Download 1 Background on this module 2 Introduction

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Morphology for Beginners
S. T. Bischoff and A. V. Fountain
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Background on this module
DR
This module is designed to stand on its own or be read in conjunction with our
other modules. Before getting started it is important to note that this module,
like all our modules, is rooted in the idea that language is a meso-object and
that linguistics is a meso-science. Additionally, we appeal to the notion of
hierarchy, the idea that items are organized in relationship to one another in
terms of hierarchical structure, that is some items are ‘above’, ‘below’, or at ‘the
same level as others’. Further, we employ the Principle of Compositionality,
the notion that the meaning of a complex expression (a sentence for example)
is fully determined by its structure (how the words are organized in relation to
one another) and the meanings of its constituents (the meaning of those words
and morphemes). Both are used throughout this module for heuristic purposes.
Our starting point is the following definition of language:
A systematic, rule governed form of human communication
that uses arbitrary signs (spoken, signed, or written) in a creative
way.
See our module Linguistics: A Brief Introduction for further discussion of these
concepts and a general overview of conceptions of language and linguistics that
influence this module on morphology.
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Introduction
Morphology is the study of how words are formed or marked by other processes.
The concept of ‘word’, we shall see below, is difficult to define, but we do know
that ‘words’ are made up of one or more morphemes, the smallest units of
language that convey meaning or grammatical information. Any morpheme can
usually be classified into one of two categories: free or bound. Free morphemes
1 The authors would like to thank Megan Stone, and the Graduate Assistant Teachers and
students participating in the University of Arizona’s Linguistics 150A1 class during the Fall
of 2011, for their helpful comments on this manuscript. All errors are our own.
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are those that can appear by themselves as separate words. Bound morphemes
are those that must attach to something and cannot appear by themselves as
separate words. For example, the word lovely consists of two morphemes: love
and -ly. Love is a free morpheme. That is, we can say love as a word, without
having to add any other morphemes to it. Love is also a monomorphemic word
- we can not divide it into any smaller morphemes.
The ending -ly, on the other hand, is a bound morpheme. We can not
say it as a word by itself. When we add it to love, we get lovely, which is a
polymorphemic word - a word containing more than one morpheme. The
word love, then, is monomorphemic and the word lovely is polymorphemic.
In our example, the morpheme love is also what we refer to as a root. A root
is generally the base form of a word, a form that cannot be analyzed into further
morphemes and that contains the primary meaning of a word. It is important
to note that in some languages, roots are often bound. So while the root ‘love’
in English is both a free morpheme and a root morpheme, it is not the case that
all roots are free. Even in English, we have some bound root morphemes. Think
about the -ceive portion in the words receive, perceive and conceive. Although
most English speakers probably don’t know what the meaning of the morpheme
-ceive is, we can tell that it might be a bound root because it combines with a
number of prefixes - bound morphemes that occur before the root of a word.
Bound morphemes that must appear after a stem are called suffixes. Prefixes
and suffixes, and a few other types of bound morphemes that are not roots, are
collectively referred to as affixes.
A root is one of the elements that bound morphemes like -ly attach to. Bound
morphemes can also attach to what are called stems. For our purposes a good
definition of stems is any polymorphemic word that a bound morpheme attaches
to. For example, in the word unlovely, we can see that the bound morpheme
un- attaches to the stem lovely. Note that we write bound morphemes with a
“-” dash. The dash tells us that the morpheme is bound, and it also tells us
whether the morpheme is a prefix or a suffix. The dash is placed on the edge
where the affix connects to its root or stem.
Besides being free or bound, root or affix, morphemes can be further classified
as derivational or inflectional. Derivational morphemes are those that change
the word class, or lexical category, of a root or stem, or add extra meaning
to a root or stem. Word classes, also called lexical categories, include things
like noun, verb, preposition, and the like. When a derivational morpheme is
added to a root or stem the result is generally a new word. A good example of
a derivational morpheme that changes a word from one word class in English
to another is the nominalizing morpheme -er. When -er attaches to a verb
root like smoke, the result is a the noun smoker. An example of a derivational
morpheme that can add extra meaning to a word is the negative morpheme
non-. If we attach non- to the noun stem smoker we get the noun nonsmoker.
The word class remains the same but the meaning has changed from one who
smokes to one who does not smoke. So we see how derivational morphemes
attach to roots and stems to change word classes, or add extra meaning, and in
so doing create entirely new words.
Inflectional morphemes work in a similar way: they attach to roots or
stems, but for different reasons. We don’t think of the results creating new
words. Rather, we think of them as resulting in the same word only in a slightly
different form. Inflectional morphemes can be thought of as being required by
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the grammar, that is, of the system of the language. Inflectional morphemes
indicate grammatical properties like tense, number, person, and gender. They
don’t change word classes and they don’t convey extra meaning in the same way
as derivational morphemes do.
As an example, in English, past tense is often indicated in spelling by -ed.
The -ed inflectional past tense morpheme attaches to roots and stems to indicate
that an event occurred in the past in relation to the time of the utterance.
Tense in English is something the grammar requires. If we want to talk about
an event that happened in the past, we often use the grammatical past tense,
which requires that we attach -ed to the verb. So we say walked rather than
walk, or camped instead of camp when we talk about these events as occurring
in the past. In other words, we inflect the verb for past tense.
The distinction between derivation and inflection can be difficult to explain
- but since we’re primarily discussing English in this unit, we’re in luck. In English there are only eight inflectional morphemes. These are plural, possessive,
third-person singular present tense, progressive, past tense, past participle, comparative, and superlative. Table 3.1 lists the inflectional morphemes of English
along with the word class or lexical category they attach to and examples of
inflected words.
Table 1: Inflectional Morphemes in English
Lexical Category
Nouns
DR
Verbs
Morpheme
plural -s
possessive -s
3rd person present tense -s
progressive -ing
past tense -ed
past participle -en/-ed
comparative -er
superlative -est
Adjectives
Example
1 dog, 2 dogs
the dog’s dish
she walks
she is walking
she walked
she had walked/written
big, bigger
big, biggest
The small number of inflectional morphemes in English, as well as the regularities among them — they’re all suffixes, and three of them are homophonous
(they sound exactly alike) – make them pretty easy to memorize. If you can commit these to memory, you’ll not have much trouble differentiating inflectional
from derivational morphology in English. But be forewarned. Most languages
have a larger inventory of inflectional morphemes, and it is not the case that in
most languages these morphemes are restricted to being suffixes, or having any
particular properties other than that they are required by the grammar, rather
than being used to create new words or change the categories of words.
So we have the following notions that help us study language from the perspective of words.
(1) a. morphology: the study of how words are built or marked by other
processes.
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b. morpheme: the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning.
c.
free morpheme: a morpheme that can appear by itself as a separate
word and can not be divided into further morphemes.
d. bound morpheme: a morpheme that must attach to something and
can not occur or appear by itself as a separate word.
e.
derivational morpheme: a morpheme that changes the word class
of a root or stem, or adds extra meaning to a root or stem. Adding a
derivational morpheme results in a new word.
f.
inflectional morpheme: a morpheme required by the grammar. That
is, a morpheme that signals a grammatical relation such as tense, number, person, and so on. Adding an inflectional morpheme results in the
same word in a different form.
There are a few more general concepts that need discussing before moving
onto the next section. Above we mentioned that English plural marking is
inflectional. We provided an example of the bound inflectional plural marker
-s. It is important to note that the examples in Table 3.1 illustrate the regular
and productive inflectional morphemes only. There are actually multiple ways of
forming plural nouns in English. We can identify at least four – you can probably
think of even more. The four we’ll look at are: the productive -s morpheme (the
one that we use for new words); the non-productive -en morpheme; morpheme
internal change; and the null morpheme. Examples of each appear below.
(2) Plural marking in English
a. -s: 1 book, 2 books. . .
DR
b. -en: 1 child, 2 children. . .
c.
morpheme internal change: 1 goose, 2 geese. . .
d. null morpheme: 1 deer, 2 deer. . .
Languages change all the time, and they change for many different reasons
and in systematic ways. Historical linguistics is the subfield that studies
language change, however, it is certainly not the only subfield interested in
language change. Historical change can affect the morphology of a language
too. What we see in the example of the English plural is a couple of different
things. First, we see that speakers today use the plural -s when faced with a
new word that needs to be plural. For example, most of you will agree that
we would say 2 MP3s not 2 MP3en. We call the -s morpheme regular and
productive. It is regular because it is the morpheme we regularly use to indicate
plural and it is productive because it is used when a new word enters the lexicon
and needs to be plural.
We also see that the plural morpheme in English has several different forms.
We call these individual forms morphs. Morphs are the different phonological
realizations of a given morpheme. In fact, the plural morpheme -s actually has
three different pronunciations [-s], [-@z], and [-z] as in cat[s], dog[z], and fish[@z]
(as in different species of fish). We say that [-s], [-@z], and [-z] are allomorphs
of the -s plural morpheme. We also say that the English plural morpheme has
four distinct morphs that can be used to produce the same meaning – the -s
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form, -en form, the morpheme internal change form, and the null morph
form. By morpheme internal change we mean that the middle of the root
morpheme actually changes its pronunciation to indicate the singular/plural
distinction. Other examples of pluralization in English by morpheme internal
change include mouse - mice, louse - lice and man - men. The null morph is just
another way to say that there is no phonological change to indicate the change
from singular to plural - instead, we simply use the word as either singular or
plural. So why all the different forms? They come from historical change that’s
happened to English. At various times in the history of English different forms
have been productive. A combination of events has shaped the language such
that today we have only one productive form and the others are historic relics
still in the language.
There are a number of other non-productive plural formation processes in
English. Some of them come from borrowed words - words that came into
English from another language. Anyone who has studied biology might be
familiar with another plural morpheme used in taxonomic names – for example,
we can have one eukaryote, but if there is more than one we say eukaryota. These
words come to English from Latin, and most taxonomic names are Latinate, so
it should be no surprise that we use the Latinate singular and plural forms.
This raises a curious question. . . are these English words or Latin words?
We can add to our list of terms the following.
• regular: predictable morpheme change: e.g. boy, girl, dog, MP3 / boys,
girls, dogs, MP3s
DR
• irregular: not predictable morpheme change: e.g. child, ox, goose /
children, oxen, geese
• productive: refers to a morphological process repeatedly and predictably
used in a language to produce the same type: e.g. -ed, tired, purchased,
etc.
• morph: the specific form of a morpheme. Some morphemes have more
than one morph. English plural for example has a productive morph, the
suffix -s, and several irregular morphs — including the suffix -en. Furthermore each morph may have its own set of pronunciations - these are
called its allomorphs. The productive plural suffix -s has three different
pronunciations, depending on the sounds of the stem or root that it is
added to.
We are beginning to outline some of the basic patterns found in English
morphology. While we find both regular and irregular forms, we see that the
grammar of English is systematic and rule governed. This is true of the grammars of all human languages. It is worth noting that while all languages are
systematic and rule governed, they are so in different ways. If we look at English and Tohono O’odham a language of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern
United States, we can see that both are systematic and rule governed in terms
of their morphology, but in different ways.
