Introduction to Morphology

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Academic Year :2014/2015 Department :English Language and Literature ” Filière :Master “Culture and Linguistics Semester : 1, MODULE 3 Course : MORPHOLOGY Faculty Of Letters

MORPHOLOGY

An Introduction

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utterance , proposition, and sentence

1. You are intelligent.• Utterance:– a complete thought;– Physical,– can be heard, – recorded, – fed into a computer, etc.,

Morphology: IntroductionProf. AFKINICH

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• Different utterances = different propositions;• A proposition :– that aspect of the meaning of a sentence which

allows us to say, "Yes, that's true" or 'No, that's false".

Morphology: IntroductionProf. AFKINICH

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• A sentence :– an abstraction over utterances which have the same

form;– Part of our shared knowledge of language;– allows us to construct sentences, which we can then utter– are internal, mental entities, which have an abstract form.– imagine (1) uttered by more than three people: it’s the

same sentence;

Morphology: Introduction

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Morphology: Introduction 5


(2) and (3) below form the same proposition with (1) – 2) Tu es intelligent (French)– 3) nta mttawar (MA)

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utterance , proposition, and sentence• A proposition:– a state of affairs that holds in the world, and – The correspondence of the world with that state

of affairs allows us to attribute truth or falsity to the proposition.

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Dictionary Definition• “Mor·phol·o·gy: a study of the structure or form of

something” Merriam-Webster Unabridged• mor・ phol・ o・ gy (mrflj-mùN-K) n. pl.

mor.phol.o.gies. Abbr. morph., morphol.1.Biology 2. Linguistics. The study of the structure and form of words in language or a language, including inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds.” American Heritage Dictionary

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MORPHOLOGY

• Bloomfield's definition of morphology from the opening sentences of his classic chapter on Morphology: "By the morphology of a language we mean the constructions in which bound forms appear among the constituents. By definition, the resultant forms are either bound forms or words, but never phrases. Accordingly, we may say that morphology includes the constructions of words and parts of words, while syntax includes the construction of phrases" (1933: 207).

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• “Morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming words. Morphemes are the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of words, “ (Nida (1949:1))

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MORPHOLOGY

• “Morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they’re used in sentences.” (Lieber (2009:2))

• “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.”(Aronoff (2011:2))

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• As a science interested in the study of part of language, morphoogy flourished in the 19th century.

• It was a science that was mainly interested in the study of the change(s) occuring in the form of words

• By the mid 20th century, it was widely believed that everything morphology has been uncovered,

• Discoveries of that time were not of the kind that would make cross-linguistic generalizations about the morphology of languages,

• It was simply observed that languages diffred in a kind of random way.

Morphology

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• The interest shifted to syntax (a new filed of study, then). It was thought to be the field that would be bringing new isigyts into the nature of language and knowledge of language,

• Towards the end of the last century, advances in syntax established the fact that there are still questions to be answered in Morphology,

• This has led to a resurgence of morphology, Since the end of 1970s, the study of morphology has flourished in ways that could not be imagined at the beginning of 20th century.

Morphology

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• This flourishing is claimed (Bauer (2003: 5)) to be partly due to the following 5 reasons:1. Consideration of new data from a range of languages,2. A consideration of the patterning of morphological

data across languages,3. Innovations in the treatment of syntax and

phonology(which have held implications for morphology)

4. A renewed interest in how the brain processes words,5. The detailed study of morphological systems

themselves

Morphology

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• Consider these sentences:1. I bought a grammar of Arabic.2. The grammar of Arabic allows

the Object-Verb-subject ordering

3. He tried to learn Arabic but the Grammar was too hard for him.

4. The grammar of a language includes its phonology, its morphology, and its syntax.

5. I always loved grammar lessons at school.

Exercise

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• How many different meanings of “grammar” are there in these sentences and what is the precise meaning of “grammar” in each sentence?

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• One way to answer the question:1. What does language consist of?

• Is to say : “words”.• In a sentence such as (2):

2. The fire is burning.

We say that we have 4 words. But then if anyone asks us: How do we know? The answer is quite difficult

WORDS

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• Here are three criteria that we might have thought of:1. words are those things which occur between spaces,(1) works only for written languages. It doesn't work for

spoken ones;Even in English: a Black bird. 3? or 2? Ice cream ?2. Meaning, one word is one concept. Black bird (a kind of

bird) Problem: what does it mean to say one concept?3. It is about pronunciation we cannot just really interrupt

the word “black bird”. we pronounce it together as one word. That's what we call prosody, the way in which we pronounce words and sentences together.

WORDS

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• It seems that we have got three criteria which are quite unreliable,

• linguists are still quarreling about what is the right definition of a word,

• Conclusion: words are hard to define and at the same time we know a word whenever we see one or hear one

WORDS

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• At this point, we might also talk about the different distinction that can obtain whne we look into the details of words. Consider:

1. As a teacher I would do as teachers would expect a teacher to do when teaching.

How many words? 16? Orthographic words, (space, meaning, prosody)

12? Word forms, realizations of lexemes 10? Lexemes, abstract dictionary words.

Most of the time signalled by use of small capitals to rite them.

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WORDS

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• Grammatical words:1. Yesterday, I walked home.2. I have walked home.

• We clearly KNOW that the two “walked” above are not the same.

