Understanding Words and Morphology

Chapter 1. What is morphology?

1.1 Introduction

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), a German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher, is credited with coining the term morphology in a biological context early in the nineteenth century. Morphology is the study of form or forms, and its etymology is Greek: morph- means’shape, form.’ Morphology is the study of the shape and structure of animals in biology, and it is the study of the configuration and evolution of landforms in geology. Morphology is a field of linguistics that studies words, their internal structure, and how they are generated.

1.2 Morphemes

The identification and analysis of morphemes, frequently characterized as the smallest linguistic elements with a grammatical function, is a significant approach in which morphologists research words, their internal structure, and how they are generated. This definition does not cover all morphemes, but it is the most common and an excellent place to start. A morpheme is a word or a meaningful portion of a word that cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful bits, such as the -ed in gazed. Morphemes have also been defined as a combination of sound and meaning. As we’ll see, certain morphemes don’t have a solid or continuous shape, while others don’t have meanings in the traditional sense. You might also hear the term morph. A morpheme’s phonological realization is sometimes referred to as a morpheme’s morpheme. The English past tense morpheme –ed, for example, has a number of morphs. It’s pronounced [t] after the voiceless [p] of leap (cf. jumped), [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled), and [ed] after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (cf. repulsed) (cf. rooted and wedded).

These morphs are also known as allomorphs or variations. In this situation, voicing and the location of articulation of the verb stem’s last consonant decide the appearance of one morph over another. Take a look at the term reconsideration. There are three morphemes in it: re-, consider, and -ation. First, consider what is referred to as the stem. A stem is a morphological element that is attached to a base unit. The stem can be simple, consisting of only one element, or complicated, consisting of multiple pieces. It’s advisable to go with a basic stem in this case. Even though it has more than one part in the past, most modern speakers would regard it as an unanalyzable form. We could also refer to this as the root. A root is similar to a stem in that it forms the basis of the word to which other parts are attached, but it only applies to morphologically simple units. For instance, disagree is the stem of disagreement since it is the base to which the suffix -ment is attached, whereas agree is the root. Taking disagree as an example, agree in both the stem and the root of the full word. Returning to reconsideration, the prefixes re- and -ation are both affixes, meaning they are linked to the stem. Prefixes such as re- that come before the stem are prefixes, while suffixes such as -ation that come after the stem are suffixes. Some readers may wonder why we didn’t break -ation down even further into two parts, -ate and -ion, which serve different purposes.

In this particular word they do not do so ( reconsiderate), and hence we treat -ation as a single morpheme. It is important to take seriously the idea that the grammatical func-tion of a morpheme, which may include its meaning, must be constant. Consider the English words lovely and quickly. They both end with the suffix -ly. But is it the same in both worlds? No – when we add -ly to the adjective quick, we create an adverb that is often synonymous with rapidly: The students quickly assimilated the concept. When we add –ly to the noun love, we create an adjective: What a lovely day! What on the surface appears to be a single morpheme turns out to be two. One attaches to adjectives and creates adverbs; the other attaches to nouns and creates adjectives. You will encounter two other sorts of affixes: infixes and circumfixes. Both are classic challenges to the notion of morpheme. Infixes are segmental strings that do not attach to the front or back but rather somewhere in the middle. The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below. It creates an agent from a verb stem and appears before the first vowel of the word:

(1) Root -um-

/sulat/ /s-um-ulat/ ‘one who wrote’

/gradwet/ /gr-um-adwet/ ‘one who graduated’

The existence of infixes challenges the traditional notion of a morpheme as an indivisible unit. We want to call the stem sulat ‘write’ a morpheme, and yet the infix -um- breaks it up. This seems to be a property of -um-rather than sulat. Our definition of morphemes as the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function survives this challenge. Circumfixes are affixes that come in two parts. One attaches to the front of the word and the other to the back. Circumfixes are controversial because it is possible to analyze them as consisting of a prefix and a suffix that apply to a stem simultaneously. One example is Indonesian ke … -an. It applies to the stem besar ‘big’ to form a noun ke-besar-an meaning ‘bigness, greatness’. Like infixes, the existence of circumfixes challenges the traditional notion of morpheme (but not the definition used here) because they involve discontinuity.

