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Linguistics week 13
Morphology 3
1
Morphology, then
What is it?
It’s the study of word forms, and the changes we
make to words
It’s part of the grammar of languages?
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What is the other important part?
Some languages are morphologically more
complex than others
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What guess could you make about languages which are
not morphologically complex?
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Words. How many words are there in this
utterance?
She was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go, she
went.
That was easy. How did you determine the number?
Now answer two further questions
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How many different word-forms are there?
How many different lexemes are there?
And another question:
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What do you think “lexeme” means?
Lexemes and word-forms are very like phonemes and allophones,
actually.
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Word segmentation
In English, words are conveniently separated by white
space, in writing
This is not true of Chinese
And it is not true of spoken English either
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If you know a language, you can separate the stream of continuous
speech into words
Adults who never learned to read are equally aware of words
Words are sound + meaning units
Words (lexemes) are the units stored in dictionaries (and in
your head)
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With their pronunciation, meaning, and morphological structure
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Two kinds of words
Function words
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Content words
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Restricted in number
A closed class
Have a grammatical function
Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical morpheme)
An open class
New content words often come into use in every
language
Which words on this slide …? Chinese examples?
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You think English is hard?
Ha! When I was at school I had to do Latin
See if you can find out what this is:
amo
amamus
amas
amatis
amat
amant
– Or this
annus
anni
anne
anni
annum
annos
anni
annorum
anno
annis
anno
annis
–
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They were Latin inflections
That means
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In English, inflection includes things like
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Number
Tense
BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme
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The two lists each show the different word-forms, for a Latin noun
or verb
So sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
Write down 10 roots (like sleep)
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Give one or more inflected forms (eg sleeps) for each
And one or more derived forms (like sleepy)
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Inflectional vs derivational
morphology
Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic
category, part-of-speech, 詞類)
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Derivation makes a new lexeme
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create creates
Inflection is productive
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create creative
Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the
original lexeme
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Derivation may or may not change word class
You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural
Derivation is not necessarily productive
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You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb
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Roots and affixes
Unbelievable contains
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One free morpheme
A root and two affixes
» One prefix and one suffix
In English, there are derivational prefixes and suffixes
There are no inflectional prefixes
Suffixes are more common in the world’s languages
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But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes
Plural in the Zapotec language is realized by a prefix, not a suffix
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Infixes
In Tagalog
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What is the root morpheme here?
What are the affixes?
Yule describes a kind of infix used in English
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sulat = write
sumulat = wrote
sinulat = was written
I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity
Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?
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Reduplication
Afrikaans
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Motu (Papua New Guinea)
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dik = ‘thick’; dikdik = ‘very thick’
mero = boy; memero = boys
meromero = little boy
How do you say ‘little boys’ in this language?
And – you guessed it – what uses does
reduplication have in Mandarin?
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Reading
Read Chapter 7
Answer the Study Questions
Don’t look at the answers until you have
finished!
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Conversion to a different POS
Related words with different POS share the same
form
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Bank: He banked the money
Better:
» You should respect your elders and betters
» His performance is difficult to better
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Empty: He emptied his glass in one gulp
Sometimes the stress changes
See how many examples you can think of
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Zero morphs (in inflectional
morphology)
What’s the plural of sheep?
We can either say
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{SHEEP}:{Ø} (the root plus a zero morph), or
The morpheme {SHEEP} realizes both singular and
plural meanings
The same applies to the past and present tense of
hit
A lot of linguists don’t like the idea of zero
morphs, because it implies
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{羊} singular, {羊};{Ø} plural (!)
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Shortening processes
Backformation (you usually need to know the history of
the word)
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Clipping (this doesn’t involve complete morphemes)
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Babysitter babysit
Editor edit
Science-fiction sci-fi
Information info
Chinese stump compounds
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台大
網咖
Are these backformations or clipped forms?
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Neo-classical compounds: two
bound morphemes
Biology {LIFE}+{WORDS}
Telephone {DISTANT}+{SOUND}
Introduce {IN}+{LEAD}
In a way, these are the closest English
equivalent to Chinese words like 朋友
Group activity
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Reading
Read Chapter 7
Answer the Study Questions
Don’t look at the answers until you have
finished!
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