In English if we want to discuss the woman who gave birth to us, we say,
my mother. We all, all of us speakers of English, know that my mother has two
morphemes and two words: my, a possessive pronoun, and mother, a noun. In
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Tohono O’odham we say, ñje’e. We all, all of us speakers of Tohono O’odham,
know that ñje’e has two morphemes and is only one word: ñ- a bound possessive pronoun morpheme ‘my’ and a root je’e ‘mother’. So all languages are
systematic and rule governed when it comes to morphology, but they will be so
in different ways sometimes and similar ways other times.
In the next sections we will look at morphemes in terms of what kinds of
information they convey, what forms they take, and what types of morphological
processes can occur in languages. Throughout, we will see that the principle of
compositionality and the concept of hierarchy can help us to better understand
the systematicity of languages. After all, morphemes are the smallest linguistic
units that have meaning, and they combine to create words, which are also units
of meaning.
3
Lexical Categories
DR
Morphemes work in a number of different ways across languages. We’ve seen
that they can be roots or they can be inflectional or derivational elements.
Linguists tend to think of morphemes as being stored in our mental lexicon.
This mental lexicon is like a dictionary, it contains each of the morphemes and
words listed like entries in a dictionary. Of course we really don’t know what
is in our brains other than neurons and cells, but it serves as a good metaphor
and gives us a way to talk about morphemes. In addition, many linguists are
working to discover what is in our brains. This is primarily the domain of
psycho-linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and neuro-linguistics. In our lexicon we
note that certain morphemes attach to certain words. We classify the words
into lexical categories or parts of speech. Most of us remember parts of speech
from elementary school.
3.1
Open lexical categories
In English we use a number of lexical categories: noun, verb, adjective, adverb,
to name a few. It is important to note that these categories must be defined
in terms of their morphological and syntactic properties. That is, they must
be defined in terms of what kinds of morphemes attach to them and where
they occur in terms of other words in an utterance. As Bloomfield (1926) tells
us, terms such as noun and verb will have different meanings depending on the
language under discussion. For example, in English blue is in the lexical category
adjective, but in Coeur d’Alene the word that indicates the same thing is a verb
in terms of how it functions in the grammar: which morphemes attach to it and
its relationship to other words. We will confine ourselves to English, but will
note that when using terms such as noun, verb, and adjective, these terms will
have a different meanings from language to language. We will need to define
them in terms of meaning (that is, semantically), and in terms of the types
of morphemes associated with them (that is, morphologically), and in terms of
how they function in larger units such as sentences (that is, syntactically).
In this section we are going to discuss in some detail the open class lexical
categories of English: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Open class lexical
categories are those that allow the addition of new forms. An open class of
words is one that speakers can add new words to freely. The words ‘MP3’,
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‘google’, and ‘truthiness’ are examples of new additions to the English lexicon
over the last few years - each added to the category of nouns and verbs. Open
class words are sometimes also called lexical words or content words.
We will focus our discussion on the morphology of each of these word classes
- but as we do so, it is important to note that not all members of a lexical
category will exhibit all the morphological properties of that lexical category.
Languages all seem to tolerate many exceptions to the rules. That is why we also
use semantic and syntactic properties to help us identify members of the various
lexical categories, as needed. One of the interesting things we will find is that
it’s remarkably difficult to identify the lexical categories of words - especially if
we see them in isolation. Your third grade teacher may have tried to convince
you that it’s easy to tell the difference between a noun and a verb, for example
- but linguists know that it’s not necessarily so simple.
3.1.1
Nouns
DR
We all learned in elementary school that nouns were words that referred to
persons, places, or things. It turns out that that is not a precise enough definition
because some nouns do not refer to persons, places, or things. For example, how
would you describe the following nouns: inspiration, turmoil, or happiness?
If they are things, they are certainly not so ‘thing-y’ as are the referents of
nouns like door, bicycle, or book. But things we call nouns do share certain
morphological and syntactic properties that help us identify them.
First, if an English word can be pluralized, it’s almost certainly a noun.
Words in other lexical categories do not generally take plural marking in English.
Let’s look at some words of English to see how we can identify nouns by looking
at plural marking. We’ll use the productive plural marking morpheme for this
test:
(3) a. dog + s = ‘more than one dog’
b. run + s = ‘more than one running events’ or ‘a third person singular
subject engages in running’
c.
blue + s = ‘more than one blue color’ or ‘sadness, or a form of music
expressing sadness’
Of course, the inflectional morphemes of English seem almost to have been
pre-designed to confuse us, since the productive plural morpheme, -s, is homophonous with (that is, sounds the same as) the third person present tense
singular subject marker -s, and as the possessive marker -’s. The form in (a)
shows a root ‘dog’, which we would probably think of as a noun, to which the
regular plural morpheme of English can be added to create an inflected word
that is a plural. We can tell that the -s in this word is the regular plural morpheme, and not any of its homophones, because the meaning of the inflected
word includes plurality.
The form in (b) shows a root ‘run’, which we would probably think of as a
verb. We can add the regular plural morpheme to this root, and in the process
of doing so we can derive a plural noun. You can think of this as a two-step
process. In step one, we take the verb ‘run’, and turn it into a noun meaning
‘the event of running’, perhaps by means of the null morph. For example, we
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DR
can say something like ‘I’d like to go for a run’. Once we’ve done that, we can
inflect that noun for plural number - perhaps to use in a sentence like ‘I wish I
had time to go for several runs each day.’
Of course, if we see the root run appearing with a bound morpheme -s, we
can also interpret that bound morpheme as the third person singular subject
present tense morpheme. When we make a sentence like ‘The dog runs around
the yard’, we must analyze run + s not as a plural, but as a singular subject
inflection. The third person singular subject marker is only found on verbs in
English, never on nouns.
The form in (c) shows the root blue that we would normally think of as an
adjective. If we add the regular plural morpheme of English to it, we get a word
that means plural types of blue - that is, we now have to understand blue to be
a noun. We also find a homophonous noun of English, ‘blues’, that refers to a
style of music, or a mood of sadness. Either way, the resulting word functions
as a noun.
The power of the regular plural morpheme of English is such that it seems to
be able to force us to understand the roots it attaches to as nouns. In English
any word that can have a singular or plural meaning of this sort is probably a
noun. In order to know whether we are supposed to understand a word as a
noun, we almost always need to see it in a context, though.
Second, we find that nouns in English can also be inflected for possession.
The productive inflectional possessive morpheme is homophonous with the plural
marker - but these are differentiated in spelling by the inclusion of an apostrophe
- either -’s or, in the case of a plural possessive, -s’. Any word that indicates
possession and includes one of the inflectional possessive allomorphs indicated
in writing by -’s or -s’ will be a noun. Just as with the plural morpheme, if
we add the possessive morpheme to a root that we might otherwise believe to
be something other than a noun, we get an interpretation in which that root is
going to be understood as a noun.
(4) a. dog + ’s = ‘belonging to a dog’
b. run + ’s = ‘belonging to a run’
c.
blue + ’s = ‘belonging to blue’
Example (a) above shows how we interpret a typical noun root when it is
inflected for possession. We would use this in a sentence like “The dog’s tail
is wagging”. If we inflect a typically verbal root with this morpheme – as in
(b) – we understand the word not as a verb but as a noun. For example, “The
run’s organization was confusing”. The word in (c) can be found in the title of a
popular children’s program, “Blue’s clues”, in which blue is actually functioning
as a character’s name - a proper noun.
So we can identify nouns based on the inflectional morphology that they
take. In English, the plural and possessive inflectional morphemes attach to
nouns. Nouns can also be created by the addition of derivational morphemes to
roots or stems that are belong to other lexical categories. When this happens,
we call it derivational nominalization.
In calling it that, we are making use of a fair number of derivational morphemes - includuing at least one nominalizer. We give you a morphological
breakdown of this term below, in which we label each morpheme with its lexical
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class. For derivational affixes, we assign each affix the lexical class that the affix
creates when it is added to a stem.
(5) deriv(e) -ation -al nomin -al -iz(e) -ation
verb
-noun -adj noun -adj -verb -noun
‘derivational nominalization.’
Some of the most common derivational morphemes of English are nominalizers. They include -ment, -ness, -ism, and -(a)tion. Do you know what these
derivational morphemes mean or what types of stems they attach to in order
to make nouns? If you want to find out, you can go to dictionary.com or the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online and do a search. Just type in the
morphemes as you see them here, with the dash, and you will find a discussion
of the rules for combining these with various types of stems.
English isn’t the only language with what can be described as derivational
nominalizing morphology. In fact, most, if not all, languages we know of seem
to have this kind of morphology. For example, Elson & Picket (1988) discuss
the -kuy an -i nominalizers in Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language of
Southern Mexico. (In these examples, when you see a vowel followed by a dot,
that simply means that the vowel is pronounced as long rather than short ). In
the following discussion of verbs, you will recognize the Sierra Popoluca roots
wı́k, pet, iš, huk, and pih that also appear here. Compare Sierra Popoluca
words in (6) with those in (7), and you will see how derivational nominalizing
morphology is used in this language. Is it similar to the English examples we
presented above? How so? How does it differ?
DR
(6) Sierra Popoluca Nominalizers -kuy and -i
a. wı́kkuy ‘food’
b. petkuy ‘broom’
c.
iškuy ‘eye’
d. hu·ki ‘cigarette’
e.
3.1.2
pi·ki ‘heat’
Verbs
Verb is a lexical category whose members are mostly identified by which inflectional morphemes attach to them. As we saw above there are four inflectional
morphemes in English that attach to verbs. They are repeated in Table 2.
If you see a word that has one of these inflectional morphemes, chances are
you have a English verb on your hands. It is important to remember that we
are talking about English here. For example, if we were talking about Japanese
and saw the past tense inflectional morpheme -katta on a word, we might have
an adjective on our hands. In Japanese the inflectional past tense morpheme
-katta can attach to adjectives like shiro ‘white’ giving shirokatta ‘was white’.
Languages are rule governed and systematic, but often in their own ways.
We should remember that tense locates the action or event expressed by
the verb somewhere in time in relation to the time of the utterance. In English
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Inflectional Morphemes
3rd person present tense -s
progressive -ing
past tense -ed
past participle -en/-ed
Bischoff and Fountain
Examples
she walks
she is walking
she walked
she had walked/written
Table 2: Inflectional Morphemes that Identify Verbs
Future
You will shoot.
You will score
She will shoot.
She will score
Present
You shoot
You score
She shoots
She scores
Past
You shot.
You scored.
She shot.
She scored.
Table 3: Tense in English: Future, Present, Past
DR
there is a bound inflectional past tense morpheme, but what about present tense
and future tense? It turns out that English indicates the present tense with a
null morpheme except in the case of third person singular. The future tense is
indicated with a free morpheme will. This is illustrated in Table 3 using the
second person and third person to illustrate.
Aspect expresses the state of an action or an event. In general, aspect tells
us if an event or action is about to start, starting, has started, is in progress, is
complete, or is at any stage in between. In English we indicate progressive
aspect with the bound inflectional morpheme -ing. This morpheme indicates
that the event is in progress. For example, you are reading, and thus in the
process of the action to read.