1.3 Kinds of Morphemes

Most native speakers of English will recognize that words like unwipe, head bracelet or MacDonaldization are made up of several meaningful pieces, and will be able to split them into those pieces:

(1) un / wipe

head / bracelet

McDonald / ize / ation

Some of the morphemes in (1) can be used as words on their own, such as wipe, head, bracelet, and McDonald. These are referred to as free morphemes. Bound morphemes are morphemes that can’t stand on their own. The bound morphemes in the examples above are un-, -ize, and -ation. Bound morphemes occur in a variety of shapes and sizes. Prefixes and suffixes are pre-fixes and suffixes, respectively; the former are bound morphemes that come before the word’s base, and the latter are bound morphemes that come after the base. Prefixes and suffixes are referred to as affixes when used together. New lexemes that are formed with prefixes and suffixes on a base are often referred to as derived words, and the process by which they are formed as derivation. The base is the semantic core of the word to which the prefixes and suffixes attach. For example, wipe is the base of unwipe, and McDonald is the base of McDonaldization. Frequently, the base is a free morpheme, as it is in these two cases.

Fig 1 :- Types of Morphemes

As a result, morphologists distinguish between affixes and bound bases. Bound bases are morphemes that aren’t prefixes or suffixes but can’t stand alone as words. They can appear before or after another bound base in some cases, such as with the morphemes route or derm: Derm precedes another base in dermatitis but follows one in endoderm; path precedes the base ology but follows the base psych(o); derm precedes another base in dermatitis but follows one in endoderm. This implies that route and derm are not prefixes or suffixes: there is no such thing as an affix that alternates between preceding and following its base. But not all bound bases are as free in their placement as path; for example, psych(o) and ology seem to have more fixed positions, the former usually preceding another bound base, the latter following. Similarly, the base -itis always follows, and endo- always precedes another base. Why not call them respectively a prefix and a suffix, then? One reason is that all of these morphemes seem in an intuitive way to have far more substantial meanings than the average affix does.

Whereas a prefix like un- (unhappy, unwise) simply means ‘not,’ and a suffix -ish (red-dish, warmish) means ‘sort of’, psych(o) means ‘having to do with the mind’, -ology means ‘the study of’, path means ‘sickness’, derm means ‘skin’ and -itis means ‘disease’. Semantically, bound bases can form the core of a word, just as free morphemes can. Another reason to believe bound bases vary from prefixes and suffixes is that prefixes and suffixes occur more frequently than bound bases. For example, the prefix un- can be used to make any number of adjectives negative, while the bound base psych has significantly fewer terms (o). This isn’t the ideal approach to distinguish between bound bases and affixes, though, because there are a few bound bases that occur with great freedom – -ology is one of them – and some prefixes and suffixes that don’t appear very often (e.g., the -th in width or health). So we’ll stick with the criterion of ‘semantic robustness’ for now. With regard to bases, another distinction that’s sometimes useful in analyzing languages other than English is the distinction between root and stem. In languages with more inflection than English, there is often no such thing as a free base: all words need some sort of inflectional ending before they can be used. Or to put it differently, all bases are bound.

Consider the data below from Latin:

(2) Latin 1st sg am + o ‘I love’ pl am + a + mus’we love’

dic - o ‘I say’ dic + i + mus ‘we say’

A first-person ending (I) can sometimes connect to the lowest constrained base meaning love or speak in the singular; this morpheme is the root. However, before the inflection may continue in the first person plural and most other persons and numbers, another morpheme must be introduced. Despite the fact that this morpheme (an a for the verb ‘love’ and an I for the verb’say’) has no meaning, it must be added before the inflectional ending may be applied. The stem is made up of the root and this extra morpheme. In another sense, when the inflectional endings are removed, the stem is usually the base that is left.

1.4 Morphemes in action

These are examples of morphology in action – morphological facts of everyday life.

1.4.1 Novel words and word play

If you were going down the street in Ithaca, New York, a few years ago, you might have noticed a sign advertising the music store Rebop, which takes its name from the jazz phrase rebop.

