Download MORPHEMICS AND SYNTAX

Introduction to General Anthropology
Course Name:
Fundamentals in Linguistic Anthropology
Paper No.: Paper-I
MODULE:
MORPHEMICS AND SYNTAX
1. Introduction
The study of grammar as seen by linguists is usually divided into two parts: morphology
and syntax. Morphology deals with the inner structure of words while syntax investigates
how words can be combined to form sentences.
What is Morphology?
The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright and
philosopher Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), who coined it early in the
nineteenth century in a biological context. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape/
form’ and morphology is the study of form or forms. In linguistics, morphology refers to
the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals
with words, their internal structure and how they are formed.
Why Morphology?
Morphology as we said earlier is the study of the internal structure of words. We will
have to clarify what it means. Let us look at these examples:
Talk, talks, talking, talked (verb)
Talk, talks (Noun)
These are all English words it seems obvious that they are all related. This is also
suggested by their meanings. If we now go to the list of words and look up in the
dictionary we will sometimes find that these words are not even listed there. This is
because many people feel that they are not really words on their own, but just ‘forms’ of
the word talk. These are what we called inflectional forms.
2. Word
Although it sounds easy enough, linguists at times find it difficult to give the definition of
word. During the twentieth century, many linguists came to the conclusion that word
should not be a technical linguistic term at all, because it was difficult to define it
rigorously. Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a
component of our mental grammars. But one can learn thousands of word in a language
and still not know the language properly. Without word one would be unable to convey
one’s thoughts.
A word is a unit of expression which has universal recognition by native speakers in both
spoken and written language: a meaning is accompanied. In another way it can be said
that in a word a particular string of sounds generally must be united with a meaning, and
a meaning must be united with specific sounds in order for the sounds or the meaning to
be registered in our mental lexicon.
3. Morpheme
A major way in which morphologists investigate words is through the identification and
study of morphemes.
Most approaches to morphology assumes that the relation between the word form talk
and its inflectional forms talks, talking and talked should be described by analysing the
inflectional forms into smaller units, as in these words:
Talk-s, talk-ing, talk-ed.
Applying the notion of morpheme to the word talk, we have four morphemes: talk, -s, ing, and -ed.
Morphemes are the smallest meaning bearing units of a language. In fact morphology can
also be defined as the study of how morphemes combine into words, or to put in more
general way, the study of the morphological structure of words.
Lexical Morphemes
Morphemes such as word talk which have a clear lexical meaning and which forms the
basis of inflectional forms are called lexical morphemes. Lexical morphemes are said to
form an open class that is new lexical morphemes can be added without much difficulty,
usually by borrowing. Most lexical morphemes in English are free i.e. they can occur as
words on their own. Some lexical morphemes are however, bound morphemes.
Grammatical Morphemes
Grammatical morphemes formed a closed class, which means that the languages do not
easily acquire new grammatical morphemes. Grammatical morphemes are typically
bound. E.g. are -s, -ing, -ed, but also –able,-ity, -tive; -ness, -er, -ie and –y. Bound
grammatical morphemes are also called affixes.
Types of Morphemes
There are two types of morphemes. They are bound morphemes and free morphemes.
1.
Bound Morphemes are the morphemes which cannot occur on their own, e.g. dein detoxify, -tion in creation, -s in dogs, cran- in cranberry etc.
2.
Free Morphemes are morphemes which can occur as separate words, e.g. car,
yes etc.
In a morphologically complex word - a word composed of more than one morpheme -one constituent may be considered as the basic one, the core of the form, with the others
treated as being added on. The basic or core morpheme in such cases is referred to as the
stem, root, or base, while the add-ons are affixes. Affixes that precede the stem are of
course prefixes, while those that follow the stem are suffixes. Thus in word rearranged,
re- is a prefix, arrange is a stem, and -d is a suffix.
4. Allomorphs
Sometimes we may run across the term morph. The term ‘morph’ is used to refer
specifically to the phonological realisation of a morpheme. For example, the English past
tense morpheme –ed has various morphs. It is realised as [t] after the voiceless [p] of
jump (jumped), as [d] after voiceless [l] of repel (repelled) and as [ed] after the voiceless
[t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (rooted and wedded). We can also call these morphs
allomorphs or variants.
5. Inflectional Vs Derivational Morphology
Inflectional morphemes vary (or "inflect") the form of words in order to express the
grammatical features that a given language chooses, such as singular/plural or
past/present tense. Thus words such as boy and boys, for example, are two different
forms of the "same" word. Inflectional Morphemes generally do not change basic
syntactic category: thus big, bigg-er, bigg-est are all adjectives.
Derivational morphemes make new words from old ones. Thus creation is formed from
create by adding a morpheme that makes nouns out of (some) verbs. Derivational
morphemes generally change the part of speech or the basic meaning of a word. Thus ment added to a verb and forms a noun (judg-ment).
The inflectional/derivational distinction is not a fundamental or foundational question at
all, but just a sometimes-useful piece of terminology whose definitions involve a
somewhat complex combination of more basic properties.
6. Syntax
The term syntax is derived from the ancient Greek syntaxis, a verbal noun which literally
means ‘arrangement’ or ‘setting out together’. Traditionally it refers to the branch of
grammar dealing with the way in which words, with or without appropriate inflections,
are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence. Syntax deals with how
sentences are constructed and users of human language employ a striking variety of
possible arrangements of the elements in sentences.