English has another inflectional morpheme that indicates aspect. This is the
participle, or participial form, which is associated with two morphs, usually
written -ed or -en. This bound inflectional morpheme indicates the completive
aspect – that the action of the verb is over, or completed. Note that one of
these morphs is homophonous with the past tense suffix -ed - but this one
means something different. The participial form of the verb often occurs with
the auxiliary verb to have in English, as we’ve illustrated in Table 2, for the
verbs walk and write. In order to convince you that the participle is different
than the past tense morpheme of English, we give you some example sentences
that use both.
(7) English tenses versus aspects:
a. Present tense (simple): The puppy walks.
b. Present tense, progressive aspect: The puppy is walking.
c.
Present tense, completive aspect: The puppy has walked.
d. Past tense (simple): The puppy walked.
e.
Past tense, progressive aspect: The puppy was walking.
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Past tense, completive aspect: The puppy had walked.
g. Future tense (simple): The puppy will walk.
h. Future tense, progressive aspect: The puppy will be walking.
i.
Future tense, completive aspect: The puppy will have walked.
DR
We encourage you to substitute lots of different verbs in the sentences above,
in order to isolate the different participial morphs that can be used to mark
completive aspect. If you use the verb read ’ in these sentences, for example, you
may notice some irregularities (apart from the fact that the resulting sentences
posit a very smart puppy). Notice that the present tense, past tense, and
participle of read are all spelled the same, although we certainly don’t pronounce
them the same. Can you guess why that might be the case? The progressive
aspect is much less irregular in English than the completive aspect is - the
progressive morpheme -ing seems to have only one morph. Can you think of a
verb in English that cannot take the progressive suffix?
In the section on nouns, we claimed that you can identify nouns in English
based on their morphology - nouns are words that can take plural and possessive
morphology in English. In this section, we’ve shown that verbs in English can
also be identified morphologically. Verbs are words that can take tense and
aspect morphology. Your third grade teacher probably taught you that verbs
were action words - but again, we find that this is an oversimplification. What
is the action expressed by verbs such as be, seem, or appear ?
Tense and aspect, like person and number, are grammatical categories. Comrie (1976) notes that some languages are tense languages and some are aspect
languages in terms of their systems of bound morphemes. English seems to be
both a tense language and aspect language because it has a few bound morphemes that indicate both tense and aspect.
Regardless of the particulars of any language’s morphological system, it
should be remembered that any language can communicate the meanings of
any tense or aspect combination found in any other language - even if does not
have any bound inflectional morphemes to do so. Languages can always use
free morphemes - alone or in combination - to convey this information. In fact,
English has many ways to indicate tense and aspect beyond the few bound morphemes we’ve discussed. Think about the meanings of the words yesterday, now,
immediately, and whenever. Don’t we use these to convey information about the
time of an event? Can you think of others? We may also use whole phrases for
this purpose. For example, “I’ll do my chores in a little while.” We can do the
same thing for communicating different states of completion or incompletion of
an action or event - that is, different aspects. How do the phrases almost done,
just getting started, just now completed, totally finished communicate information about aspect ? Languages will always meet the needs of their speakers. Or
put a different way, speakers can always find a way to express what ever it is
that they need to express. Where languages differ is not in what information
they can convey, but rather in how they package that information in terms of
their grammars. Some languages require speakers to inflect their verbs morphologically for aspect but not tense, others vice-versa. Some languages don’t
have any bound morphemes to indicate tense or aspect! But all speakers of all
languages can talk about when and how things happen.
English has some derivational morphemes that take roots or stems that are
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not verbs, and makes them into verbs – that is, we have derivational verbalizing morphology. See, for example, the morphological structure of the phrase
derivational verbalizing morphology - and look for the bound morpheme labeled
as verb:
(8) deriv(e) -ation -al verb -al -iz(e) -ation
verb
-noun -adj noun -adj -verb -noun
‘derivational verbalization.’
Have we confused you by labeling the root verb as a noun in this example?
We did that because the morpheme ‘verb’ is a noun - we can tell that it is by
seeing if it can take plural marking. Do you agree that the polymorphemic word
verbs refers to “more than one verb”? In any case, the suffix -ize is one of the
derivational verbalizing morphemes of English. Can you think of any more?
There are a lot to pick from, and we hope you’ll enjoy thinking of them.
In the section on nouns, we saw the Sierra Popoluca roots wı́k, pet, iš,
huk, and pih occurring with one of two nominalizing morphemes. In the next
example we see the same roots occurring with the aspect morpheme -pa. Since
verbs occur with aspect in Sierra Populuca, we can be assured that these roots
are verbs and that the nominalizing morphemes identified above are derivational.
(9) Sierra Popoluca Aspect -pa
a. wı́kpa ‘he eats’
b. petpa ‘he sweeps’
c.
iišpa ‘he sees it’
DR
d. hukpa ‘he smokes’
e.
3.1.3
pihpa ‘it gets hot’
Adjectives
By now we hope that you have concluded that the purely semantic, or meaningrelated, definitions of lexical classes that you learned in elementary school are
not very reliable. This is also true of the category adjective in English. You
probably learned that adjectives refer to properties or qualities of things. The
problem with that definition is that words that refer to properties or qualities
in English may not always be adjectives. For example:
(10) The meek shall inherit the earth.
The word meek is clearly identifying a property of something, or someone –
but in that sentence, the word meek is functioning as a noun.
We may do better to identify adjectives syntactically in English - if you see
the word in a sentence. Adjectives can appear between an article and a noun,
to modify the meaning of the noun, as in the following sentence.
(11) The yellow horses galloped away.
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Number of Syllables
One Syllable
Two Syllables
Three or More
Syllables
Adjectives
big
bright
long
happy
fluffy
honest
beautiful
complicated
reliable
Bischoff and Fountain
Comparative
bigger
brighter
longer
happier
fluffier
more honest
more beautiful
more complicated
more reliable
Superlative
biggest
brightest
longest
happiest
fluffiest
most honest
most beautiful
most complicated
most reliable
Table 4: Adjectives: comparative and superlative
Even here, we have a problem, though. There are other lexical classes of
words that can occupy the same position and function, other than just adjectives. For example quantifiers, words that indicate the number of entities
being discussed, can often be substituted for adjectives in sentences of English:
(12) The three horses galloped away.
DR
Morphologically, we can identify forms in the lexical category adjective in
English by looking for the superlative or comparative forms. However, there are
some curious rules about how the superlative and comparative work based on
the syllable structure of a word. Once again, we see language is systematic and
rule governed - even though the rules might be complicated. This time the rules
of English cross two subfields of linguistics, phonology and morphology.
In English the superlative bound inflectional morpheme is written -est and
the comparative bound inflectional morpheme is written -er. These morphemes
attach to adjectives that have one syllable. If the adjective has three or more
syllables, however, these morphemes can not attach to it, and we have to use
the free morpheme most to indicate the superlative, and more to indicate the
comparative.
What about adjectives with two syllables? The bound inflectional morphemes -est and -er can attach to such adjectives — but we can alternatively
use the free morphemes most and more - depending on the particular adjective.
We give you some examples of the use of the comparative and superlative bound
inflectional morphemes in Table 4.
Do you notice anything similar about the two syllable adjectives that take
the -er and the -est versus those that prefer more and most ? Can you come up
with a hypothesis regarding these forms?
What about fun and pretty? Is it funner and prettier or more fun and more
pretty? It seems that we have a case of the rule regarding adjectives with one
syllable being violated if anyone finds these are all acceptable. However, there
is probably a good reason why some people think it is ok to say, “Riding horses
was more fun than cleaning stalls” or “Nina gets more pretty each year”. Can
you think of any reasons why the rules of a language may allow some flexibility
from time to time?
Finally, there are a few derivational morphemes that can be used in English
to make a non-adjective stem into an adjective. Some of the more common
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adjective-forming derivational morphemes are, -able, -ous, and -al. If you see a
word with one of these bound morphemes then you probably have a polymorphemic adjective.
3.1.4
Adverbs
DR
Adverbs are a tricky lot morphologically in English, but they make up the last
of the open class lexical categories. It seems it is easiest to identify adverbs by
their syntactic properties. Adverbs modify a number of forms such as verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, and even entire sentences. Morphologically, adverbs can
often be found by looking for the bound derivational adverbial morpheme -ly.
For example, words like quickly, handily and cutely are all adverbs - and they
have been derived by adding the adverb-forming -ly to the adjectives quick,
handy and cute.
However, there is also an adjective-forming derivational morpheme -ly in
English. It is found in words like lovely - the word with which we began this
unit! You will also find adjective-forming -ly in the words kingly, dastardly, and
cowardly.
Worse (or better?) yet, not all adverbs in English contain the morpheme
-ly. Some very common adverbs, such as very, do not contain the derivational
adverb-forming morpheme.
A syntactic clue to help you out is that adverbs seem to be able to move
around in sentences. As an adverb you get to move around and hang out with
different lexical categories — unlike adjectives that get stuck next to nouns or
other adjectives all the time, or get sandwiched between determiners and nouns.
The following example illustrates how some adverbs can move around rather
freely in a sentence, while adjectives generally cannot. A sentence preceded by
the symbol * is one that we think is ill-formed. Note that both the adverb
slowly and the adjective cuddly have a bound derivational -ly morpheme. Can
you explain the difference between the two morphemes? Do you agree that the
starred sentences are ill-formed in the variety of English you speak?
(13) a. Slowly I moved toward the cuddly grizzly.
b. I slowly moved toward the cuddly grizzly.
c.
I moved slowly toward the cuddly grizzly.
d. I moved toward the cuddly grizzly slowly.
e.
* Slowly I moved cuddly toward the grizzly.
f.
* Slowly I cuddly moved toward the grizzly.
g. * Cuddly slowly I moved toward the grizzly.
In sum, the open lexical categories include noun, verb, adjective and adverb. We can offer morphological criteria for identifying these categories in
English as follows. Nouns can usually be inflected for plurality and possession.
Verbs can usually be inflected for tense and aspect. Adjectives can usually be
inflected for comparative and superlative. Adverbs in English are often formed
with the adverb-forming derivational morpheme -ly.
We’ve pointed out, though, that these morphological criteria are not sufficient in and of themselves to reliably identify the lexical class of a word, due
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to the various exceptional and irregular forms we find in the language. We’ve
offered syntactic, and semantic criteria to help us reliably identify the lexical
class of a given word. No one strategy works all the time, but usually we can
use all three, in various measures, to identify word classes in English. And we
will always be better at identifying the class of a word if we can see that word
in a context, rather than seeing it in isolation only.
In this regard, English is not unusual among languages of the world. Every
language that we’re aware of uses at least some of these open word classes.
And in every language that we’re aware of, we find morphological, syntactic
and semantic evidence for the systematic, and rule-governed categorization of
different words into these classes.
3.2
Closed lexical categories
There are a number of other lexical categories in English, the remainder of
which we will refer to as closed categories. That means that new words
are rarely, if ever, added to them. Closed category words typically serve a
syntactic function, rather than having a clear, dictionary-type meaning. For
this reason, the categories are also frequently called functional categories,
and the words that belong to them are called function words or grammatical
words. The categories we’ll discuss are pronouns, determiners, prepositions,
and conjunctions. There are other closed categories in English, and in other
languages, but we’ll focus on these. We’ll start with pronouns in English because
they are a lexical category that illustrate a number of grammatical categories
that are often indicated morphologically.