1. Rebop was one of several gibberish terms used by jazz performers in their vocal improvisations beginning in the early 1920s. In the 1940s, rebop became synonymous with bebop, a phrase of similar provenance, as a term for young black artists’ rhythmically and harmonically unconventional music. By the 1950s, the term bop had become synonymous with this musical genre.

2. Today, only the cognoscenti are aware of the original meaning of rebop, thus most passers-by are likely to misinterpret the term as a combination of the words bop and the prefix re-, which roughly translates to ‘again.’ Because this prefix can only be attached to verbs, we must understand bop as a verb in this context. If it implies anything at all, Rebop must imply ‘bop again.’ And this particular music outlet specialised in the sale of secondhand CDs. Something strange is going on with English morphology. Rebop isn’t an English term that’s completely formed. The verb bop signifies something akin to ‘bounce,’ but the prefix re- is usually reserved for verbs that signify accomplishment. As a result, the verb rebop makes no sense. However, the names of stores and items are meant to catch the consumer’s attention, not necessarily to make sense, and this one accomplishes so by taking advantage of people’s knowledge of English in a rather complex way and breaking the norms in order to attract attention, as verbal art frequently does.

Consider now the following phrases, taken from a Toni Braxton song:

Unbreak my heart, uncry these tears. We have never seen anyone unbreak something, and you certainly can’t uncry tears, but every English speaker can understand these words.

We all know what it’s like to shatter someone’s heart or yearn for someone’s heart to be broken. We would be asking someone to unbreak my heart if we asked them to reverse the process of our heart being broken. We can also see uncry these tears if we imagine a movie playing backwards. We can comprehend these phrases because we are familiar with the meaning of the prefix un-, which, when added to a verb, means to reverse or undo an activity. The fact that both actions, shattering a heart and pouring tears, are irreversible just adds to the song’s poignancy. Every human being has the ability to create and comprehend new words. When J. R. R. Tolkien developed the now-familiar term elf, he created a totally new word. However, we frequently create new words from pre-existing components, such as unbreak and uncry, or hobbitish and hobbit-like, which are created by adding suffixes to the stem hobbit. More words on these patterns may easily be written. We are surrounded by novel words.

In a movie theatre, Jerry Seinfeld has spoken about the shushers, shushees, and unshushables. On a special segment of 60 Minutes, Morley Safer was called a quirkologist, or an expert on odd people. The TV character Frasier Crane coined the term smorgsaphobia to describe people who despise buffets. Deinstitutionalization, from the New York Times, is the longest novel morphologically complicated word we’ve been able to locate on our own in the daily press. These are common morphological facts that a literate English speaker encounters on a daily basis. All of these terms – rebop, unbreak, uncry, hobbit, hobbitish, hobbit-like, quirkologist, smorgsaphobia, and deinstitutionalization – have one thing in common: they are all brand new. They jumped out at us the first time we saw or heard them. It’s remarkable that novel words have this effect on us, but novel phrases don’t. When you hear a new sentence for the first time, you usually don’t notice it’s the first time, and you don’t think to yourself, What a fantastic sentence, unless it’s one from Proust, Joyce, or another verbal artist. Many people have noticed that morphology differs from syntax in this way before.

1.4.2 Abstract morphological facts

Let’s move to some more abstract morphological facts. These are the kind of morphological facts that you don’t notice every day. They are so embedded in your language that you don’t even think about them. They are more common than the ones we have just looked at, but deeper and more complex.

If you speak English and are concerned about your health, you might say:

(2) I eat one melon a day.

Let’s imagine that we are even more concerned about our health than you are. We don’t just eat one melon a day, rather:

(3) We eat two melons a day.

It is a fact about standard American or British English that we cannot say:

(4) *We eat two melon a day.

However, if we were speaking Indonesian or Japanese, we would say the equivalent of two melon (three melon, four melon, etc.) because these languages don’t use morphological plurals in sentences like this.

(5) Indonesian:

Saiga makan dua buah semangka (se) tiaphari

I eat two fruit melon every day

‘I eat two melons every day.’

Japanese:

mainichi futatsu-no meron-o tabemasu

every.day two- Gen melon-obj eat.imp

‘I eat two melons every day.’

