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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