Pronouns
DR
3.2.1
In English, pronouns are forms that stand in for nouns or noun phrases, are a
closed class, and are free forms. We can see this in the examples below, where
she replaces Nina (a noun) and it replaces the big furry black and white panda
(a noun phrase).
(14) Pronouns substituting for nouns
a. Nina likes pandas.
b. She likes pandas.
c.
The big furry black and white panda likes Nina.
d. It likes Nina.
There are five categories of pronouns in English. These are listed here with
examples.
(15) a. personal pronouns: indicate person, number, case, human/nonhuman and reflexive (e.g. I, you, we, us, he, she, it, them)
b. indefinite pronouns: stand in for unknown or unspecified elements
(e.g. anyone, someone, whoever, some)
c.
interrogative pronouns: stand in for an unknown element to form
a question (e.g. who, whose, what, which)
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d. demonstrative pronouns: point to things previously mentioned or
in the physical environment (e.g. that, this, these, those)
e.
relative pronouns: act as the subject or object of a dependent/subordinate
clause to link the clause to a preceding noun phrase (e.g. who,
whose, which, that as in “People who smoke annoy me” or “The
book which/that I am reading is interesting.” )
DR
Pronouns in English are free morphemes. In some languages pronouns are
bound. Sometimes bound pronouns are called agreement, it depends on your theory of pronouns whether you call them bound pronouns or agreement markers.
Many of the languages of the Americas have bound pronouns. Coeur d’Alene,
a Salish language of the Pacific Northwest, is one such language. So is Navajo,
an Athabaskan language of the American Southwest. You’ll see examples from
each of these languages below.
In the examples below, we use interlinear glossing, which means that each
example sentence will be written in multiple lines. The top line is the sentence
as it would be pronounced in the language. If you know the International Phonetic Alphabet, you will be able to sound out the words - but if you don’t know
it, this may be a bit mysterious to you. The second line is the morpheme-bymorpheme breakdown. You’ll see some of the words from the top line are broken
down into their constituent parts, using dashes. The third line is the morphemeby-morpheme gloss. This gives you some information about what each content
morpheme means, and the function that each grammatical morpheme fulfills.
For example, the abbreviation det stands for determiner - which is a closed
class that we’ll discuss further on in this section. The abbreviation irr stands
for irrealis aspect, which is used to report things that haven’t yet happened.
The word should in the last line is an attempt to translate the irrealis aspectual
meaning into English (which is a language in which that aspect is not morpho√
logically marked). The square-root symbol, , marks the root morpheme that
the pronoun attaches to. Finally, the last line is the free translation - it gives
you a brief English translation of the sentence as a whole. We realize that these
examples can seem a bit complicated, so we use bold face to mark the bound
pronoun we want you to see in each line.
(16) Bound pronouns in Coeur d’Alene
hoi ìE smaı́Pčn’
nEP č@ngw @nı́t@m
√
˙
hoi ìE smaı́Pčn’
nEP čn- gw int-m
˙
√
then det Grizzly.bear irr I- call-m
‘Then, Grizzly Bear [said], “I should call”.’
Notice that in the Coeur d’Alene example the morpheme čn-, ‘I’ is a bound
pronoun. You should also notice that there is some phonological change between
the first line, which is what is spoken, and the second line, which shows the
individual morphemes.
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Singular
1st
2nd
3rd
human m/f
3rd
human n
3rd
non-human n
Bischoff and Fountain
Subject
(nominative)
I
you
he
she
they
Object
(accusative)
me
you
him
her
them
Possessive
(genitive)
mine
yours
his
hers
theirs
Reflexive
it
it
its
itself
myself
yourself
himself/
herself
themselves
Table 5: English Personal Pronouns: Singular
(17) Bound pronouns in Navajo (Young & Morgan 1980:763)
Nitélii ’atiingóó yilwoì
√
Nitélii
’atiin
-góó yilwoì
√
your
mule the.road -along it.is.running
‘Your mule is running along the road.’
DR
Notice that in the Navajo example the bound morpheme ni-, ‘your’ is also a
bound pronoun. Navajo does have some pronouns that are free morphemes, and
these are often used along with bound pronouns for emphasis. If you speak
Spanish, you might be familiar with the use of free pronouns for emphasis, as
in (a) below. You can omit the free pronoun from the sentence as well, as in
(b). The two sentences mean roughly the same thing, it’s just that in the first
one the speaker is emphasizing the ‘I’:
(18) An emphatic free pronoun in Spanish
a. Yo hablo Inglés. “I speak English.”
b. Hablo Inglés. “I speak English.”
Pronouns can indicate different grammatical information in different languages. In English, pronouns indicate person (e.g. 1st , 2nd , and 3rd ), number
(e.g. singular or plural), gender (e.g. masculine, feminine, neuter, human,
and non-human), and case (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive). English also
has a set of pronouns used to indicate the reflexive which we discuss in our
introductory module. English singular pronouns are listed in Table 5 and plural
pronouns are listed in Table 6.
We suspect that the grammatical categories person, number and gender are
things you’ve heard of before, but if you are only, or primarily, an English
speaker you may not be familiar with the grammatical category case. If, on the
other hand, you’ve learned any Latin, French, Russian, Finnish or Japanese (or
any of a wide variety of other languages), you will have had to grapple with
grammatical case. Case refers to the role that a word or phrase plays in the
syntax of a sentence. For our purposes, we’ll focus only on those cases that
English inflects for: nominative, accusative and genitive.
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Plural
1st
2nd
3rd
Subject
(nominative)
we
you
they
Object
(accusative)
us
you
them
Bischoff and Fountain
Possessive
(genitive)
ours
yours
theirs
Reflexive
ourselves
yourselves
themselves
Table 6: Personal Pronouns: Plural
Nominative case is used to mark subjects of sentences. Accusative marks
objects. Take a look at the following examples, in which the nominative pronoun
is written in bold face and the accusative is underlined.
(19) a. She welcomed him.
b. He welcomed her.
c.
They visited the puppies with her.
DR
Examples (b) and (c) both use the accusative form of the pronoun. From this
we can conclude that in addition to marking the object of a verb, the accusative
case in English also marks the object of a preposition.
Genitive case is used to mark possessors. The bound inflectional morpheme
-’s is a marker of genitive case, and that is English’s only bound morpheme that
inflects for case. We use -’s to mark a noun for genitive case. The possessive
pronouns are inherently marked for genitive case - so we don’t have to add the
bound morpheme -’s to them.
You may have noticed that in Table 5 we have a third person singular human
‘n’ (neuter) morpheme ‘they’. This form hasn’t made its way into all academic
writing yet, but we suspect it will within in perhaps the next 5 to 10 years.
Why do we have this morpheme listed? Well for some of you the answer may
be simple: because you use it. As we’ve noted, language is always changing.
Languages change to meet the needs of the speakers. Well, American English
needed a morpheme that indicated third person singular human neuter. Why?
Because in the past the third person singular human masculine, ‘he’, was
used generically - even when ‘he’ could be a ‘she’. For example, it used to be
acceptable to say something like this:
(20) A veterinarian must study the physiology of many animals. He must be
able to treat mammals, reptiles, and even birds.
A generation or two of speakers have gradually been deciding that the generic
‘he’ had to go, as it was identified with a set of cultural notions about the
roles and stereotypes of men and women in the US and other English-speaking
countries. This change in the culture is leading to a change in language. What
is especially interesting about this is that pronouns are a closed class of words.
By definition, closed classes of words cannot be readily added to by speakers.
Did English speakers create a new word to indicate third person singular human
neuter ? Some have tried, but their attempts have been unsuccessful. You may
have seen some of these failed attempts - have you run across odd words such
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DR
as co or zhe being used in place of generic ‘he’ ? If not, do not worry. These
attempts were ill-fated, and did not work.
What does seem to be working is to just borrow a pronoun that already
exists, as a plural: ‘they’, and let it function as a singular too. The same kind
of thing happened a few hundred years ago with the second person nominative
singular and plural ‘you’. It used to be the case that English speakers used ‘ye’
for the singular and ‘you’ for the plural in the second person. But as English
changed, we gradually lost ‘ye’ and let ‘you’ function as both singular and plural.
Interestingly, English did have a phase in its history when it had a genderneutral third person singular pronoun - at least in some dialects. This pronoun,
ou, had gone from the language before the emergence of Modern English in
the 17th century. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, English speakers
have been solving a problem that was created, apparently, several hundred years
before.
These examples shows us that languages will change to meet the needs of the
speakers, and will do so in systematic ways. Of course there are some speakers
who cringe every time they hear they as the third person singular neuter, but we
suspect they are fighting a losing battle. This innovation seems to be spreading
in its acceptability, and since it is a perfectly rational type of change, it’s likely
it will eventually gain universal acceptance.
Individual morphemes that include several types of grammatical information, like person, number, case and gender, are referred to as portmanteau
morphemes. English monomorphemic pronouns such as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘you’ and
‘they’ are portmanteau morphemes, because they encode many grammatical
categories in a single morpheme. The Coeur d’Alene morpheme čn- above is
also a portmanteau morpheme. It indicates first person, singular number and
nominative case. Notice that it does not indicate gender like the English morpheme. By contrast the English bound inflectional past tense morpheme -ed is
not a portmanteau morpheme. Can you explain why?
3.2.2
Determiners
Determiners are closed-class morphemes that introduce nouns. English determiners are free morphemes. The words you’ve probably learned to call articles
(e.g. the, a, and an) are one subset of the class of determiners, but they are not
the only words that are included in this class.
(21) Determiners
a. A cat is napping.
b. The cat is napping.
c.
That cat is napping.
d. My cat is napping.
e.
One cat is napping.
f.
Every cat is napping.
The class of determiners can include demonstrative pronouns and some possessive pronouns, as well as quantifiers. Note that there are some possessive
pronouns of English that cannot function as determiners.
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(22) Not determiners
a. * Mine cat is napping.
b. * Yours cat is napping.
c.
* Hers cat is napping.
d. * Ours cat is napping.
e.
3.2.3
* Theirs cat is napping.
Prepositions
Prepositions are closed class morphemes that relate a noun phrase to some
other element in the sentence. In English, the prepositions are free morphemes,
and most are monomorphemic. Here are a few of the prepositions of English,
given in bold face, with their noun phrase underlined:
(23) Prepositions
a. The cat is napping under the table.
b. The cat is napping on the fluffy pillow.
c.
The cat is napping in the box.
d. The cat is napping through the night.
e.
The cat is napping for an hour.
f.
The cat is napping with her very happy kittens.
DR
g. The cat is napping between her very happy kittens and the toasty fireplace.
We think that it’s probably easier to understand the definition of the term
preposition when you see some examples than it is when you’re just given a
definitional statement like the one above. That definition is awfully vague, isn’t
it? This is because the functions of prepositions in languages are actually many
and varied — but prepositions always introduce noun phrases (complete with
their determiners, adjectives, and any other modifiers) into a sentence, and set
up a relationship between that noun phrase and something else in the sentence
(in the above cases, that something else is the cat’s napping).
