Unit 2; Morphology

Morpheme: Smaller word parts which cannot be divided into even smaller parts.

Can words be decomposed into smaller units?

- Yes, there are different parts of words we can separate

o Morpheme: smaller word parts

o Root: lexical morpheme, base to which grammatical or

derivational morphemes are added to for a complex word.

o Suffix: bound morpheme added after the root

o Prefix: bound morpheme added before the root

Morphological competence

- When you know a word, you know its sound (pronunciation) and its meaning.

- Sound-meaning relation is arbitrary: it is possible to have words with the same

sound and different meaning (Bear and bare) and words whit the same meaning

and different sounds (Sofa and Couch)

o Arbitrary: Proposed by Lessouseur, argues communities came up with

sounds “randomly”

- Each word in one's mental lexicon specifies the grammatical category or

syntactic class of the word (noun, pronoun...)

How to know if a word is noun, adjective or preposition?

- A ... promised to inquire about a schoolmaster (Noun)

- A friend made a promise to the ... Bianca (Adjective)

- The schoolmaster made a promise... Bianca (Preposition)

Content words VS Function words (to know by hard)

- Function words are specifically grammatical relations and have little to no

semantic content. (Prepositions, pronouns...)

o Aka. Closed class words

- Content words denote concepts like object actions... (Nouns, adjectives)

o Aka. Open classes (new words can be added trough derivational

morphemes between other ways)

Lexical morphemes VS Grammatical morphemes

- Lexical morphemes refer to items, actions, attributes. They are referential

(Nouns, verbs and adjectives)

o Boys: Boy+s, boy is lexical (s) is the plural

- Grammatical morphemes signal relations between a word and the context

which it is used

o Determiners, prepositions and inflectional morphemes

Free morphemes VS Bound morphemes

- Our morphological knowledge has two components:

o knowledge of the individual morphemes

o knowledge of the rules that combine them.

 - Free morphemes: morphemes like boy, desire or gentle may constitute words by

themselves

- Bound morphemes: morphemes like –ish, -iness and –ly, are never words by

themselves, but are always parts of words

Prefixes and suffixes

- Many languages have prefiexes and suffixes, but languages may differ on how

they deploy these morphemes.

- A morpheme that is a prefix in one language may be a suffix in another and vice

versa.

o In English the plural morphemes are –s and –es while in Zapotec the

plural morpheme is ka- (a prefix).

▪ Zigi -> Kazigi (chair -> Chairs)

Infixes

- Infixes are morphemes that are inserted into other morphemes.

o An English example of an infix would be “absofuckinglutley”

▪ In this case fucking is an affective morpheme, it does not add

lexical meaning

- To indicate infixes, we add comas to separate the morphemes (as opposed to a

line like suffixes or prefixes –s or un-)

o Abso,fucking,lutley (,fucking,)

Circumfixes
 - Some languages combine a prefix and a suffix into a circumfix- a morpheme that

occurs in tow parts, one on each side of a stem.

o In Samoan a morpheme FE-/-A ʔ I means “reciprocal” and the verb “to

quarrel” is finau

▪ To quarrel with each other = fefinauaʔi (FE + FINAU +AʔI)

Rules of word formation

- Rules for word formation are basicaly rules you follow to “create” words

o Adjective+ -ify= verb (purify)

Derivational morphology

- New words enter the language in two different ways

o Addition of words unrelated to any existing words (words borrowed from

other languages)

o Derivational morphology, the creation of new open-class words by the

addition of morphemes to existing roots.

▪ Anti-, dis-, -ment, -ful, -ly between others

- Derivational morphemes increase vocabulary, but their occurrence is not

related to sentence structure.

o Establish-ment, simply a noun, there is no sentence frame that demands

a –ment noun

Inflectional morphology

- Many languages have bound morphemes that have strictly grammatical function

(no meaning by themselves), these are called inflectional morphemes.

 - Inflicted forms are produced to express a series of values of specific

grammatical categories that the grammar of a language requires to be

obligatorily expressed.

- Inflectional morphology does NOT create new words or change classes

o Adding –s for plurals, -ing or –ed for tenses...

- Inflectional morphemes can be attached to most bases

Functions of inflectional morphonology

- Number: Grammatical systems encode whether a word refers to a single

individual (singular) or multiple individuals (plural)

o Some languages have dual (two individuals) and paucal (small plural)

- Gender: masculine, feminine and neutral

o There is no real reason for this; there is no reason why la luna is feminine

in Spanish

- Person: The speaker and the listener. Encodes whether the reference is directed

towards one of the actors in the communication.

