes
the minimal units of meaning or grammatical function that are used to form words.
A morpheme may also consist of a single syllable, such as boy and fish.
two or more syllables, as in
paper (two syllables), and crocodile (three syllables).
morpheme has a constant meaning.
the same sounds represent more than one morpheme, meaning that different morphemes may be ‘homophonous’ or pronounced identically.
two types of morphemes
bound morphemes
the smallest units of meaning or grammatical function that are attached to other forms to generate complex words.
cannot normally stand alone and must be typically attached to another form.
all affixes in English
bound base morphemes
not meaningful in isolation but have meaning when combined with other morphemes.
free morphemes
some morphemes may be simple words that cannot be broken down further into meaningful units.
can stand alone as an independent, single word.
lexical morphemes
n., v., adj. and adv. that transmit the content of the messages speakers want to convey “Content words”
functional morphemes
articles, prep., conj., quantifiers and pron. we cannot create new functional morphemes in the language easily, they are treated as a closed class of words
“Function words”
morphs
are the actual forms that are used to realize phonetic realization of morphemes.
three different morphs
z
әz
s
used to realize the inflectional morpheme “plural” in English
allomorphs
one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments.
all “phonologically conditioned” in addition to being homophones.
type of allomorph
Replacive Allomorph
Replaces letters within the word to create plurals using -en, irregular plurals, or past tense forms.
Suppletion Allomorph
Allomorphs of a morpheme are phonologically unrelated and changes the shape of the word.
Additive Allomorph
Adding an affix changes the tense or creates a positive or negative impression, and the word sound may change.
Zero Allomorph
There is no change from singular to plural.