• In (1), it is WALK+ past; • In (2), it is “WALK+ past participle”• Grammatical words are defined in terms of their place in the

paradigm and named by descriptions (such as above) which speel out that place

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words

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• We have now 3 kinds of wordsi. Word forms including orthographic words,ii. Lexemes,iii. Grammatical words

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WORDS

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• MORPH:– A unit which is a segment of a word-form:• E.g. birthright = birth.right • Completely = complete. ly

– Potentially free morphs: “right” above– Obligatorily bound morphs

• It is typically the case in English that all free morphs realise “LEXEMES”

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WORDS

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• Any morph which can realise a lexeme and which is not any further analysable (except in the form of phonemes) is called a “root”

• Obligatory bound morphs which do not realise a lexeme and which are attached to roots to produce word forms are called affixes,

• Affixes can be added directly to a root or they can be added to a root and some already attached affixe(s),

• A base is anything to which we attach an affix whether it is a root or something bigger than a root

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• When an affix is attached before a base it is called a prefix,

• after the base, it is called a suffix,• If it is attached in the middle of the base, it is an

infix,• Suffixes are more common in English than prefixes

are,• There are no infixes in English

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WORD

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• Affixes can be of two kinds: – Inflectional, or – Derivational

• An inflectional affix is one which forms a new word form of a lexeme from a base,

• A derivational affix is one which forms a new lexeme from a base.– Recreates = re+create = a new lexeme, and – recreate +s = a new word form– In English, prefixes are always derivational and suffixes are

either derivational or inflectional

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WORDS

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• Criteria to say if an affix is derivational or inflectional:1. If it changes the part of speech of the base, it is

derivational,2. Inflectional affixes have always a regular meaning, that

of derivational ones is irregular,3. If you can add an inflection to one member of a class,

you can add it to all members of that class (3rd person vs –tion : nationalis(e).ation *com(e).ation, *produc(e).tion

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WORDS

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• Morphs which realise a particular morphemes and which are conditioned (phonologically, lexically, or grammatically) are called the allomorphs of that morpheme,

• Every allomorph is a morph, • A morph which realizes more than one morpheme

(person, gender, number) is called a porte-manteau morpheme

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word

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Morphology: Introduction 27Prof. AFKINICH

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Words

• learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a matter of putting words together, not of taking sentences apart (The example of a child),

• Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel, when words are strung together meaningfully.

• there are quite a few circumstances in which we use single words,

• words on their own, outside sentences, can be sorted and classified in various ways,

• A dictionary lists them according to their spelling in alphabetical order.

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Words and dictionaries

• A dictionary entry is an association of a word, alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means plus information about grammar and pronunciation,

• A word is a building-block of a sentence with a meaning that is unpredictable

• How many words? “Mary goes to Edinburgh next week, and she intends going to Washington next month.”

• 14? to and next repeated: 12?• The 2 “to” and the 2 “next” are Tokens of the same type• Words as listed in dictionaries entries are types

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Words and meaning

• some words are characterised by the fact that their sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly directly.

• A meaning, such as smoothness or wetness or both in the set of words

slip, slop, slurp, slide, slither, sleek, slick, slaver, slug.• However, the associations between most words and

their meanings are purely conventional, • We also have words that are composed of independently

identifiable parts, where the meaning of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of the whole word.

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Words and meaning

• The vast majority of words are words whose meanings, if not strictly predictable, are at any rate motivated in the sense that they can be reliably guessed by someone who encounters them for the first time in an appropriate context.

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Word

• Walk walks walks walked walking• Walk: the citation form• We have to make a distinction between the notion

‘word’ in an abstract sense (lexeme) and • the notion ‘word’ in the sense of ‘concrete word as

used in a sentence’

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Word

• The concrete words walk, walks, walked, and walking can be qualified as word forms of the lexeme walk.

• Small capitals are used to denote lexemes when necessary to avoid confusion between these two notions ‘word’.

• The rules for computing the different forms of lexemes are called rules of inflection

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Morphology

• The words walk, walks, walked, and walking show a relationship in form and meaning of a systematic nature, since similar patterns occur for thousands of other verbs of English.

• The subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with such patterns is called morphology.

• The existence of such patterns also implies that word may have an internal constituent structure. For instance, walking can be divided into the constituents walk and -ing.

• Therefore, morphology deals with the internal constituent structure of words as well.

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WORD• words as units of meaning versus units of sentence

structure• words as pronounceable entities (‘word forms’)

versus more abstract entities (sets of word forms) • inflectionally related word forms (forms of the same

‘word’) versus derivationally related words (different ‘words’ with a shared base)

• the distinction between compound words and phrases

• the relationship between the internal structure of a word and its meaning

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• Dictionary makers assume that these forms of the lexeme WALK are formed according to rules, and therefore need not be specified individually in the dictionary.

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LEXEME

• lexeme is :– a (potential or actual) member of a major lexical

category, having both form and meaning but being neither, and

– existing outside of any particular syntactic context. In actual use, though, any instance of a lexeme appears in a sentence, a grammatical and pragmatic context.

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• 1. Which of the following words may not deserve to be regarded as lexical items, and so may not need to be listed in a dictionary of modern English? Why?a. break breaking breakable breakageread reading readablepunish punishing punishable punishmentb. conceive conceivable conception– receive receptive receivable reception– perceive perceptive perceivable perceptionc. gregarious gregariousness gregariously– happy happiness happily– high highness highly

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• 4. Which of the following phrases (in italics) may deserve to be regarded as lexical items? Why? (you may like to consult a native speaker about what these sentences mean.)

a. They put the cat among the hamsters.b. They put the cat among the pigeons.c. They put out the cat before going to bed.d. They put out the light before going to bed.e. They really put themselves out for us.f. They looked really put out.g. Roger is a man who keeps his promises.h. Richard is a man of his word.i. A man in the road witnessed the accident.j. The man in the street is not interested in economic policy.k. Rupert is a man about town.l. I met a man with an umbrella.m. May the best man win.n. The best man unfortunately lost the rings on the way to the wedding.

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• Morphology-wise, this is a very resourceful website:• http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

Documents

Introduction to Morphology