Morphology
Ling 111 Structure of Language March 7, 2024
• Morphology
• the part of the grammar that is concerned with words
and word formation.
• We have seen how phonemes are the minimal meaningful unit of linguistic
structure.
• Why do we analyze them in this way?
• changing one phoneme e ects the meaning of the larger linguistic unit in
which it occurs.
• native speakers recognize phonemes as distinct units.
• they are stored as disinct units in our mental grammars.
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• If you ask your friends who have not studied linguistics asked you (or maybe if
you asked yourself before you started this class) what the minimal meaningful
unit of linguistic structure is, what would you be likely to answer?
• the word
• Why?
• We often think of sentences as being composed of words.
• But…
• What are all of the distinct meaningful elements in the sentence below?
• If you ask your friends who have not studied linguistics asked you what the
minimal meaningful element in your langauge is, your rst answer might be,
“words, obviously.”
• What are all of the distinct meaninful elements?
• If you ask your friends who have not studied linguistic-s asked you what the
minimal meaning-ful element in your langauge is, your rst answer might be,
“words, obviously.”
• morpheme
• the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or
function
• the minimal unit that is meaningful (in the sense of lexical meaning or
conveying grammatical information)
• If you ask your friends who have not studied linguistic-s asked you what the
minimal meaning-ful element in your langauge is, your rst answer might be,
“words, obviously.”
• What is the meaning conveyed by:
• -s in friends
• -ed in studied
• -ful in meaningful
• -ly in obviously
• word
• the smallest free form found in language
• convey lexical or grammatical meaning
• Criteria for analyzing a form as a word:
• do not need to be attached to any other forms within a sentence.
• can occur in isolation (i.e. without being in a sentence).
• can change their position in the sentence.
• Criteria for analyzing a form as a word:
1. Words do not need to be attached to any other form within a sentence.
Exams are stressful.
*Exam are -s stressful.
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2. Words can occur in isolation:
• Q: What part of the course do you nd most stressful?
• A: Exams.
3. Words can change their position within the sentence:
• Students take exams.
• Exams are taken by students.
• It is exams that really stress students out.
fi
• Some words can generally not occur in isolation:
• Q: Are you studying right now or will you study tomorrow?
• A: *Are.
• But there is other evidence for analyzing them as words.
• Their position within the sentence is not completely xed.
• You are going to study tonight.
• Are you going to study tonight?
• Unlike phonemes, words carry lexical meaning
• Unlike sentences, words are permanently stored in our mental
grammars.
• lexicon
• the list, represented and stored in our mental grammars, of all of a
language’s words (and morphemes?)
• contains information about their phonological representations, meanings,
and syntactic properties
• = a speaker’s mental dictionary
• Two di erent classes of words, based on their morphological structure
• simple words - words that consist of one morpheme; monomorphemic
words
• complex words - words that consist of two or more morphemes
ff
• simple words
• house
• train
• please
• book
• volume
• complex words (How many morphemes in each word?)
• dancer runs
• dancers redecorated
• activate
• reactivate
• specialize
• specialization
The status of morphology in the grammar
• How do we know that morphologically complex words consist of multiple
individual morphemes?
• E.g. smallest
• = small + est
1. meaning
2. productivity
• productivity
• morphemes can combine independently with other morphemes to make
other words
• small + er = smaller
• large + est = largest
• We can make a generalization about the distribution of the morphemes -er
and -est.
• -er attaches to adjectives to form a new adjective that indicates a relatively
greater degree
• -est attaches to adjectives to form a new adjective that indicates the relatively
greatest degree
• Morphology (like phonology) is characterized by:
• regularity
• productivity
• predictivty
• Regularity
Singular Plural
cat cats
dog dogs
star stars
moon moons
table tables
• Productivity
• the Wug Test
One wug and one wug make two ________.
→ The meaning and form of the plural morpheme -s is part of our mental
grammar, along with the plural formation rule.
English Plural Formation Rule
Plural Noun → Root Noun + -s
( → means “consists of”)
A plural noun consists of a root noun and s.
•
• Compositionality
• the meaning of a word is made up of the meanings of the morphemes
it contains.
• Consider:
• small
• smaller bigger
• smallest biggest
• Why do you think we would not want a grammar in which all of the plural
forms of the regular nouns are memorized as well as the irregular ones?
•
Exercise: Break the following words down into their morphemes:
• rewrite
• delight
• fewest
• impossibility
• refastening
• deconstruct
• review
•
Key morphological concepts
• All morphemes are either free or bound.
• free morpheme - a morpheme that can stand on its own
• Examples: the, cat, run, pretty, trapezoid
• Free morphemes may appear with bound morphemes attached to them.
• But, they don’t need to have other morphemes attached in order to be well-
formed.
•
• bound morpheme - a morpheme that must be attached to a
free morpheme in order to be well-formed
• Examples: re-, un-, -est, -er -s -ing
• Concepts that are expressed by free morphemes in English do not necessarily
have the same status in other languages.
• Morphemes can be roots or a xes
• root - the primary piece of meaning in a word, to which a xes can be added.
• Examples: cat, pretty, magnet
• What is the root of the word remagnetize? (See next slide)
ffi
• Example illustrating root versus a xe(s)
• remagnetize
• root = magnet
• a xes: re-, -ize
ffi
• a x - a morpheme which attaches to roots (or stems), changing their
meaning in regular ways.
• Examples: re-, un-, -est, -er, ing, -s
• A xes are bound morphemes.
• Why?
ffi
ffi
base - a form to which an a x is attached.
• can be either:
• a root
• drinker (drink is the base)
• swimmer (swim is the base)
• a root plus one or more a xes
• drinkers (drinker is the base)
ffi
ffi
• Types of a xes
• pre x
• su x
• in x
• circum x
fi
ffi
fi
fi
ffi
• pre x
• an a x that occurs before a base
๏ reread
• undo
fi
ffi
• su x
• an a x that occurs after a base
๏ slower
• quickest
• reads
• books
ffi
ffi
• in x
• an a x that occurs inside of a base
๏ fan-fuckin-tastic
• abso-bloody-lutely
fi
ffi
• circum x
• an a x that surrounds a base
• broken into two parts, usually a pre x and a su x
• Example: Tuwali Ifugao (Austronesian language spoken in Phillipines)
• circum x ka-an - nominalizes a verb (makes a Verb into a Noun)
1. baddang ‘help’ verb root/stem
2. ka-baddang-an ‘helpfulness’
2.
ffi
fi
fi
fi
• Compound (word)
• a complex word formed by combining two or more individual words from
various parts of speech
• Examples:
• re engine = re + engine (Noun + Noun)
• bluebird = blue + bird (Adjective + Noun)
•
fi
fi
• Compound (word)
• Note that the meaning of the compound is not always the sum of its two
parts.
• Examples:
• blackboard
• hotdog
•
