WHAT IS

A MORPHEME?

Presented by :Amal M Mahjup

THE MAIN POINTS:

• Introduction• Problem with morphemes• Some other views of the

morpheme .

WARM UP !

• What is ........ • Morph?• Allomorph• Complementary distribution ?

MORPH / ALLOMORPH :

• A morph is a physical form representing some morphemes in a language. It is a recurrent distinctive sound ( phoneme) or sequence of sounds (phonemes).

• If different morphs represent the same morpheme, they are grouped together and they are called allomorphs.

COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION :

• If two elements never occur in the same contexts but, instead divide up some set of contexts between them, they are said to be in Complementary distribution.

• For example, the –s suffix is pronounced /s/ after voiceless obstruents, and /z/ after all other non-sibilant sounds.

• e.g., Ask-s /s/ • Add-s / z/

INTRODUCTION

• The term morpheme is used to refer to an abstraction away from number ( possibly

only one, possibly more) of morphs which share meaning and form and are in complementary distribution.

• e.g.,

fee Care-ful the

• According to Bauer (2003) ,this is a very narrow definition of morpheme and few practising linguists today would wish to adhere to it. The reason is that there are a number of problems with such a definition. Some of the problems those relating to recognising shared form and meaning.

PROBLEMS WITH MORPHEMES :

• The whole notion of morpheme works best when each word is easily divisible into one or more discrete morphs.

• e.g.,

• • This divides each word up into self-contained

units which are adjacent in the word.

Dis-em-power-ment Person-al-ities

• While analyses of this type are possible in large proportions of many languages, there are also many places where this kind of analysis simply will not account for the data.

• e.g.,

mosquito *Mos-quito

fierce *fi-erce

PORTMANTEAU MORPH / CUMULATION

• A portmanteau morph is a morph which realises more than one morpheme.

• For example:• The morph / –a /, at the end of the word-

form bella in the Italian phrase : • la mia bella cugina• My beatiful ( female ) cousin’ realises both

[ feminine and singular ]

• Il mio bello cugino. • ‘my handsome male cousin’ • Le mie belle cugine.• my beatiful female cousins.• Some scholars retain the term portmanteau

morph for those instances where two distinct word-forms are reduced to a single element.

• In portmanteau morphs or cumulation we could have distinct meanings which could not

be attributed to separate morphs but which had to be piled up on a single morph. The standard notion of a morpheme requires that each morpheme should have its own form and this is not true with cumulation. This is a case where there is meaning but no form.

• The converse is also found : the situation where there is form but no meaning. This can be found in the French adverbial formations.

• e.g.,

• It can be seen that the adverbs are consistently derived from the feminine form of the adjective but there is no feminie meaning in adverbs. ( empty morph)

gloss

• Gentle• Hasty• Complete

masculine

•du•atif

• kɔmplɛ

feminine

•dus•ativ• kɔmplɛt

adverb

• dusma•ativma•kɔmplɛtmἁ

• An empty morph is a recurrent form in a language that doesn’t appear to be related to any element of meaning.

• e.g.,

sens-u-al

Fact-u-al

ABLAUT• Ablaut is a change in a vowel in the root of a

word that signals a change in grammatical function.

 e.g.,

sing sang

Stand stood

Take took

• One option would be to analyse these forms as having infixes, and this runs into trouble with the meanings of the infixes.

• For instance, the / eı / in the middle of take cannot easily be glossed as ‘present simple’ when it also appears in taken.

• An alternative analysis, is to see replacement of /ı / in sing by /æ/ as being a morph. This , however, is

contracting with the theoretical concepts: a morph is defined as a form, not as a process of replacement.

SOME OTHER VIEWS OF THE MORPHEME

• The next diagram, shows how the different allomorphs of the morpheme are phonologically conditioned.

we select allomorph

/-s/ if a noun ends strident voiceless

consonant

• Example:• Cup – cups• Leek – leeks

We Select allomorph

/-iz/ if a noun ends in an alveolar or

alveo-palatal sibilant

• Example :• maze – mazes• beach – beaches

We select /-z/ if the noun ends

in a voiced nonstrident segment ; this

includes all vowels and consonants / bd g

mn

•Examples:•Room – rooms•Mug – mugs

BUT WE HAVE OTHER WAYS OF MAKING NOUNS PLURAL IN ENGLISH .

Singular•Goose•Cherub•Ox•Tempo

Plural•Geese•Cherubim•Oxen •Tempi

• The only conclusion We can come to about the words in diagram (2 ) is that they contain morphs belonging to morphemes which are synonymous with the {s} plural morpheme shown in (1) . They must be seperate morphemes because they do not clearly share form with the markers which are found in (1) .

• An alternative view, which gives priority to the semantics rather than to the form, that sees the markers for the plural on gees, oxen and children and probably all the plural markers in 2 as allomorphs of the same morpheme { plural}. The difference is that the choice of allomorphs is lexically conditioned in (2) not phonologically conditioned, as it is in (1).

THIS ARGUMENT HAS BEEN WIDELY ACCEPTED AND HAS RAISED SOME QUESTIONS:

• First, note that, while the –en in oxen and the –s in cows are genuinely in complementary distribution. The same is not true of all the plural markers illustrated in (2).

• Cherubs and cherubim • Tempos and tempi are possible plural in

English.• This can be answered in two ways. It is

possible that cherubs and cherubim belong to separate lexemes in English ,cherubs being the plural of cherubs ‘ innocent-looking child’ and cherubim the plural of cherub ‘ attendant of god’.

• While tempos and tempi are possible plurals of tempo in English, they are used in different registers or dialects.

• Indeed just the opposite would normally be taken to be the case : given Wasp

• ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ and wasp ‘ stinging insect’

• We would normally associate them with different morphemes, on account of their meaning ,even though they form their plural in precisely the same way

Verb

Conceive

deceive

• In this case dividing the word into morphs each representing a morpheme is unacceptable and the reason is the meaning. For instance :

• Con-ceive • Re-fer• Re-mit • We can feel justified in establishing a morpheme

where the meaning is costant but the form is not.

• All the verbs ending in –ceive form their corresponding nouns in the same way ( by changing –ceive to ception ) and this is not a regular way of forming nouns in English.

• All the –fer words have similar nouns and all the –mit words have similar nouns.

• If we find a word ending in –it which does not contain the element –mit

• For example : • Edit • Orbit • Such a word does not make its corresponding noun

in the same fashion.• Example :• *edission• * orbission• The way of forming nouns seems to have something

to do precisely with the –ceive , -fer , and –mit elements.

CONCLUSION

• The word ‘morpheme’ is one of the most basic terms in linguistics, one which students are expected to control almost from the beginning of their study of the field. Linguists of many persuasions use the word freely, if only as a descriptive convenience, even when their theoretical commitments are not consistent with the idealized picture of word structure inherited from our structuralist forebears. We commonly assume that both the intension and the extension of the term are virtually self-evident, but it turns out on closer examination to hold the keys to some of the deep questions we can ask about the nature of language. One of these, indeed, is whether or not there is any such thing as a ‘morpheme’.

REFERENCES

• Anderson, Stephen R. (in press). “The Morpheme: Its Nature and Use.” to appear in The Oxford Handbook of Inflection (Matthew Baerman, ed.).

• Aronoff, Mark (1994), Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh.

• Katamba, Francis (1993), Morphology, Basingstoke: Macmillan.