CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn about the intersection between morphology and syntax, which is the study of sentence structure.

• We will examine morphological processes like passivization and causativization that change the number of arguments of a verb.

• We will look at phenomena that sit on the borderline between word formation and syntax: clitics, phrasal verbs like call up in which the two parts can sometimes be separated in sentences, and compounds that contain whole phrases or even whole sentences.

KEY TERMS

valency, argument, active, passive, anti-passive, causative, applicative, noun-incorporation, clitic, phrasal verb, phrasal compound

Introduction

As you've learned so far in this book, morphology is concerned with the ways in which words are formed in the languages of the world. Syntax, in contrast, is concerned with identifying the rules that allow us to combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences. Morphology and syntax, then, are generally concerned with different levels of linguistic organization. Morphologists look at processes of lexeme formation and inflection such as affixation, compounding, reduplication, and the like. Syntacticians are concerned, among other things, with phrase structure and movement rules, and rules concerning the interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which morphology and syntax interact.

We saw in chapter 6 that inflectional morphology is defined as morphology that carries grammatical meaning; as such it is relevant to syntactic processes. Case-marking, for example, serves to identify the syntactic function of an NP in a sentence.

One of the things that drew me to linguistics several decades ago was a sense of wonder at both the superficial diversity and the underlying commonality of languages. My wonder arose in the process of working through my first few problem sets in linguistics, not surprisingly, problem sets that involved morphological analysis. What I learned first was not theory – indeed at that moment in linguistic history morphology was not perceived as a separate theoretical area in the US – but what languages were like, how to analyze data, and what to call things. I love morphological theory, but for drawing beginning students into the field of linguistics, I believe that there is no substitute for hands-on learning, and that is where this book starts.

This book is intended for undergraduate students who may have had no more than an introductory course in linguistics. It assumes that students know the International Phonetic Alphabet, and have a general idea of what linguistic rules are, but it presupposes little else in the way of sophistication or technical knowledge. It obviously assumes that students are English-speakers, and therefore the first few chapters concentrate on English, and to some extent on languages that are likely to be familiar to linguistics students from language study in high school and university. As the book progresses, I introduce data from many languages that will be “exotic” to students, so that by the end of the book, they will have some sense of linguistic diversity, at least with respect to types of morphology.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will get your first taste of the theoretical challenges that morphologists face.

• We will consider what the best way is to characterize morphological rules.

• And we will examine several theoretical controversies that have occupied morphologists in recent years: the extent to which rules of morphology and rules of syntax can interact, the nature of blocking, the best way to analzye so-called bracketing paradoxes, and the characterization of affixal polysemy.

KEY TERMS

Item and Arrangement, Item and Process, Word and Paradigm, realizational, model, multiple, exponence, Lexical, Integrity, Hypothesis, blocking, bracketing, paradoxes

Introduction

Up to this point, we've spent a lot of time looking at the way morphology works in languages – what kinds of morphemes there are, what to call them, how to analyze data, and so on. This is an important and necessary first step to becoming a morphologist, but there's more to morphology than just being able to analyze data. When we study morphology, or indeed any of the other subfields of linguistics, we have a much larger goal in mind, which is to characterize and understand the human language faculty. Put a bit differently, our ultimate goal as linguists is to figure out the way in which language is encoded in the human mind. For morphologists, our specific goal is to figure out how the mental lexicon is encoded in the mind.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn about morphological typology: how morpholgists characterize the morphological systems of languages.

• We will begin by describing the morphological systems of five very different languages, looking at the kinds of lexeme formation and inflection that they display.

• Then we will discuss both traditional ways of classifying the morphology of languages and more contemporary ways of doing so.

• Finally, we will look at how both the family a language belongs to and the geographic area in which it is spoken can influence its typological classification.

KEY TERMS

isolating, analytic, agglutinative, fusional, polysynthetic, index of synthesis, index of fusion, head-marking, dependent-marking, implicational, universal

Introduction

In this book, we have focused so far on formal processes of morphology that occur in many languages of the world; we have provided a sort of toolkit for forming new words from which languages can pick and choose. What we haven't looked at yet is what we could call “the big picture”: how does word formation work overall in specific languages and how can the morphological systems of particular languages vary from one another? In other words, rather than looking at specific processes and how they work, we can look at how languages exploit different parts of our toolkit to constitute their own unique systems of morphology. We can try to characterize the morphological systems of languages according to the sorts of morphological processes that they exploit.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn why we make a basic distinction between the dictionary and the mental lexicon.

• We will look at how linguists study the mental lexicon and how children acquire words.

• We will consider whether complex words are stored in the mental lexicon, or derived by rules, or both.

• And we will look further at how dictionaries have evolved and how they differ from one another and from the mental lexicon.

KEY TERMS

word, mental, lexicon, lexicography, the Gavagai problem, fast mapping, aphasia

Introduction

In the last chapter, we raised the question “what's a word?” And we saw in section 1.2 that this question actually subsumes two more specific questions. In this chapter we will look more closely at those questions.