Do you notice in the examples given here that the preposition always comes
before the noun phrase it introduces? The word preposition is actually polymorphemic. The pre- morpheme means ‘before’. Some languages use postpositions instead of prepositions. If English were a postpositional language, we
would say the sentences above as they’re written below.
(24) Postpositions (in an alternative universe, where English used them instead
of prepositions)
a. The cat is napping the table under.
b. The cat is napping the fluffy pillow on.
c.
The cat is napping the box in.
d. The cat is napping the night through.
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e.
The cat is napping an hour for.
f.
The cat is napping her very happy kittens with.
g. The cat is napping her very happy kittens and the toasty fireplace between.
As far as we know, most languages choose either prepositions or postpositions, we don’t normally see languages that allow both. And we can now
introduce a generic term for the closed class of relational morphemes that includes both prepositions and postpositions: adpositions. We can use that
term if we want to discuss these kinds of words as they occur in prepositional
and/or postpositional languages.
3.2.4
Conjunctions
The last set of closed class words we’ll discuss is the class of conjunctions.
Did you ever get to hear the Schoolhouse Rock song about conjunctions? If not,
you should google it, and listen to the youtube video. It actually gives a pretty
good definition of conjunction. We quote here from the song lyrics:
Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words
and phrases and clauses. Conjunction junction, how’s that function?
You’ve got ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘or’, they’ll get you very far.
DR
Conjunctions are closed class morphemes that are used to join words, phrases
or sentences together. And the coordinating conjunctions of English are listed
here, with examples illustrating the conjunction of different kinds of elements
in which the conjoined elements are underlined:
(25) Coordinating conjunctions of English
a. and: I like dogs and cats.
b. or: I like dogs or cats.
c.
but: I like dogs but I like cats more.
d. yet: I like dogs yet I love cats.
e.
so: I like dogs so I think I’d like cats.
If you try these words out in sentences, you’ll find that they like to join
two things that are similar to each other. Look at the following sentences,
and see if you agree with our judgments about their well-formedness. Actually,
they’re not our judgements — we take these from a posting to the Language
Log, a blog maintained by a number of linguists around the US, which you can
find at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu. The post from which we draw these
examples is dated September 24, 2010.
(26) English coordinating conjunction in use
a. We will save you energy and money!
b. * We will save energy and you money!
c.
We will save us energy and you money!
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The authors of the blog entry saw the sentence in (b) on a sign in a mall,
and noted that they thought it was not right. What do you think? Can you
come up with a hypothesis about why (b) might be ill-formed, while (a) and
(c) seem OK? Can you come up with other examples of ungrammatical uses of
conjunction in English?
In addition to the coordinating conjunctions listed above — each of which
is monomorphemic, English also has some conjunctions that are built of two
separate morphemes that actually appear at different places in the sentence.
These are called correlative conjunctions, and they include the following.
(27) Correlative conjunctions of English
a. either — or: I want either a puppy or a kitten.
b. neither — nor: I have neither a puppy nor a kitten.
c.
both — and: I have both a puppy and a kitten.
d. not — but: I have not a puppy but a kitten.
e.
whether — or: Whether you have a puppy or a kitten is your decision.
Finally, we have conjunctions that introduce subordinate elements into a
sentence. These are, unsurprisingly, called subordinating conjunctions.
(28) Some subordinating conjunctions of English
a. that: I know that I will someday have a pony.
b. because: I got a pony because I finally saved enough money.
when: I will get a pony when I have prepared a barn for him.
DR
c.
Conjunctions of all of these types serve to connect two pieces of a sentence
together. They form a closed class — can you imagine introducing a new conjunction to English? We would not expect that to happen very often.
In sum, all of the closed classes of words we’ve discussed here share at least
the following properties. First, each class is relatively small and stable over
time. That is, there can be historical changes that affect closed class words
— but it is remarkably difficult to coin new words in any of these categories.
Second, each class fulfills some requirement of the grammar of language. Third,
these morphemes tend to have functions more clearly than definitions. It’s very
hard to say what the words ‘so’ or ‘of’ mean in English. But if we say that ‘so’
is a conjunction and ‘of’ is a preposition, we can begin to understand how they
are used.
4
Morphological Processes
Next we turn to how words are formed, or morphological processes. There are a
number of different ways that languages can, and do, create new words. In this
section we will look at some of the ways in which English creates new words.
We will start with the process of affixation.
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Type of Affixation
prefixation
suffixation
circumfixation
infixation
Type of Affix
prefix
suffix
circumfix
infix
Bischoff and Fountain
Where it Goes
left edge
right edge
both sides
inside the word
Example
pre- as in prepay
-ed as in walked
en- -en as in enlighten
f**king as in inf**kingsane
Table 7: Types of Affixation
4.1
Affixation
DR
Affixation is a morphological process where one morpheme attaches to another.
A slightly more technical definition would be that affixation is a morphological
process where lexical or grammatical information is added to a root or stem.
The morphemes that attach to the root or stem are simply affixes. There are
several differen types of affixation and thus several types of affixes. Table 7 lists
the different processes of affixation and provides examples from English.
Prefixation and suffixation are probably quite familiar to most English speakers, as is infixation – only most probably didn’t know that’s what you call it. In
English, it seems there are only a few morphemes that can be infixes and these
are generally explicatives (bad words!). They follow very strict rules in English
and generally occur before the first stressed syllable of multisyllabic words. Circumfixation is quite rare in languages that have been studied. A circumfix is a
morpheme that has two parts. One part attaches to the left edge of the root or
stem and the other part attaches to the right edge. In fact, technically speaking there are no circumfixes in English. What are often given as examples of
circumfixation in English are really examples of prefixes and suffixes that occur
together. Examples like those given in table 7 are generally analyzed as the
bound derivational intensifier morpheme en- plus the stem lighten. The stem
lighten can be analyzed as the root light plus the bound inflectional participle
morpheme -en.
One example of a true circumfix comes from Tuwali Ifugao, a language of the
Philippines. In Tuwali Ifugao, the circumfix ka- -an is a derivational morpheme
that can change a verb into a noun.
(29) The circumfix ka–an
a. baddang: a root ‘help’ v.
b. ka–an: circumfix that turns verbs into nouns
c.
kabaddangan: ‘helpfulness’ n.
Reduplication occurs when a prefix or suffix repeats certain phonological
elements of the root or stem.2 There are many types of reduplication in the
world’s languages and some are listed in table 8.3
2 Examples come from the following sources: Macdonald & Darjowidjojo (1967), Ghomeshi
et al. (2004), Sommer (1981), Stevens (1968), Kiparsky (1987), Sproat (1992).
3 For examples of English reduplication see the Corpus of English contrastive focus reduplications at http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/linguistics/russell/redup-corpus.html.
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Type
Complete
Partial
Phonological
Change
Root/Stem
buku
orang
job
elbmben
garadus
abit
bali
iba
udan
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Reduplication
buku-buku ‘books’
orang-orang ‘people’
job-job ‘contrast’
elbmbelbmben ‘red’
dusgaradus ‘fast and sloppy’
bitabit ‘finally’
bolabali ‘return’
ibaibu ‘mother’
udanudEn ‘rain’
Language
Bahasa Indonesian
Bahasa Indonesian
English
Uw Oykangand
Madurese
Madurese
Javanese
Javanese
Javanese
Table 8: Reduplication
Root
En’is
caq
Reduplication
E’En’En’is
caqcaqaqElip@p
Gloss
‘little ones went off one by one’
‘he fell on his back’
Table 9: The Best Examples of Reduplication Ever
DR
The Javanese examples are rather complex. The reduplicative morpheme
indicates habitual-repetitive aspect. That means the event happens habitually
and repeatedly. So if it always rains and rains you would say udan udEn in
Javanese. In Table 8 the morphemes are indicated as prefixes. However, if you
look closely you will see the vowels are changed in the Javanese examples. There
are some very complicated phonological rules that determine if the left or the
right form will have a vowel change. No matter which it is, the speakers will
always get it right. It would take about a third of a page for us to write out
the rules for these vowel changes. So we won’t, but you can go to Sproat (1992)
chapter two and read about it yourself.
One last set of examples of reduplication, this perhaps one of the greatest
examples on Earth, comes from Gladys Reichard’s 1938 grammar of the Coeur
d’Alene language. These examples include all the types of reduplication we
saw above. Can you identify all the reduplicated elements in Table 9? In
caqcaqaqElip@p the last two morphemes are -ip-@p. The morpheme -ip is actually
an affix that is reduplicated as -@p!
4.2
Truncation, Compounding and Blending
We can sometimes create a new word by removing material from an existing
word, and pronouncing the remainder. When we do this, we call it truncation.
Some other authors will refer to the same process as clipping, you can use
whichever term you would like. Examples of truncation in English are often
found in nicknaming, which can be more fancily referred to as hypochoristic
formation.
(30) Some English truncations
a. refrigerator = fridge
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b. Jonathon = Jon
c.
Christopher = Chris or Toph or Topher
English speakers have a long and storied history of truncating long words to
form shorter ones. Have you ever used the word delish to mean delicious? Can
you think of other commonly truncated words in English?
We can also create new words by combining free morphemes together. This
is called compounding. A few examples of English compound words are given
below.
(31) Common compounds in English
a. black + bird = blackbird
b. chalk + board = chalkboard
c.
hot + dog = hotdog
DR
In English, we sometimes write compound words as one whole word with
no spaces — as in the examples above — but we also sometimes use a hyphen
between the words (as in the word single-minded ) or even leave a space between
them (as in the word White House). These different orthographic, or spelling,
conventions can make the identification of compound words in English a little
tricky. To make matters worse, these conventions are often followed by only
some people, and often inconsistently. Your authors are still trying to find out
whether we should be writing about webpages or web-pages or web pages, for
example. Smart and competent English writers disagree with each other about
which, if any, of these is correct!
So how can we identify a true compound word, as opposed to a sequence
of separate words? One clue is the stress pattern - that is, the pattern of
strong versus weakly pronounced syllables. In English, every content word has
at most one primary stress. So we can try pronouncing the compound with one
stressed syllable, and see whether that sounds right. For words that we know to
be compounds, like blackbird, we can actually differentiate the compound word
from the sequence of words in a phrase. Try saying black bird as two separate
words. Then say blackbird as one word. Can you hear that in the compound,
you stress the morpheme black but not the morpheme bird ? But when you say
them as separate words, you’ll stress each of these morphemes separately?
We admit that sometimes the stress test we’ve outlined above can be confusing. Luckily, there’s another way of identifying a compound word, and this
has to do with the meaning of the word. The meaning of a compound word is
usually based on the meanings of the words that make it up – but it can drift
away from those base meanings and take on a more specific meaning of its own.
Consider the following examples that show that the meaning of a compound
word can become detached from the meanings of its parts.
(32) Compound words showing semantic drift
a. blackbird: “There is a rare genetic mutation that can result in albinism in blackbirds. The result of this mutation is a small number
of white blackbirds.”