Since sentence formation is the most obvious and frequent manifestation of creativity in
any language, we need to know what a sentence is.
7. What is a Sentence?
Although everyone knows or thinks they know what a sentence is, the term defies exact
definition. The sentence as a linguistic concept has been defined in over 200 different
ways, none of them completely adequate. Here are the most important attempts at
defining the sentence:
The traditional or common sense definition states that a sentence is a group of words that
expresses a thought. The problem comes in defining what a thought is. The phrase an
egg expresses a thought but is it a sentence? A sentence like I closed the door because it
was cold expresses two thoughts and yet it is one sentence.
The grammatical definition of the sentence says that it is the largest unit to which
syntactic rules can apply. In terms of syntactic categories, most sentences- at least in
English- can be divided into a subject and a predicate.
Types of Sentences
Syntax usually examines sentences that have a clear inner division into subject and
predicate. There are three types of subject/predicate structured sentences:
i) A simple sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate: John read Macbeth.
ii) A compound sentence is a sentence which has two or more simple sentences joined
into a single sentence: John read Macbeth and Mary read Othello. Each simple sentence
maintains its own internal syntactic structure. They may be joined by a coordinating
conjunction such as and or or.
iii) A complex sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic roles is played by an
embedded sentence: I made students read Chomsky. The simple sentence students read
Chomsky plays the role of object of the verb made. Because the syntax of the two parts
of a complex sentence is intertwined, it is often not possible to divide them into two freestanding simple sentences.
*I made. Students read Chomsky.
8. Syntactic Atoms
The basic unit of syntax is not the word, but the syntactic atom, defined as a structure
that fulfills a basic syntactic function. Syntactic atoms may be either a single word or a
phrase that fulfills a single syntactic function. For e.g
1. Fido ate the bone. The dog ate the bone.
2.The big yellow dog ate the bone.
3. Our dog that we raised from a puppy ate the bone.
Elements with syntactic equivalence all belong to the same type of syntactic atom (NP,
VP)
A language also contains specific rules for properly connecting syntactic atoms to form
sentences--these are called phrase structure rules. The sentence: The big yellow dog ate
the bone. is well formed because it uses the parts of speech in a way that conforms to the
rules of English syntax. The string of words: big the ate bone dog yellow the, is not a
sentence because it violates syntactic rules.
Syntactic Relations and Phrase Structure Rules
Let us now examine syntactic relations within English sentences. One approach is to
divide the words of a sentence into phrases. This technique is known as parsing. The
most fundamental division is between subject and predicate. Phrases containing different
parts of speech can serve one and the same function.
The big yellow dog //ate bones
He //ate the old bone.
The big yellow dog //slept.
The dog //growled at John.
9. Transformational Grammar
Transformational grammar has maintained its popularity since 1957 when Noam
Chomsky published his first book, Syntactic Structures. He came to believe that such
parallel syntactic means of expressing the same meaning were simply surface
manifestations of deeper structural units of language. To study and describe such deep
structures, he devised the theory of transformational grammar. The three main tenets
of this theory are:
i) The surface forms of a language are reducible to a limited number of deep structures.
The same deep structure is manifested in several different ways in actual sentences. This
is similar to the use of the principle of allomorphs to describe morpheme variants.
ii) These deep structures are universal- in other words, the same for all the languages of
the world; only the rules for deriving the surface forms from the deep structures differ
from language to language.
iii) The reason these deep structures are universal is that they are inborn, part of the
human genetic code; being inborn they help children discover the surface forms of
language so quickly.
However major problems continue to dog the transformational grammar theory. The
main problem is:
Transformational rules only work for sentences composed of separate noun and verb
phrases and not all sentences are of this type.
10. Conclusion:
There is an important relationship between morphology and syntax. Syntax and
morphology make up what is traditionally referred to as grammar, an alternative term for
Morpho-Syntax, which explicitly recognises the important relationship between
morphology and syntax and this forms one the major sections in language analysis.
Quiz:
1. The study of internal structure of words
(A) Phonology
(B) Morphology
(C) Syntax
Answer: (B) Morphology
2. The smallest minimal units of a language
(A) Phoneme (B) Morpheme
(C) Sentence
Answer: (B) Morpheme
3. Bound grammatical morphemes are called
(A) Affixes (B) Prefixes (C) Suffixes
Answer: (A) Affixes
4. Morphemes which cannot occur of their own
(A) Lexical morphemes (B) Grammatical morphemes (C) Bound morphemes
Answer: (C) Bound morphemes
5. Core morphemes are called
(A) Infixes
(B) Suffixes
(C) Root
Answer: (C) Root
6. Morphemes that can be inserted within another form is called
(A) Base
(B) Infixes
(C) Suffixes
Answer: (B) Infixes
7. Morphemes that can occur in different variants are called
(A) Morphs (B) Phones
(C) Allomorphs
Answer: (C) Allomorphs
8. Morphemes that do not change the basic syntactic category
(A) Inflectional morphemes (B) Derivational morphemes (C)Grammatical
morphemes
Answer: (A) Inflectional morphemes
9. Division of sentence into phrases is called
(A) Parsing (B) Deep structure
(C) Surface structure
Answer: (A) Parsing
10. Who propounded the theory of transformational grammar
(A) Bloomfield
(B) Dell Hymes
(C) Noam Chomsky
Answer: (C) Noam Chomsky