Linguistics week 13

Morphology 3 1

Inflectional vs derivational morphology

     Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic category, part-of-speech, 詞類 ) – Derivation may or may not change word class Derivation makes a new lexeme –

create



creative

Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the original lexeme –

create



creates

Inflection is

productive

– 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 2

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 3

Infixes

     In Tagalog –

sulat

= write – –

sumulat

= wrote

sinulat

= was written What is the root morpheme here?

What are the affixes?

Yule describes a kind of infix used in English – I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?

4

Reduplication

   Afrikaans –

dik

= ‘thick’;

dikdik

= ‘very thick’ Motu (Papua New Guinea) –

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?

5

Reading

 Read Chapter 8   Answer the Study Questions Don’t look at the answers until you have finished!

6

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 7

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 (!) 8

Shortening processes

   Backformation (you usually need to know the history of the word) – – Babysitter  Editor  edit babysit Clipping (this doesn’t involve complete morphemes) – – Science-fiction  Information  info sci-fi Chinese stump compounds – 台大 – 網咖 – Are these backformations or clipped forms?

9

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 10

Reading

 Read Chapter 8   Answer the Study Questions Don’t look at the answers until you have finished!

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