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b. White House: “The house where the US President lives was recently
painted blue by clever vandals. Until it can be repainted by White
House staff, the White House will be blue.”
If you contrast the compounds blackbird and White House with the corresponding word sequences that are not compounds – that is, with the phrases
black bird and white house – you’ll find that you cannot use the latter in the
same way. It is nonsensical to refer to a white black bird, or a blue white house,
we think. Do you agree?
Another type of word formation, blending, is the process of combining some
parts of two words to create a new word. You might think of this as a process
that begins with the truncation of two words, and that ends by compounding
the results! Some common blends in English are found here.
(33) Common blends in English
a. smoke + fog = smog
b. motor + hotel = motel
c.
breakfast + lunch = brunch
DR
The meaning of the blend usually combines in some way the meanings of the
words that are used to create it. There is currently a lot of blending being used
by English speakers to create new, and sometimes funny, open class words. Even
though nobody ever explicitly taught you how to make blends, you are probably
quite good at it. We’ve heard from many students who find the formation of new
blends just plain fun. We present some innovative blends that we’ve recently
heard. Have you heard, or made, any new blends recently?
(34) Novel blends in English
a. Brad + Angelina = Brangelina
b. information + entertainment = infotainment
c.
4.3
labrador + poodle = labradoodle
Reanalysis and Backformation
Reanalysis is this process of reanalysing a word into morphemes that aren’t
really a part of the word. For example, many people think of -oholic as a morpheme. After all, isn’t it part of the word alcoholic? It isn’t. The morphological
√
structure of the word alcoholic is actually alcohol + -ic. But look at the words
below and see if you can figure out how the words are formed and come up with
a hypothesis regarding how that might occur.
(35) Common -oholic words in English
a. chocoholic
b. shopoholic
c.
bookoholic
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It seems that the oholic part of alcoholic has been reanlysed as a bound
derivational morpheme, -oholic. The word in (a) looks like it could be a blend
of alcoholic and chocolate, but the words in (b) and (c) don’t really look like
blends. Instead, they seem to be cases in which a free morpheme, shop and book,
is combined with a suffix, -oholic. Are there other words that can be combined
with -oholic? Do you think that maybe we’ve added -oholic to our list of
derivational morphemes in English? If so, this would be a case of reanalysis
resulting in suffixation.
Sometimes, reanalysis results in a type of word we will refer to as a backformation. When an element is reanalyzed, speakers can use this (originally
incorrect) reanalysis to form new words. Some very prominent examples of
backformation in English involve the derivational suffix -ation, and its closely
related suffixes -ate and -tion. Consider these words of English:
(36) Two well-established backformations in English
a. orientate
b. conversate
DR
What do we mean that these words are backformations? Originally, each was
created as follows. A verb root – converse and orient – received the derivational
nominalizing suffix -ation. This created the nouns conversation and orientation.
Over time, the noun forms of these words became more frequently used
than the original verb forms were. Speakers knew, of course, that there was
a derivational nominalizing suffix -tion in English, and that it is often added
to verbs formed via the derivational verbalizing suffix -ate, which is sometimes
associated with bound stems. Examples of words that contain both -ate and
-tion with bound stems are plentiful in English, and they include at least rel +
ate + tion = relation, confisc + ate + tion = confiscation, and subordin + ate
+ tion = subordination. In all of those cases, if we have access to the noun form
first, and we want to derive a verb, we do so by removing only the -tion. The
resulting verbs are relate, confiscate and subordinate, right?
On this model, it seems that many speakers have reanalyzed the words conversation and orientation as follows:
(37) Reanalysis of conversation and orientation:
√
√
a.
converse + -ation is reanalized as convers + ate + tion
√
√
b.
oriente + -ation is reanalized as orient + ate + tion
As a result of this reanalysis, speakers began to use the newly identified
bound root + -ate morphemes as the verb. Many speakers of English have no
idea that the original analysis of these words is anything other than that, and
it may be the case that as time passes, the backformations will entirely replace
the verbs converse and orient in the lexicon of English.
You may want to take a moment to think about all of the words you know
that end in -ation. We’ve talked about several such words in this unit! Do
you think that, given time, speakers of English will create backformations from
the nouns suffixation, prefixation and infixation, so that they will begin to use
the new verbs prefixate, suffixate and infixate? Why or why not? Whatever
your opinion about this now, only time will tell whether you are right or wrong.
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Linguists do not have a reliable way of predicting when backformation will, or
will not, occur. But we want to recommend the backformation backformate to
you as a means for remembering what backformation is.
4.4
Spelling-based word formation
DR
In English, and many other languages with highly literate traditions, we sometimes use the spelling of words to form brand new words. There are two very
common ways of doing this in English — alphabetism and acronymy. Alphabetism is when we form a word out of the first letters in each word in a phrase,
and then pronounce the letter names as a new word. A good example of an
alphabetism in English is the word CIA, which was created based on the phrase
Central Intelligence Agency. We pronounce that word using the names of the
letters ‘c’, ‘i’ and ‘a’. Acronymy occurs when we form a word out of the first
letters in each word in a phrase, but we pronounce the result as though it were
a normal, spelled word of English. Did you know that the word scuba is really
an acronym? It was created by combining the first letters of each word in the
phrase “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”?
Just as it seems that English speakers love to blend, we also seem to really
enjoy these spelling-based word formation strategies. We know that there are
a number of organizations and projects whose names were specifically created
not to be good names themselves, but to make clever acronyms. We know, for
example, of a multi-university database project that was undertaken in Arizona,
and that was named the Arizona State System for Information about Student
Transfer. It could have gotten a shorter and more pithy name if organizers had
wanted that — but instead they wanted a good acronym. ASSIST sounds like
a very helpful system, doesn’t it?
4.5
Concatenative and Non-concatenative Processes
Many of the word formation processes we have seen require that we simply
add something to the left or right edge of a root or stem. This processes of
adding a morpheme to the left or right edge of a root or stem is referred to as
concatenation. Can you identify the morphological processes we saw above
that were not concatenative? They’re listed here.
(38) Nonconcatenative processes from above
a. null derivation: word change without the appearance of any morphological process taking place phonologically. Examples such as the
null plural morpheme in English illustrate: 1 deer, 2 deer.
b. morpheme internal change: n some cases the morphemes “inside a word” can change. The English plural morpheme once again
provides and example of this process: 1 goose, 2 geese.
c.
infixation: the process of adding a morpheme inside a root or stem.
d. truncation: the process of removing part of a word to create a new
word, as in fridge.
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e.
blending: the process of combining parts of two existing words to
create a new word, as in smog.
f.
spelling-based word formation: the process of deriving a new
word by using some portion of the spelling of another word or words,
as in CIA.
Anothor nonconcatenative process that you might have been wondering
about when we discussed the English superlative is suppletion. Suppletion
is the process of replacing one word in one grammatical context with a completely different word in another grammatical context. An example taken from
adjectives is bad and its superlative counterpart worse. The words have nothing in common phonologically, but they are related. We find suppletion very
frequently in the inflection of extremely frequent function words in languages.
If you think about the various inflections of the auxiliary verb to be in English,
you’ll find many suppletive forms. These include is, are, was and were. If you
speak other languages, you may know that the auxiliary verbs that mean things
like to be or to have are very often inflected via suppletion. Why do you think
that suppletion tends to happen for very frequently used words in languages,
and not very often in uncommon or rare words?
5
Morphology and Compositionality
We have just reviewed a number of the morphological processes used in languages
of the world. Let’s take a moment to think about how those processes work in
terms of building up word meanings. Consider the following word of English:
DR
(39) a. ‘unlockable’
unlock -able
NEG- lock -ADJ
prefix- root -suffix
This word is made up of three morphemes, and each morpheme contributes
meaning to the word as a whole. The root morpheme, ‘lock’, is being used in its
verbal form, so the word as a whole refers to the action of ‘locking’ something.
The prefix, ‘un’, is a negating prefix, and the suffix ‘-able’ is a morpheme that
refers to ‘ability’, and that derives adjectives from verbs. The whole word,
‘unlockable’, must therefore have some element of meaning involving the action
of ‘locking’, as well as negation and ability; the whole word is also an adjective.
Think about what the word ‘unlockable’ means - maybe by creating a scenario in which you might use the word. Do you imagine something like this?
(40) Speaker A: (wiggles a key in the lock of a closed door) “Dang it! I can’t
get this door locked. It’s unlockable!”
Or do you imagine something like this instead?
(41) Speaker B: (reaches over, uses a different key and opens the door) “No,
you just have to wiggle it this way. If you use the right key, the door is
easily unlockable.”
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Speakers A and B above are each able to use the same word - but they use
it to mean two very different things. In fact, the two possible meanings of the
word unlockable are opposites. How is that possible?
We have argued that human language is subject to the Principle of Compositionality. We restate that Principle here:
(42) The Principle of Compositionality
The meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by its structure
and the meanings of its constituents.
DR
The reason that a word like ‘unlockable’ can have two different meanings
is that this word is interpreted according to the Principle of Compositionality.
How does the Principle apply?
First, we see that the word is a complex expression. By ‘complex’, we simply
mean that the word is composed of more than one morpheme. Any linguistic
unit that is polymorphemic will count as a complex expression. Second, we see
that both meanings of the word are derived from the meanings of its constituent
morphemes. On one interpretation, the word ‘unlockable’ means ‘unable to be
locked’. On the other, the word means ‘able to be unlocked’. Both interpretations involve ‘locking’, negation, and ‘ability’. The interpretations differ only in
terms of how those morphemes are organized - that is, in terms of the word’s
internal structure. Any word (or phrase, or sentence) that has more than one
possible meaning can be called ambiguous. So the word ‘unlockable’ is ambiguous. When the difference between those possible meanings is specifically due
to the structure of the expression (and not to homonymy or multiple meanings for each of the constituent morphemes), we call the expression structurally
ambiguous.
In order to better understand the contribution of the structure of the word
to its meaning, and to illustrate its structural ambiguity, we will use the tree
diagrams given below. These diagrams are simply illustrations of the ways in
which the morphemes in the word combine with each other.
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(43) Structural ambiguity in the word unlockable
a. ‘cannot be locked’
Adj
Neg
un-
Adj
V
lock
Adj
-able
b. ’can be unlocked’
Adj
V
Neg
un-
Adj
-able
V
lock
DR
In the (a) example above, when we combine the morphemes ‘un-’, ‘lock’ and
‘-able’, we first combine the verb root ‘lock’ with adjective-forming ‘-able’. This
creates a complex expression, ‘lockable’, which combines the meanings of those
two morphemes. We derive an adjective meaning ‘able to be locked’. We next
take that adjective and combine it with the negating prefix ‘un-’, and the result
is a complex expression meaning ‘not [able to be locked]’.
In the (b) example, we take the same morphemes, but combine them in a
different structure. Here, we first combine the verb root ‘lock’ with the negating
prefix ‘un-’. This creates a new verb, ‘unlock’. We then combine that complex
expression with the adjective forming suffix ‘-able’, and get a new word that
means ‘able to be [unlocked]’.
The rules of English morphology can be applied to produce either of these
two structures based on the input string of morphemes ‘un-’, ‘lock’, and ‘-able’.
