Ling 001

Word Structure, Part II

Outline

• In looking at morphology we are examining the relationships that words have to one another, and to the morphemes that are assembled into complex structures

• Two further themes– Different kinds of morphology: inflection vs. derivation

– What is a word? What can go into a word?

• We’ll see along the way how languages differ in terms of the distinctions we’ve introduced

• Conclude with questions about morphology and syntax

I. Inflection and Derivation

• Inflection: Creates new forms of the same word in a way that introduces or expresses different grammatical properties, while retaining some core notions of meaning (and category)

• Example:Play and Played describe the same action, but

situate it differently in time.

Inflectional categories

• Languages differ with respect to which categories are expressed inflectionally on e.g. verbs. English, for instance, expresses Person (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd) in a limited way, as well as tense:

Present Past

1s praise prais-ed

2s praise prais-ed

3s praise-s prais-ed

1p praise prais-ed

2p praise prais-ed

3p praise prais-ed

(s = singular, p = plural)

• Notice that marking for Person is not found in Past

Comparison

• The expression of such inflectional categories is limited in English. Compare Latin (lauda:re ‘praise’):

Present Past (imperfect)

1s laud-o: lauda:-ba-m

2s lauda:-s lauda:-ba:-s

3s lauda-t lauda:-ba-t

1p lauda:-mus lauda:-ba:-mus

2p lauda:-tis lauda:-ba:-tis

3p lauda-nt lauda:-ba-nt

Comparison, cont.

• In the English and Latin comparison, we are talking about the same abstract categories in some sense: Tense and Person/Number

• Languages express different notions in verbal marking:

• Classical Greek: Dual as well:

• Lu-ei `he/she/it looses’

• Lue-ton `they-2 loose’

• Luo-usi `they loose’

Another example

• Example 2 : (Some) verbs in Tepetotula Chinantec differ for whether the object is animate or inanimate:The verb here is ‘abandon’:

Inanimate Animate

1s tíLM téNLM

1p tíLM téNLM

2(s/p) tíLM? téNLM?3(s/p) tíM téNM

So, if you want to say ‘I abandoned my friend’ versus ‘I abandoned the house’, you have to use different verb forms

Synopsis

• Languages differ in terms of – What type of information is expressed in different

categories of words; and

– How many distinct means of marking such differences there are

• A further point of cross-linguistic difference concerns how much can fit into a single word, and how we are going to define word for different languages in the first place (see below)

Inflection, cont.

• Some general properties associated with inflection, generalizations which hold for the most part:– Inflection does not change syntactic categories. E.g. kick-s

is still a verb, even with its inflectional suffix

– Inflection expresses grammatically required features or relations (e.g. agreement, tense, etc.)

– Inflectional morphemes occur outside of derivational (see below) morphemes: ration-al-iz-ation-s

• As a general way of thinking of this, inflection creates new forms of the same word; derivation is thought to create a ‘different’ (but related) word

• Some inflectional morphemes in English:

--ed (past tense), -s (plural), etc.

Derivation

• As a basic working definition, derivational morphology creates new words from existing ones. Basic properties:– Change of category or part of speech (noun, verb, adjective)

is possible: pay, pay-ment

– New meaning added: e.g. re-do means to ‘do again’

– Inflection often has syntactic connections outside of the word, (e.g. agreement relates a subject to a verb). This is not so if we have e.g. kind/unkind; the change doesn’t relate to anything external

– Sometimes not productive (it sometimes doesn’t attach to some words) or unpredictable meanings:

• Destroy/destruction; employ/*empluction/employment

• Transmit ‘send’; transmis-sion ‘sending’; ‘car part’

Derivation: Examples

Morpheme Function

-(a)tion verb --> noun

deviate, devia-tion

-al noun --> adjective

institution, institution-al

-ize noun --> verb

color, color-ize

-like noun--> adjective

dog, dog-like

un-Karl Farbman-like

Further aspects of derivation

• Derivation is not necessarily category-changing; sometimes it creates a new word with the same category as the root/stem, but with a different meaning:

king, king-dom

star, star-dom

• But nounhood is a property of -dom in this case, as is clear from instances in which it attaches to other categories:

free, free-dom

Some unpredictability

• In many cases, the same kind of derivational pattern shows differences in form; take e.g. verb --> noun:1) -al refuse refus-al

arrive arriv-al

2) -ion confuse confus-ion

extend extens-ion

3) -ation derive derivation

confirm confirm-ation

4) -ment confine confine-ment

treat treat-ment

This is in a sense allomorphy: the form of the nominalizing affix is something that depends on what host the affix is attached to (put differently, the different affixes only attach to certain hosts)

Additional Interactions

• Often the distinction between derivation and inflection is used as a helpful tool, not an absolute distinction

• Consider some additional cases in terms of our criteria above:

Formation of gerunds in -ing:

John destroyed the house.

