Transcript New Employee Orientation

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?
–

What is the other important part?
Some languages are morphologically more
complex than others
–
What guess could you make about languages which are
not morphologically complex?
2
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
–
–

How many different word-forms are there?
How many different lexemes are there?
And another question:
–
–
What do you think “lexeme” means?
Lexemes and word-forms are very like phonemes and allophones,
actually.
3
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
–
–


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)
–
With their pronunciation, meaning, and morphological structure
4
Two kinds of words

Function words
–
–
–
–

Content words
–
–

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?
5
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
–
6
They were Latin inflections

That means
–

In English, inflection includes things like
–
–

Number
Tense
BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme
–

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)
–
–
Give one or more inflected forms (eg sleeps) for each
And one or more derived forms (like sleepy)
7
Inflectional vs derivational
morphology

Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic
category, part-of-speech, 詞類)
–

Derivation makes a new lexeme
–

create  creates
Inflection is productive
–

create  creative
Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the
original lexeme
–

Derivation may or may not change word class
You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural
Derivation is not necessarily productive
–
You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb
8
Roots and affixes

Unbelievable contains
–
–
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
–
–
But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes
Plural in the Zapotec language is realized by a prefix, not a suffix
9
Infixes

In Tagalog
–
–
–



What is the root morpheme here?
What are the affixes?
Yule describes a kind of infix used in English
–

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?
10
Reduplication

Afrikaans
–

Motu (Papua New Guinea)
–
–
–

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?
11
Reading



Read Chapter 7
Answer the Study Questions
Don’t look at the answers until you have
finished!
12
Conversion to a different POS

Related words with different POS share the same
form
–
–
Bank: He banked the money
Better:
» You should respect your elders and betters
» His performance is difficult to better
–


Empty: He emptied his glass in one gulp
Sometimes the stress changes
See how many examples you can think of
13
Zero morphs (in inflectional
morphology)


What’s the plural of sheep?
We can either say
–
–


{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
–
{羊} singular, {羊};{Ø} plural (!)
14
Shortening processes

Backformation (you usually need to know the history of
the word)
–
–

Clipping (this doesn’t involve complete morphemes)
–
–

Babysitter  babysit
Editor  edit
Science-fiction  sci-fi
Information  info
Chinese stump compounds
–
–
–
台大
網咖
Are these backformations or clipped forms?
15
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
16
Reading



Read Chapter 7
Answer the Study Questions
Don’t look at the answers until you have
finished!
17