So both meanings of the word are equally grammatical - and English speakers
may well use the word ‘unlockable’ to mean either ‘able to be unlocked’ or ‘unable to be locked’. Often when we produce structurally ambiguous expressions,
we’re not aware of the fact that they are ambiguous at all - as we produce and
interpret expressions, we typically assign one reasonable, grammatical, structure to the constituent parts, and then stop there. If our interlocutor assigns
another structure than we intended, this can result in miscommunication. It
may be only because of such miscommunications that we ever realize we have
been ambiguous. But when someone points out the other possible meaning for
our utterance, we can readily understand it - and even be surprised that we
didn’t notice it before.
The Principle of Compositionality is derived from observations like this that the same set of meaningful elements can be combined in different ways
to produce different meanings. The meanings of each constituent part of an
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expression matter - but the structure that we assign to them also matters to
our understanding of language! All human languages allow for this kind of
combination - which is another way of saying that all human languages can
produce structural ambiguities. This can occur in any kind of complex expression
- that is, in any expression that is composed of two or more morphemes, whether
those morphemes are combined to form a complex word, or whether they are
combined to form phrases or sentences.
6
Morphology and the Languages of the World
Now that we have talked a bit about morphology, morphemes, and morphological processes we can talk about how languages differ in the world in terms of
these things. Morphological criteria are a good way to classify languages of the
world, and in this section we will see some of the ways that linguists divide the
languages of the world into categories.
Morphology is one of the grammatical systems that conveys information.
How much information and what kind of information conveyed morphologically
varies greatly from language to language. In this regard, traditional linguistic
description classified languages into four broad types based in part on how
information is encoded and what type of information is encoded morphologically.
Most linguists agree that languages can be usefully described in terms of this
distinction, which we will refer to as the polysynthesis continuum.
Bloomfield (1933:207-8) describes these distinctions as follows:
DR
(A) Isolating languages have very few, if any bound morphemes—forms,
such as affixes, that must be attached to a word.
(B) Agglutinative languages have bound forms which occur and are arranged
in the word like beads on a string. (That is the morphemes join typically
in a linear fashion, one right after the other. In addition, the morpheme
boundaries are generally quite clear.)
(C) Inflectional languages show a merging of distinct features into a “single
bound form or in closely united bound forms.”
(D) Polysynthetic languages express morphologically certain elements that
often occur as separate words in other languages, such as arguments (subject and object) of the verb.
It should be noted that the following discussion benefits greatly from Sproat
(1992). Sproat (1992) is an excellent source for learning more about morphology
and morphological processes in the world’s languages.
6.1
Agglutinative languages
Agglutinative languages have bound forms which occur and are arranged in
the word like beads on a string. That is, the morphemes join typically in a
linear fashion, one right after the other as prefixes or suffixes. These languages
are highly concatenative. They tend to have few portmanteau morphemes. In
addition, the morpheme boundaries are generally quite clear.
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Turkish is the example usually given to demonstrate the category of agglunative languages. Note that in the example below one morpheme tends to convey
one meaning or grammatical function. The word is built of a root followed by
10 suffixes.
(44) Agglutinative morphology in Turkish: çöplüklerimizdekilerdenmiydi
çöp
-lük -ler -imiz -de -ki -ler -den -mi -y
-di
√
garbage -aff -pl -1p/pl -loc -rel -pl -abl -int -aux -past
‘was it from those that were in our garbage cans?’
Jurafsky & Martin (2000) note that because of its agglutinative morphology,
Turkish has a “...theoretically infinite number of words.” The words in some
cases are the equivalent of whole sentences in a language like English, and so we
would expect Turkish to have at least as many possible words as English has
sentences.
Most languages have characteristics that come from more than one of the
categories we’ve defined above. English has some agglutinative morphology –
we can see elements of agglutination in the English words like anti-dis-establishment-arian-ism. But in English we don’t typically use such morphologically
complex words as that. In Turkish, they are much more commonly used, and
may even be required.
6.2
Inflectional languages
DR
Inflectional languages show a merging of distinct features (generally grammatical or functional categories) into a “single bound form or closely united
bound forms.” Latin is considered by many to be the archetypal inflectional
language. It is important not to confuse the terms inflectional language and
inflectional morphology. Inflectional morphology was discussed previously
to refer to the morphology required by the grammar of a language, and in contrast to derivational morphology. An inflectional language is characterized by
large number of inflectional morphemes, many of which will be portmanteau
morphemes.
The suffix -ō in Latin is a kind of portmanteau morpheme typically found in
inflectional languages.
(45) Inflectional languages: Latin
am +ō
love +1st.person+singular+present+indicative+active
‘I love.’
If you speak or study any of the descendants of Latin, including Spanish,
Italian, Romanian or French, you know a little something about inflectional
languages. Many languages in the Indo-European language family (which is
the family in which English is included) are inflectional. English has a few
properties of inflectional languages – we talked about some of the portmanteau
morphemes of English, for example – but English only has a very small set of
inflectional morphemes compared to the more fully inflectional languages such
as those mentioned above.
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Polysynthetic languages
Polysynthetic languages express morphologically certain elements that often
occur as separate words in other languages, such as arguments (subjects and
objects) of the verb. We mentioned that agglutinating languages such as Turkish, may generate words that are the equivalent of entire sentences in English.
This property is even more clearly found in polysynthetic languages. In addition, the overwhelming number of morphemes in a polysynthetic languages are
bound. Like inflectional languages, polysynthetic languages use many portmanteau morphemes. This often makes it somewhat difficult for us to be able to
identify each specific morpheme in a word, and to associate that morpheme
with a particular meaning or function. The boundaries between morphemes in
polysynthetic languages are often unclear.
The following example of Mohawk taken from Sproat (1992) illustrates. Note
the ‘??’ in the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss. We include this because it is not
clear what the meaning or function of the word-final morpheme is.
(46) Polysynthetic languages: Mohawk qayá:liyú:lú:ni
qayá: -li
-yú:
-lú:ni
kayak -make -excellent -??
‘he was excellent at making kayaks’
DR
The object of the sentence qayá:, ‘kayak’, is incorporated into the word.
The ability to incorporate the object of a verb into the verb word itself is an important difference between agglutinative languages and polysynthetic languages.
Usually agglutinative languages do not allow incorporation of this type, while
polysynthetic languages do. However, not all polysynthetic languages allow incorporation of an object noun into the verb word. Navajo, for example, is a
polysynthetic language that does not generally allow that.
Some non-polysynthetic languages, such as English, can allow limited nounincorporation. English words like bridge-building, sign-making and car-washing
show incorporation of a verb’s object into the verb word. But English does not
have the large number of portmanteau inflectional morphemes found in truly
polysynthetic languages such as Mohawk or Navajo.
Many of the languages of the Americas are polysynthetic. During the initial
stages of study of Native American languages by Europeans, scholars thought
that polysynthesis might be a property of all American Indian languages, but no
others. They were wrong. There are a number of American Indian languages
that are not polysynthetic. For example, Tohono O’odham, a Uto-Aztecan
language of Arizona and Northern Mexico, is not polysynthetic. Furthermore,
there are some polysynthetic languages in places other than the Americas. Many
of the languages native to the Caucasus are polysynthetic.
6.4
Isolating languages
Isolating languages have very few, if any, bound morphemes. The most
commonly cited example of an isolating language is Mandarin Chinese, which
lacks morphological marking for tense and number, along with most other known
types of morphological marking. Sproat (1992) provides the following example
of Mandarin.
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(47) Isolating languages: Mandarin
gŏu bú ài chī qīngcài
dog not like eat vegetable
We have not given you a free translation for the Mandarin sentence above.
That’s because there are at least five possible meanings for it. Under the right
circumstances the above sentence can mean any of the following:
(48) Possible translations for Mandarin “gŏu bú ài chī qīngcài”
a. ‘the dog (specific) doesn’t like to eat vegetables’
b. ‘the dog (specific) didn’t like to eat vegetables’
c.
‘the dogs don’t like to eat vegetables’
d. ‘the dogs didn’t like to eat vegetables’
e.
‘dogs don’t like to eat vegetables’
DR
The number of possible translations of this sentence into English should not
be taken to mean that Mandarin sentences are generally more (or less) imprecise than are sentences of English, or Navajo, or Turkish, or any other human
language. All languages allow for sentences with multiple interpretations! But
here we hope you can see that each morpheme in this sentence is not only a free
morpheme, but also that none of the words has more than one morpheme. This
is the definitive characteristic of an isolating language.
No language that we know of is 100% isolating. We can see isolating-like
elements in the English sentence “John will go”, because that sentence is comprised entirely of monomorphemic words. But English is not a purely isolating
language. And while it is true that Mandarin has few, if any, bound morphemes,
but it is not true that Mandarin has no morphology. Compounding is found in
Mandarin, and it produces polymorphemic words. So, when we say Mandarin
is an isolating language that is an approximation, and it may be the closest
well-studied language to the isolating end of the polysynthesis continuum. We
can arrange these language types on that same continuum, where at one end
will be isolating languages, and at the other extreme will be polysynthetic languages. In the middle, we have agglutinative and inflectional languages. All
languages have at least a few characteristics found in each of these four types
– no language is 100% any of them. But each language seems to tend toward
one of these types. We would place English on the isolating end of the continuum, but not so far towards that end as Mandarin is. Spanish, French, Latin,
and Turkish, among others, occupy the middle range of the continuum, while
Mohawk and Navajo are furthest towards the polysynthetic end.
7
Words
We have been using the term word throughout this chapter, and it is one of
those terms whose meaning seems at first to be pretty obvious. However, it
turns out that word is a rather slippery concept when it comes to linguistics.
As an exercise try to write a short definition of word, perhaps even drawing
from what you’ve read in the previous sections of this unit. When you’re done,
come back to this text.
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No doubt many of you probably mentioned something like this: “words are
the things with spaces on either side of them”. This might work for languages
like English that have a writing system, but most languages of the world are
not written. Additionally, when speakers of languages such as Japanese and
Sanskrit write their language, the words are not separated by spaces. Even in
English, we’ve seen that the existence of a space between morphemes is not a
perfectly reliable indicator of where a word begins or ends. Remember compound
words? Is it washing machine or washing-machine? It’s the White House, and
that is one word in terms of English grammar. So while invoking writing can
be helpful, it is not the best way to define the notion word. This is especially
true since most linguists are more interested in spoken or signed language rather
than written language.
In general, there seem to be five fairly reliable tests for wordness. It is
important to note that these tests don’t always work, but combined they can
give us a fairly good sense of when we have a word on our hands and when we
don’t.
• Potential Pause: If you ask someone to say a sentence slowly, they will
inevitably pause between words. So, potential for a pause may count as
a diagnostic for a word boundary. The problem with this is that speakers
can also pause between syllables fairly naturally. So, a speaker might say
something like this: “The (pause) mon pause key pause likes pause ba
pause na pause nas.”
DR
• Indivisibility: If you ask someone to say a sentence, and to then add
more words — perhaps a modifying word such as an adjective or adverb
to it — they will usually add those between words and not inside of them.
This test is good but not perfect. In English expletive infixation is an
example of a word being added to a sentence inside another word.