When discussing more than one melon, English morphological grammar dictates that we add a -s to the word. This truth of English is so obvious that native speakers are unaware of it. However, if we happen to be speakers of a language that does not require plural marking, we will notice and may have difficulty with it. We’ve now discovered something interesting about English morphology. If a word is plural, it takes the suffix -s. Living creatures don’t eat only melons, however:

(6) The evil giant at the top of the beanstalk eats two melons, three fish, and four children a day.

Everyone agrees that fish is plural, even though there is no plural marker. Children is also plural, but it has a very unusual plural suffix, -ren, plus an internal change: we say [ʧɪld-] instead of [ʧajld]. We do not always mark plural words with an s-like thing; there are other ways in which we can mark plurals. Native speakers of English know this, and they do not need to think about it before making a plural. Consider the following:

(7) Today, they claim that they will fix the clock tower by Friday, but yesterday they claimed it would take at least a month.

We utilize two alternative versions of the verb claim in this example. One is in the present tense, while the other is in the past. This isn’t true for all languages, though. If we were speaking Vietnamese, we wouldn’t distinguish between claim and claimed at all — we wouldn’t even mark the verb. If we were speaking Chinese, we would not distinguish between claim and claimed in a sentence like this, because the adverb zuótian ‘yesterday’ is sufficient to indicate past tense:

(8) jıntian tamen shuo tamen xıngqı-

today they say they Friday

wuˇ ké yıˇxiu haˇo zho-nglóu, keˇ shì zuótian

can fix well clock.tower but yesterday

tamen què shuo zhì shaˇo xuyào yíge yuè

they however say at least need a month

‘Today they claim that they will fix the clock tower by Friday, but yesterday they claimed that it would take at least a month.’

If we were to leave out zuótian ‘yesterday’, we would need to use the particle le after the verb to show that the action took place in the past. Whether or not a speaker must indicate past tense in Chinese depends on context.

Notice what happens in English when we use some other verbs besides claim:

(9) Today they say … but yesterday they said …

tell us told us

knowknew

That these verbs and others do not add -t, -d, or - ed to make their past tense is an elementary fact about English morphology.

The next observation about English morphology has to do with pronouns. Here is an exchange between an American mother, who has just watched a billiard ball break through a window, and her 6-year-old boy, who is standing inside:

(10) Who just threw a pool ball through the basement window?

Not me.

In this context, a 6-year-old wouldn’t respond Not I, though if he were to answer with a sentence, the response would be I didn’t, not Me didn’t. Without formally knowing anything at all about subjects and objects, English-speaking 6-year-olds (and children even younger) master the pronoun system of the spoken language.

It is a fact about English that there is a morphological distinction among universal quantifiers between the one designating all of two (both) or all of more than two (all) of a particular type of entity. In some other languages, marking for dual is even more pervasive. This is the case in Ancient Greek, as shown by the following examples:

(12) ho stratiô:tes lambánei tous híppous

‘The soldier takes the horses.’

to: stratió:ta lambáneton tous híppous

‘The two soldiers take the horses.’

hoi stratiô:tai lambánousi tous híppous

‘The soldiers (three or more) take the horses.’

1.5 Morphological Analysis

1.5.1 Two basic approaches: analysis and synthesis

Analytic and synthetic morphology are two complementary approaches to morphology. Both are required by the linguist. The analytic approach is usually linked with American structuralist linguistics from the first part of the twentieth century, and it entails breaking words down. This is for a very excellent cause. These linguists were frequently working with languages they had never encountered before, and they had no written grammars to guide them. It was consequently critical that they have highly specific linguistic analytic procedures. We need analytic tools that are independent of the structures we’re looking at, no matter what language we’re looking at; preconceived preconceptions could sabotage an impartial, scientific examination.This is especially true when working with languages that aren’t your native tongue. Perhaps unjustly, the second approach to morphology is connected with theory rather than methods. The synthetic method is used here. I’ve got a lot of small parts here, it basically says. How do I assemble them? says the narrator. This question assumes that you are already familiar with the components. In some way, an analysis must come first. Assume you’ve damaged a clock and dismantled it; now, you must reassemble all individual parts. There’s only one problem: you have no idea how to do it. You might always try out different things and see what works best for you. However, understanding how the clock works would be the most efficient method. Synthesis entails the development of theories. The synthetic question you pose from a morphological standpoint is, How does a language speaker construct a grammatically difficult term when needed? This question already implies that you know what kind of basic parts you’re using to construct the complex word. One of the big issues with morphological theories, we believe, is that we don’t always know what the components are. Syntacticians can provide us with tools like case and number, which are ancient syntactic concepts that we may use in our morphology.