On the one hand, when we ask “what's a word?,” we may be asking about the fundamental nature of wordhood – as we saw, a far thornier philosophical question than it would seem at first blush. Native speakers of a language seem to know intuitively what a ‘word’ is in their language, even if they have trouble coming up with a definition of ‘word’. Interestingly, the Oxford American Dictionary seems to bank on this intuitive knowledge when it defines a word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.”

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn what morphology is, namely the study of word formation.

• We will look at the distinction between words and morphemes, between types, tokens, and lexemes and between inflection and derivation.

• We will also consider the reasons why languages have morphology.

KEY TERMS

morpheme, simplex, complex, type, token, lexeme, word form, inflection, derivation

Introduction

The short answer to the question with which we begin this text is that morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world, and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they're used in sentences. As a native speaker of your language you have intuitive knowledge of how to form new words, and every day you recognize and understand new words that you've never heard before.

Stop and think a minute:

• Suppose that splinch is a verb that means ‘step on broken glass’; what is its past tense?

• Speakers of English use the suffixes -ize (crystallize) and -ify (codify) to form verbs from nouns. If you had to form a verb that means ‘do something the way ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair does it’, which suffix would you use? How about a verb meaning ‘do something the way ex-President Bill Clinton does it’?

• It's possible to rewash or reheat something. Is it possible to relove, reexplode, or rewiggle something?

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn about common ways of creating new lexemes.

• We will look at derivational affixation, considering the distinction between affixes and bases, and between free and bound bases.

• We will learn how to segment words into morphemes, how to formulate word formation rules, and how to determine the structure of words.

• We will consider what morphemes mean.

• Beyond affixation, in this chapter we will learn about processes of compounding, conversion, and other ways of creating new words.

• And you will get your first taste of morphological analysis.

KEY TERMS

derivation, affixation, compounding, conversion, coinage, blending, backformation

Introduction

Take a look at the words below:

• autoclave (v.)

• head bracelet (n.)

• conversate (v.)

• deBaathification (n.)

• oversuds (v.)

• McDonaldization (n.)

• unwipe (v.)

Have you ever heard these words before? Can you imagine what they mean?

Chances are that you haven't heard or read them before. Nevertheless, you probably didn't have much trouble figuring out at least roughly what their meanings might be. Assuming that you know that an autoclave is a device for sterilizing instruments, the verb to autoclave probably means something like ‘to sterilize using an autoclave’. A head bracelet is probably something that goes around one's head. DeBaathification must have something to do with removing the Baath (the Iraqi political party associated with Saddam Hussein). And so on. You might not know exactly what they mean, but you can make a good guess.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter you will learn about inflection, the sort of morphology that expresses grammatical distinctions.

• We will look at a wide variety of types of inflection, both familiar and unfamiliar, including number, person, gender and noun class, case, tense and aspect, voice, mood and modality.

• We will learn what morphologists mean by a ‘paradigm’ and look at patterns within paradigms.

• And we will consider whether it is always clear where to draw the line between inflection and derivation.

KEY TERMS

person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, inherent, contextual, paradigm

Introduction

At the outset of this book we divided morphology into two domains inflectional and derivational word formation. In the last three chapters, we have concentrated on derivational word formation – types of word formation that create new lexemes. In this chapter, we turn our attention to inflectional word formation.

Inflection refers to word formation that does not change category and does not create new lexemes, but rather changes the form of lexemes so that they fit into different grammatical contexts. As we'll see in detail below, grammatical meaning can include information about number (singular vs. plural), person (first, second, third), tense (past, present, future), and other distinctions as well. In this chapter, we will first survey different forms of inflection that can be found both in English and familiar languages, and further afield in the languages of the world, and then look at the ways in which inflection can work.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

In this chapter we will learn about the intersection between morphology and phonology, which is the study of the sound structure of languages.

• We will learn that some morphemes exhibit allomorphs, that is, phonologically distinct variants.

• We will learn how to analyze both phonologically predictable and unpredictable allomorphy.

• And we will consider the nature of lexical stratification, where different types of phonological behavior characterize different parts of the morphology of a language.

KEY TERMS

allomorph, assimilation, dissimilation, vowel harmony, intervocalic, voicing, palatalization, lexical strata

Introduction

Phonology is the area of linguistics that is concerned with sound regularities in languages: what sounds exist in a language, how those sounds combine with each other into syllables and words, and how the prosody (stress, accent, tone, and so on) of a language works. Phonology interacts with morphology in a number of ways: morphemes may have two or more different phonological forms whose appearance may be completely or at least partly predictable. Some phonological rules apply when two or more morphemes are joined together. In some languages morphemes display different phonological behavior depending on whether they are native to the language or borrowed into it from some other language. In this chapter we will explore the various ways in which phonology interacts with morphology.

In this chapter we will frequently make use of phonetic transcriptions, so you may want to review the IPA before you begin reading it.