• Minimal Free Forms: If a morpheme can be uttered on its own and be
meaningful, then chances are it is a word. Again, this test isn’t perfect.
English speakers might well be able to say, for example, the derivational
prefix un- by itself, and explain that it means “not”.
• Phonological properties: In some languages the actual sounds change
at word boundaries. For example in Turkish the vowels in any individual
word will always come from a single subset of the vowels of the language.
So if you hear morphemes that contain vowels that come from different
subsets, you can be reasonably sure that you’ve gone on to a new word.
This kind of phonological process is called vowel harmony. Of course, not
all languages have vowel harmony. Some languages use stress to indicate
the status of a morpheme as an independent word — we saw earlier in
this chapter that English does this for content words. We used it as a
diagnostic for compound words.
• Semantic Units: In some cases it is possible to identify words in an utterance by their meaning. For example I slept. In the example each word
conveys a single meaning. Of course, this won’t always work either. Many
languages have portmanteau morphemes that encode many meanings in
the same morpheme. There are also expressions in many languages, including English, in which speakers use more than one word to encode a
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single meaning. For example, English has a number of verbs that combine with particles (often prepositions) in order to form a single meaning.
Consider these examples: looked up, cleaned out, and looked after.
As you can see it is a bit of a challenge to identify words and thus define
the term word. We seem to be able to recognize words more easily than we can
define the term. Let’s posit the following definition, then, and note that it’s not
perfect.
(49) word: a meaningful linguistic unit, comprised of at least one morpheme,
usually pronounceable on its own or between pauses, that is formed according to the phonological and morphological grammars of the language.
8
Summary
DR
In summary, we have learned some key terminology when it comes to discussing
morphology cross-linguistically. We’ve learned what morphemes and morphs
are. We’ve also seen a variety of types of morphemes, including bound, free,
inflectional, and derivational morphemes. We’ve noted that linguists think of
morphemes as being stored in our mental lexicon or mental dictionary. Further,
that these morphemes include information regarding lexical categories which
may be opened or closed. We’ve also seen that there are numerous morphological
processes that lead to the creation of new words. Some of these processes such
as affixation and compounding are concatenative, while others, like truncation
and morpheme-internal change are non-concatenative.
In addition, we’ve learned that languages can be thought of as expressing morphological properties that we have seen in this chapter in terms of the
polysynthesis continuum with isolating on one end of the continuum and polysynthetic on the other end. No language will be 100% one type or another, rather
languages will fit somewhere along the continuum.
• Isolating languages have no or very few bound morphemes/forms—
forms, such as affixes, that must be attached to a word. Example: Mandarin Chinese
• Agglutinative languages have bound forms which occur and are arranged
in the word like beads on a string. Example: Turkish
• Inflectional languages show a merging of distinct features into a “single
bound form or in closely united bound forms.” Example: Latin
• Polysynthetic languages express morphologically certain elements that
often occur as separate words in other languages, such as arguments (subject and object) of the verb. Example: Mohawk
Morphology is the study of words and word-building in languages. Some
languages rely a lot on morphology to build complex expressions by building
complex words. Other languages tend to use larger units than words – phrases
and sentences – to communicate the same amount of information. When we
look at these larger structures, we are doing syntax rather than morphology. If
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you study syntax, you’ll find that many of the concepts we’ve discussed here are
still applicable. You may even find that information encoded in one language’s
morphology may very well be encoded in the syntax of another.
Key words
accusative case: a grammatical category marking objects.
adjective: an open-class word that, in English, can usually be inflected for
comparative and superlative.
adpositions: a closed class of words that function to relate nouns to some other
element in a sentence.
adverb: an open-class word that, in English, often contains the derivational
morpheme -ly.
affix: a bound morpheme that is not a root.
affixation: a morphological process where an affix attaches to a root or stem.
DR
agglutinative: a type of language that has bound forms which occur and are
arranged in the word like beads on a string.
allomorph: a particular pronunciation of a morph.
aspect: a grammatical category that expresses the state of an action or an
event, e.g. progressive (in progress), completive (complete) and so on.
backformation: using a reanalyzed word as a base for forming new words,
as in the verbs conversate and orientate.
blending: a morphological process in which parts of two existing words combine
to create a new word. For example elements of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’ are used to
create ‘smog.’
borrowed word: a word that is taken from another language, sometimes with
its own morphology.
bound morpheme: a morpheme that must attach to something and cannot
occur or appear by itself as a separate word.
case: a grammatical category marking the role that a word or phrase plays in
the syntax of a sentence.
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completive aspect: an aspectual category indicating that the action of the
verb is finished, or complete. In English, we use the participial form to indicate
completive aspect.
compound word: a word formed from two or more free morphemes. For example, ‘black’ and ‘bird’ combine to create ‘blackbird’.
conjunction: a closed class of words that are used to link words, phrases or
sentences together.
content word: any open category word - that is, any noun, verb, adjective or
adverb.
derivational morpheme: a morpheme that changes the word class of a root or
stem, or adds extra meaning to a root or stem. When a derivational morpheme
is added to a root or stem the result is generally a new word.
derivational nominalization: the creation of nouns by adding a derivational
morpheme to a stem that is not itself a noun.
determiners: a closed class of words that function to introduce nouns.
free morpheme: a morpheme that can appear by itself as word without other
morphemes necessarily attaching to it.
function words: words belonging to closed classes.
DR
functional categories: closed categories.
genitive case: a grammatical category marking possessors.
grammatical word: any closed category word.
historical linguistics: the subfield of lingusitics that studies language change
over time.
homophonous: two or more words or morphemes are homophonous if they
sound the same as each other.
inflectional: a type of language that shows a merging of distinct features into
a “single bound form or in closely united bound forms.”
inflectional morpheme: a morpheme required by the grammar. They do not
change word classes and they do not convey extra meaning in the same way as
derivational morphemes. Inflectional morphemes indicate grammatical properties like tense, number, person, and plural. When an inflectional morpheme is
added the result is generally considered the same word in a different form.
irregular morphology: unpredictable morpheme change: e.g. child, ox, goose
/ children, oxen, geese.
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isolating: languages that have no or very few bound morphemes/forms—
forms, such as affixes, that must be attached to a word.
lexical category: synonym of word class – word classes include things like
noun, verb, preposition, and the like – the parts of speech.
lexical word: any open category word - that is, any noun, verb, adjective or
adverb.
mental lexicon: the ‘mental dictionary’ of morphemes that linguists think
speakers must have as a part of their knowledge of language.
morph: the phonological form of a morpheme. Some morphemes have more
than one morph, English plural for example. The morphs that indicate the plural
morpheme are allomorphs.
morphology: the study of how words are formed or marked by other processes.
morpheme: the smallest unit of language that conveys meaning or grammatical information.
morpheme-internal change: in some cases the sounds “inside a word” can
change to indicate a derivational or inflectional process. The English plural
morpheme provides an example of this process: 1 goose, 2 geese.
DR
nominative case: a grammatical category marking subjects.
noun: an open-class word that, in English, can usually be inflected for plural
and possessive.
null derivation: word change without the appearance of any morphological process taking place phonologically. Examples such as the null plural morpheme in
English illustrate: 1 deer, 2 deer.
null morph: a morpheme that has no phonological content - we use this as a
way to conceptualize null derivation.
participle, or participial form: a morpheme of English used to mark the
completive aspect.
postpositions: an adposition that must be positioned after its noun.
prefix: a bound morpheme that is placed before the root of a word.
prepositions: an adposition that must be positioned before its noun.
productive: refers to a morphological process repeatedly and predictably used
in a language to produce the same type: e.g. -ed, tired, purchased,. . .
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progressive aspect: an aspectual category indicating that the action of the
verb is ongoing. In English, we use the suffix -ing to indicate progressive aspect.
pronoun: a morpheme that belongs to a closed class and that stands in for
nouns or noun phrases. In English, all pronouns are free morphemes.
polysynthetic: type of language that expresses morphologically certain elements that often occur as separate words in other languages, such as arguments
(subject and object) of the verb.
reanalysis: dividing a word into morphemes that aren’t really there. For example, the word alcoholic has been reanalyzed to produce a productive derivational
suffix -oholic.
regular morphology: predictable morpheme change: e.g. boy, girl, dog, MP3
/ boys, girls, dogs, MP3s.
root generally the base form of a word, that is, a form that cannot be analyzed
into further morphemes and that contains the primary meaning of a word.
stem: any polymorphemic word that a morpheme attaches to.
suffix: a bound morpheme that is placed after the root of a word.
tense: a grammatical category that locates the action or event expressed by the
verb (in English) somewhere in time in relation to the time of the utterance.
DR
truncation: creating a new word by removing material from an existing word,
as in fridge.
verb: an open-class word that, in English, can usually be inflected for tense
and aspect.
word: a meaningful linguistic unit, comprised of at least one morpheme, usually pronounceable on its own or between pauses, that is formed according to the
phonological and morphological grammars of the language. But note that this is
an imperfect definition.
word class: synonym of lexical category – word classes include things like
noun, verb, preposition, and the like – the parts of speech.
Suggested reading
The best place to first learn about a subject is an encyclopedia, not wikipedia.
One of the best encyclopedias on language is the Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language edited by David Crystal. Your library is sure to have a copy or access
to one through interlibrary loan. Some of the more popular introductory text-
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books include the following and will have been published in numerous editions
so you’ll want to be sure to find the most recent.
• The Language Files edited Department of Linguistics the Ohio State University. Ohio State Press
• Linguistics for Non-Linguists by Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley
• Linguistics: An Introduction by William McGregor
• An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and
Nina Hyams
• Understanding Language by Elizabeth Grace Winkler
Some morphology-specific books. . .
• Complex Words in English by Valerie Adams
• English Words: A Linguistic Introduction by Heidi Harley
• Morphology and Computation by Richard Sproat
• Understanding Morphology by Martin Haspelmath
• Finite State Morphology by Kenneth R. Beesley and Lauri Karttunen
DR
A good field specific dictionary is always informative as well. Two that we
often use are The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics and A Dictionary
of Linguistics and Phonetics by David Crystal.
References
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language.
Language 2.153–164.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. Henry Holt.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect . London: Cambridge University Press.
Elson, Benjamin F., & Velma B. Picket. 1988. Beginning Morphology
and Syntax . SIL.
Ghomeshi, J., R. Jackendoff, N. Rosen, & K. Russell. 2004.
Contrastive Focus Reduplication in English (The Salad-Salad Paper).
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22.307–357.
Jurafsky, Daniel, & James H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language
Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,
Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1987. The phonology of reduplication (Ms.). Stanford
University.
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Macdonald, R. R., & S. Darjowidjojo. 1967. A Student’s Reference
Grammar of Modern Formal Indonesian. Georgetown University Press.
Sommer, B.A. 1981. The shape of Kunjen syllables. In Phonology in the
1980s, ed. by D.L. Goyvaerts. Story-Scientia.
Sproat, Richard. 1992. Computational Morphology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Stevens, A. 1968. Madurese phonology and morphology. New Haven, CT:
American Oriental Society.
DR
Young, Robert W., & William Morgan. 1980. The Navajo Language: A
Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary. Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, first edition.
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