However, morphologists’ major method of determining the elements they’re dealing with is to examine language data. They methodically dissect language, taking great care to pinpoint where each piece came from in the first place. We’ve talked about analysis and synthesis from the perspective of a morphologist studying language, but the two concepts are equally applicable to language speakers. When speakers read or hear a complicated word they have never heard before, they use morphological analysis. To comprehend it, they disassemble it and ask themselves if any of the bits seem familiar. When speakers build new forms from pre-existing elements, they use synthesis.

1.5.2 Analytic principles

Some basic analytic principles used in morphology.

Principle 1: Forms with the same meaning and sound shape in all their occurrences are instances of the same morpheme.

The first step in morphological analysis is to look for pieces with similar forms and meanings. This is the fundamental type-token issue. Let’s pretend we have a collection of coins. Each one is a form, a token. When we examine them closely, we can tell that three of them resemble each other (they’re all nickels), and two of them are identical (they both say 1997). These two coins are identical tokens of the same type, with identical shapes and values. Furthermore, all three coins are tokens of a greater type that includes all nickels, not simply those struck in 1997.However, although having the same value as a nickel, five pennies do not make up the same kind as the nickel since, while they have the same value, they are not the same shape. Consider the Spanish words buensimo’very good’ (bueno ‘good’), riqusimo’very tasty’ (rico ‘delicious’), and utilsimo’very useful’ (til ‘useful’) in terms of word analysis. The suffix -simo contributes the same superlative meaning and has the same shape in each situation. We may deduce that the suffix for all three terms is the same.It’s worth noting that we used three words with the same suffix. When attempting to break down a single form into its smaller elements, it is not enough to simply gaze at it. One of the characteristics that distinguishes a morpheme is that it recurs, allowing speakers to recognise it and assign it a meaning.

Principle 2: Forms with the same meaning but different sound shapes may be instances of the same morpheme if their distributions do not overlap.

The stem /baj-/ has two conceivable shapes in Kujamaat Jóola: [baj-] and [b ej-], but their distributions do not overlap. In the presence of a morpheme with an underlyingly tense vowel, [b ej-] occurs, while [baj-] does not. We may conclude that the two forms are instances of the same morpheme-based on the non-overlapping distribution. Allomorphs are when two or more instances of the same morpheme appear with different forms. The regular plural marker in English has several allomorphs – voice less alveolar fricative /s/, voiced alveolar fricative /z/, schwa plus voiced alveolar fricative /z/, syllabic alveolar nasal /n̩/, and Ø – as shown in (16):

(16) seat-/s/

shade-/z/

hedg-/ ez/

ox-/n̩/

fish-Ø

As in the previous example, the distributions of these forms do not overlap, and they all have the same meaning. We can infer that they are instances of the same morpheme.

Principle 3: Not all morphemes are segmental.

When we think of morphemes, we usually think of forms that may be said in some way, such as chicken, the, un-, and -ize. Some morphemes, however, are unable to be pronounced on their own. They are realised by the use of other morphemes. In English, for example, vowel alternations can help distinguish between the verb’s basic and past versions.

We refer to these alternations as ablaut (as in 18):

(18) run ran

speak spoke

eat ate

We know that the words in the second column are distinguished from those in the first by a past tense marker. But what exactly is it? It’s not the / in ran or the /o/ in spoke that’s the problem; it’s the difference between these vowels and the fundamental verb’s vowels, which aren’t segmental at all. We need to look at both the present and past tense forms of these verbs since the difference between them is crucial.Another typeof non-segmental morpheme in English is shown in (19):

(19) breathN breatheV

clothN clotheV

houseN houseV

Each pair has a voiceless fricative ([, s]) at the end of the noun and a voiced fricative ([, z]) at the end of the verb. Assuming that the noun is basic, the morpheme that distinguishes verbs is the phonological characteristic [+voice].