- Case: Nominal elements exhibit case in morphology. Which expressed the

syntactic function of a complement.

o Reginam populus amat -> The people love the queen

o Regina populum amat-> The queen loves the people

- Tense: Past, present or future

- Mood: Indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the denoted event.

o A speaker can describe a real event, indicative mood: Mario leaves

 o Refer to a potential event, subjunctive mood; I think Mario might leave

o Command it, imperative mood: Leave!

o Wish for it, desiderative mood: If only Mario would leave

- Aspect: Indicates different viewpoints regarding the development of the

process/action denoted by the verb. (Perfective and imperfective)

o Perfective aspect: Jhon has eaten the apple -> action is over

o Imperfective aspect: Mario was eating the apple -> action could or could

not be over, it does not matter.

- Voice: Describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses

and its arguments.

o Active voice: The cat (S) is chasing (V) the mouse (O) -Unmarked, normal

form-

▪ The subject is the actor, and the object is the reciver

o Passive voice: The mouse (S) is chased (V) by the cat (IO)

▪ Emphasises something, marked form

Compounds

- Two or more words may be joined to form new, compound words.

o Bittersweet (Adj+ Adj= Adi)

o Poorhouse (Adj+ Noun = Noun)

o Spoon-feed (Noun+ Verb= Verb)

- The right word will be the one that gives the Grammatica class

- The head of the compound is the one that gives meaning

o Dog bed-> Noun+Noun= Noun head= bed

 ▪ What is it? A bed

o Heavy weight-> Adjective+ Noun= Noun head= no head

▪ It's not a weight or a heavy so there is no head

- It’s impossible to separate compounds, therefore, to make sure it is a

compound try to separate it or add something in the middle

o *eixuga-bé-mà

- Unity of meaning, two words give one meaning

o Clau anglesa

The Hierarchal Structure of Words

- The way affixes are attached to words usually reflects hierarchical structure.

o Certain affixes must be attached before others

- E.g.: happi-ness-es
o Derrivational suffix: -ness
▪ Nomalizer that forms a noun from an adjective
o Attached to the root: happy
o Suffix: -es
- The plural suffix attaches to nouns, not adjectives, thus –ness
must be attached to happy to derive a noun before –es can be
added
- E.g.: Un-fasten-ed
o Derivational morpheme un-: used to make a verb to
mean the opposite of the root verb
o Fastened: complex word, fast (old word for secure) -en
(derivational suffix)
- -ed is a verb suffix thus it can’t be added directly to the adj. fast,
-en has to be added first

Labeled bracketing
Each class node or constituent has its own bracket labeled with the appropriate class

node (name) abbreviation

- [N[N[A un-[A happy]-ness]-es]

Tree diagrams

Other morphological phenomena

- Ablaut: Internal change of sound to express change in meaning

o Sing- Sang- Sung (change of vocal)

- Portmanteau morphology: When a morpheme contains information about more

than one grammatical category.

o The (i) in Italian shows singular and masculine

- Suppletion: Irregular forms of a paradigm.

o Go- went

o Be- were

- Reduplication: All or a part of a word is copied or duplicated to indicate a change

in meaning or usage.
 o Complete reduplication: In Lakhota verbs referring to colour gí (sin) and

gigí (plur) (to be rusty brown)

o Partial reduplication: gogs (dog) gogogs (dogs)

- Zero morpheme: A morphological category that is not manifested phonetically

o {nen}+{masc} -> /‘n3n/ + /θ/

o {nena} + {fem} -> /‘n3n/ + /e/

- Conditioned variation: elements that are in complementary distribution,

depends on the last leter before the s sound

o /-iz/, /-s/ or /-z/ in english

o /-s/, /es/ in spanish or in can be /im/, /in/ or /i/

/-s/ after voiceless consonants: k,p,t and f

/-z/ after voiced consonants: b,g,d,v,l,m,n,r and vowels

/-iz) (extra sylable) after strident consonants: s,z,sh...

The notion of word

- Clitics: do not have all the characteristics we attribute to a word because they

cannot be pronounced in isolation, they are phonologically dependent.

o Proclitic: associated with the word that follows it.

▪ For example, the sentence "They love to dance" is typically

pronounced with the to truncated to a "t" that gets tacked onto the

front of dance.

o Enclitics: clitic that is associated with the word that comes before it.
 ▪ Contractions, such as the "ve" in "would've" and the "ll" in "it'll,"

are enclitics.

o They are usually weak forms of functional elements such as auxiliaries,

determiners, particles and pronouns.

Acquistion of morphology (Berko's study 1958)

- Berko’s study: set of drawings to elicit children’s production of pseudowords

with their inflections. He tested 19 children between 4 and 5 years old and 61

children between 5,6- and 7-years old

- Hypothesis: If children learned inflected forms by imitation, they would be

unable to add inflections to unfamiliar words.

o Words with the morphemes:

▪ Plural (s,ez, and z)

▪ Possessive (three allomorphs)

▪ Past (ed, t and d)

▪ Progressive (ing)

▪ Compounds

o Conclusions/ findings

▪ Five- to seven-year-olds readily added different inflections endings

to non-sense and non-existing words.

▪ Children were applying consistent procedure in marking noun as

plural or possessive, or a verb as ongoing or past.