Download Zeros, theme vowels, and construction morphology

Zeros, theme vowels, and construction morphology
The standard take on the morpheme is that it is, at least prototypically, a mapping between phonology
semantics. As all Chuck’s students and colleagues know, he is famously opposed to zero morphemes. If
all that is added to a construction is meaning, then there are better ways to do that. However, construction
morphology crucially introduces the notion that morphemes also have syntactic properties. Unfortunately,
little work has been done to elaborate what follows from that fact. Drawing on data from English, Latin,
and Native American languages, I will show that a typology of morphemes reveals that syntactic
properties — either construction internal or external — are the only necessary part of a morpheme.
Given that constructions can have phonological, syntactic, and semantic content, it is possible to imagine
that there could be up to seven distinct kinds of morphemes depending on whether they contribute
phonological, syntactic, or semantic content to their construction. (The eighth, Type H isn’t possible
because a morpheme must contribute something in order to exist at all.)
Morpheme type
Phonological content
Syntactic content
Semantic content
A
+
+
+
B
C
+
+
+
–
–
+
Table I
D
+
–
–
E
–
+
+
F
–
+
–
G
–
–
+
(H)
–
–
–
Do all these types of morphemes actually exist? Type A is garden variety morpheme, e.g. the English verb
burn which has the phonological content [bәrn], the syntactic content of being a basically intransitive
verb, and the semantic content of ‘burn’. Type B morphemes are common enough. The best known
examples are theme vowels. For example, the Latin morpheme am- is a root meaning ‘love’, but amcannot function as an inflecable stem without some futher morphology. The addition of the theme vowel
-ā- turns am- into a verb stem, but adds no semantic content; the addition of -ōr turns am- into a noun
stem, again adding no semantic content.
Morpheme types E and F are kinds of zero. For example, one class of English simple adjectives can be
converted into nouns referring to humans (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). This is a zero morpheme of
Type E. It changes word class syntactically and adds the semantics of [human] and [plural]. There is a
question whether there are any clear examples of Type F. One putative case is the morpheme that converts
English unaccusative verbs to transitive verbs, e.g. burn (intransitive) > burn (transitive). If this is the
correct analysis no further semantics is needed, the syntactic addition of an actor to the frame is sufficient.
I will conclude by arguing that putative cases of morphemes without syntactic content (Types C, D, and
G) should be analyzed in other ways, and conclude that the defining characteristic of a morpheme is that it
has syntactic content, since that feature alone distinguishes the possible morpheme types from the
impossible ones.