John’s destroying the house (upset me).

Gerunds, cont.

• Formation of the nominalization in -ing is– General: we can take whatever verbs we think of and form

such nominals

– Shows no allomorphy: all such nominals show -ing. Sometimes there is more than one denominal verb:

1) John’s destroying the city

2) John’s destruction of the city

There is a sense in which the second is more ‘nounlike’ than the first

• General point: This type of case meets some of the criteria for both inflection (regularity, productivity) and for derivation (category change)

II. What’s in a word?

• Recall our division of morphemes along two lines: free vs. bound and content vs. function:

Content Function

Bound cran- -ed

Free dog the

• Languages differ in terms of how they divide up this cross-classification; many languages have more morphological (bound) marking than e.g. English– Relatedly, languages differ in terms of what can go

in a ‘word’ (we can try to define word below)

Words

• One way to think of this is in terms of some counting exercises; how many words in

John ate the apple

• How about

I’ll eat the apples later.

I will eat the apples later.

I didn’t eat any apples yesterday

Distinctions

• Phonological Words: An object that forms a single unit for the purpose of phonology

• (Syntactic) Word: A single object for the purposes of the syntax

Example:

I’ll eat the apples later.

Here I’ll is a single phonological word. But if we think that this sentence has the same syntax as I will eat the apples later, this single phonological word is composed of two syntactic words

Complex words

• Languages differ greatly in terms of what they package into their words (relatedly, in terms of what is expressed as bound or free)

• Some languages pack a great deal into single (phonological) words:English:

They treated us in that way

Hupa (California, Athabascan)

‘a:yanohch’ilah

Analysis

• The Hupa example:

‘a:yanohch’ilah

‘a- ya- noh- ch’i- lah

thus PL 1Pl-Obj 3rdPl-Subj treat

• In this language and many others, what is expressed in English with many free morphemes is expressed in a single phonological word, with many bound morphemes

Incorporation

• Noun Incorporation

– Mapudungun

Ni chao kintu-waka-le-y

my father seek-cow-TNS-3s

‘my father is looking for the cows’

• Here, the meaning of the phrase “look for cows” is expressed in a single word (they can express it with a separate noun as well).

• This is similar in many ways to what happens in compounding in English; remember truck driver. In English, though we can’t use this as a verb *I truck-drive.

• But, in Mapudungun (and many other languages!) these strutures are not restricted to nouns; they happen with verbs as well.

‘How much’ Morphology

• Languages are often described in terms of whether they have little (English, Chinese) or rich (e.g. Hupa, Latin) morphological systems

• Further distinctions: whether meanings are “combined” in morphemes, or separated into different morphemes:– English: from our islands

– Latin: insul-i:s nostr-i:s

island-ABL.PL. our-ABL.PL– Turkish: ada-lar-ImIz-dan

island-PL-OUR-ABL

Syntax/Morphology

• What do the examples on the last slide show? At some level of description, languages express the same meanings in different ways, ranging from “more syntactic” (English) to “more morphological” (Turkish)

• This suggests that there is no sharp dividing line between a “word system” (morphology) and a system for assembling words into phrases etc. (syntax)

• Some more thoughts along these lines…

Morphology and Syntax, cont.

• With morphology we refer to the study of words and their structure, while with syntax we refer to the structure of larger objects (phrases, clauses)

• Examples:– The black board (phrase = syntax)

– The blackboard (2nd part is a word=morphology)

• In some cases, the distinction between these two domains of study is blurred as well

Interactions between syntax and morphology• Consider how comparatives and superlatives work in

English– Comparative: tall, tall-er

• In cases of this type, the comparative seems to be a kind of (inflectional?) morpheme, creating a comparative adjective from an adjective

• But:

Think of more adjectives

smart, smart-er intelligent, *intelligenter

Note that the comparative of intelligent requires a phrase:

more intelligent

More examples

• A more difficult case occurs with English in the phenomenon called do-support

• Consider a normal past tense sentence:John play-ed football yesterday.

Notice that the (bold-faced) past tense morpheme -ed appears on the verb play

Now the negative equivalent:

John di-d not play football yesterday.Here we see past on do, in did, which is the past tense of that verb.

The past tense, which appears as part of the word in the first example, occurs in a different word in the second example

• A consistent treatment of these facts involves a structure in which the tense morpheme -ed occupies a different syntactic position from that occupied by the verb