ling1111 morphology - lecture 5b Flashcards
Syntax
The component of language that arranges words into phrases and sentences. The principles of syntax account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, et cetera. That is, syntax is the study of how sentences are structured.
syntactic category
Traditionally called ‘parts of speech’. E.g. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions.
Phrasal category
The class of syntactic categories that comprises the highest-level categories, including NP, VP,AdjP, PP and AdvP. See also lexical category functional category.
Lexical category
A general term for the word-level syntactic categories of noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition.
Head (of a phrase)
The central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of phrase, e.g. the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man who came to dinner; the verb wrote is the head of the verb phrase wrote a letter to his mother; the adjective red is the head of the adjective phrase very bright red.
Two classes of words?
Content words - Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
Function words - Conjunctions, Pronouns, Articles/determiners, verbal auxiliaries, prepositions
Morpheme
The smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function, e.g sheepdogs contains three morphemes, sheep, dog and the function morpheme for plural, s.
Morphology
The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation.
Free morpheme
A single morpheme that constitutes a word e.g. “duck” or “house”
Affix
A bound morpheme attached to a stem or root; see prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, stem, root.
Bound morpheme
A morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes, e.g -ly, -ed, non-. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes and some roots, such as cran in cranberry; see also free morpheme.
Infix
A bound morpheme that is inserted in the middle of a word or stem.
Root
The morpheme that remains when all affixes are stripped from a complex word, e.g system from un + system + atic + al + ly.
two classes of morphemes?
Inflectional and derivational
Inflectional morphemes
No syntactic category change, small/no meaning change. Required by grammar. Cannot stack in English.
E.g. Bunny (N) - Bunnies (N)
hopped (V), hopping (V), hops (V)
derivational morphemes
syntactic category (can) change, more meaning change. Not required by grammar. Have a lexical function
E.g. Happy (Adj)
Happily (Adv)
Unhappiness (N)
Adjectival inflectional morphology
e.g. fat, fatter and fattest.
Irregulars : Words that behave idiosyncratically in regard to their inflectional morphemes
Nouns: child/children; ox/oxen; brother/brethren, sheep/sheep; aircraft/aircraft
Verbs: sing/sang/sung; sink/sank/sunk
put/put/put; hit/hit/hit; rid/rid/rid
Adjectives: good/better/best
bad/worse/worst
The verb ‘to be’ is an irregular exception for inflectional morphemes
am/are/is/was/were : when an inflection changes the phonological word entirely, without any pattern it is called suppletion
Lexemes (to do with inflections)
A lexeme is an abstract concept that encompasses a set of words with the same meaning, syntactic category (plus any other attributes); it is typically written in small caps. A lexeme is of a single syntactic category (the noun RECORD and the verb RECORD are different lexemes)
e. g. - swim, swam, swum, swimming are different forms of SWIM.
- child and children are different forms of CHILD
- cat and cats are different forms of CAT.
- am, are, is, was, were, being, been are forms of BE
Derivational ‘morphology’
Morphemes that attach to words to form entirely new lexemes are called derivational morphemes. They add semantic meaning. e.g. morpheme: hood; has the meaning of status… such as childhood.
morpheme: -ness; meaning quality, state or condition. Example kindness
morpheme: -er; meaning agent who does (verb); example driver
Allomorphs
Morphemes have underlying forms and complimentary distributed surface forms. The English plural has 3 allomorphs
buses= bus + əz (after sibilant fricatives)
cats= cat + s (after voiceless consonants)
dogs= dog + z (after everything else)