Although Principle 3 suggests using the term morpheme to refer to the non-segmental alternations in (18) and (19), doing so is inconvenient. Pairs like runran or breathbreathe are easier to understand as processes than as morpheme concatenations. We’ll go over this topic in more detail in the upcoming chapter. We briefly discussed basic morpheme difficulties in the context of infixation and circumfixation in section 1.2. Another classic issue is the presence of non-segmental alternations, such as those in (18) and (19).The contrast between forms was crucial in (18) and (19). The notion of contrast can be further extended, leading to Principle 4:

Principle 4: A morpheme may have zero as one of its allomorphs providedit has a non-zero allomorph.

In the plural, fish usually don’t have any distinctive markings: one fish, ten fish-. Because other words in the language, such as frogs, have non-zero plurals, we can claim that it has a zero plural, and that this zero plural is an allomorph of the ordinary plural [z]. This is a method of analysis, not a theoretical point. We can’t have a zero unless it’s in opposition to a non-zero variant. We cannot construct a zero plural (*sakana-) in Japanese, since sakana signifies both ‘fish (sg)’ and ‘fish (pl)’, because -PL contrasts with a non-zero allomorph nowhere in the language.

1.5.3 Introduction to Kujamaat Jóola

The Kujamaat Jóola people dwell in Senegal’s Basse-Casamance region, known as Kujamaat and speak the Kujamutay language. Jóola is a collection of dialects, the most notable of which are Kujamaat, often known as Foy, and Kasa. 4 In 1998, the total number of speakers was estimated to be 186,000. Kujamaat Jóola is a member of the Atlantic (sometimes known as West Atlantic) language family, whose most well-known members are Wolof, Senegal’s official language, and Fula. In terms of linguistic history, the Atlantic languages descend from Africa’s most widespread language family, Niger-Congo, one of the world’s largest language groups. Kujamaat Jóola has a number of characteristics that are strikingly comparable to those of the Bantu languages, a closely related but much larger and better-known subgroup of Niger-Congo. The most pervasive and characteristic morphological features of Kujamaat Jóola are

(i) a simple and elegant vowel harmony system,

(ii) an extensive noun class or gender system,

(iii) rich agreement morphology, and

(iv) agglutinative verbal morphology.

Morphology is the most intricately intertwined of all the different parts of language. It’s impossible to discuss morphology without also discussing phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Phonology is particularly essential since there is no way to get to a language’s morphology without first removing the effects of phonology on word forms. As a result, we must begin with a brief overview of Kujamaat Jóola phonology before moving on to morphology. (1) and (2) offer the phonemic inventory of Kujamaat Jóola (2). 5 Kujamaat Jóola has voiceless and voiced stops in three articulation locations – bilabial, alveolar, and velar – as well as nasal consonants in four articulation locations – bilabial, alveolar, palatal, and velar.It has voiceless and voiced postalveolar affricates /ʧ/ and /ʤ/, transcribed here as and (following Sapir 1965), voiceless labiodental and alveolar fricatives /f/and /s/, two liquids /l/ and /r/, and labiovelar and palatal glides/w/ and /y/. The voiceless glottal fricative /h/ rarely occurs.

(1) Consonants

Labial alveolar palatal velar glottal

p t k

b d ɡ

m n ɲ ŋ

c

j

f s h

l

r

(w) y (w)

Vowels occur in tense–lax pairs and may be short or long; what Sapir represents as schwa is realized as a tense unrounded high-mid central vowel under stress (Sapir 1965: 6), and is the tense counterpart to /a/. Tense high vowels are underscored (i and u). The lax counterparts of tense /e/ and /o/ are /ε/ and / c/ respectively:

(2) Vowels (all may be either long or short)

i i u u

e e o

ε c

a

The organization of this vowel chart follows standard linguistic practice. It reflects the position of the tongue during articulation and resonance, with the high vowels [i, i, u, u] at the top of the triangle, and the low