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AF T Morphology for Beginners S. T. Bischoff and A. V. Fountain 1 1 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. 2 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. AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain DR 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 2 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 3 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 4 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 5 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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’, c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 6 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain ‘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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 7 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 8 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 9 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 10 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners f. Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 11 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 12 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 13 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 14 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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) c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 15 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 16 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 17 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 18 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 19 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain (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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 20 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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! c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 21 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 22 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 23 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Type Complete Partial Phonological Change Root/Stem buku orang job elbmben garadus abit bali iba udan Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 24 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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.” c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 25 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 26 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 27 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 28 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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.” c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 29 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 30 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain (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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 31 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 32 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 33 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners 6.3 Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 34 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain (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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 35 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 36 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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 c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 37 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 38 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 39 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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,. . . c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 40 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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- c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 41 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 42 AF T Linguistics: Morphology for Beginners Bischoff and Fountain 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. c 2011-2012, all rights reserved 43