Morphology Flashcards
Morphology
deals with the structure of words
Free Form
elements that do not have to occur in a fixed position with respect to neighbouring elements, and (in many cases) can appear in isolation
-dinosaurs
Morphemes
- smallest unit in language that carries information about lexical or grammatical meaning
- reactivate: re-, act, -iv, -ate
Simple words
-monomorphemic, consisting of a single morpheme
Complex words
-polymorphemic, consisting of two or more morphemes
Morpheme types
- Free vs. bound
- Root vs. affix:morpheme’s position within word
- Derivational vs. inflectional
Free vs. bound
- refer to the morpheme’s ability to occur on its own
- free morpheme: can be a word by itself.
- A bound morpheme: must be attached to another element.
Root
- core, necessary element of a word.
- Free: English morphemes do, treat, and happy in re-do, treat-ment, un-happy.
- Bound: e.g. Japanese arui-
Derivational vs. inflectional
refer to the morpheme’s function within the word
Base
-part to which an affix attaches
Affixes
- Affix(es): (optional) all the other morphemes in the word; affixes are always bound morphemes
- Prefix: an affix that attaches to the front of the base (re-do).
- Suffix: an affix that attaches to the end of the base (act-iv-ate).
- Infix: an affix that occurs within another morpheme. (bili-binili)
Decomposing words into morphemes
-subtract the outermost morpheme and check whether the rest of the form exists as a word having the same/related meaning
Derivation
- uses affixes to form words distinct from their bases in meaning and/or grammatical categories
- nation - nation-al - national-ity.
- noun adjective noun
Parts of speech
- N = noun (the ___, a/an ___ ).
- V = verb (agree with the subject with respect to gender/number/person, etc.).
- A = adjective (modify N, be/look/feel/sound__ ).
- Adv = adverb (modify V, modify A, modify sentence).
- P = preposition ( __ N; in, on, with, during, etc.).
Inflection
- modifies a word’s form to mark some grammatical information (as opposed to the lexical meaning). It is most often expressed by affixation
- the books, He reads well, the smaller one
Inflectional affixation
- English inflection is marked by suffixation
- can express a range of grammatical meanings:
- Number, Gender, Person, Tense, and Case.
- Note, however, that inflection is not the only way to express grammatical meaning
Number
- expresses contrasts for countable quantities.
- The categories of Singular, Dual, and Plural.
Gender
- expresses contrasts in noun classes.
- categories of Masculine, Feminine, Neuter.
- Depending on the gender of the noun, other words agree in gender.
Person
- expresses contrasts between the speaker, the addressee, and anyone else referred to in the sentence.
- First Person (speaker(s)), Second Person (addressee(s)), Third Person (anyone else).
- English 1st: I, me, we, us; 2nd: you; 3rd: he, she, it, they, them
Tense
- expresses the time of an event/state in reference to the speech moment.
- Past, Present, and Future
- Progressive (continuation), Perfect (completion)
- Progressive: He is eating an apple.
- Perfect: He has eaten
Case
- expresses the role of words in sentences:
- Subject, Object, Possessive/Genitive, etc.
Internal change
- grammatical contrasts are indicated by substitution of segments within a root/stem
- sing-sang, drive-drove, foot-feet
Suppletion
- grammatical contrasts are indicated by replacing morphemes with phonologically unrelated ones
- go-went, good-better/best
Reduplication
- grammatical contrasts are indicated by repeating all or part of the base
- lakad-lalakad
Tonal change
-grammatical contrasts are indicated by changing tone
Inflectional affixes
-add to the lexical meaning expressed by the root (express grammatical function)
Derivational affixes
- change the lexical meaning expressed by the root (and usually change its part of speech too)
- sensitive to the lexical category of its base
Derivation of words
Not all affixes can attach directly to the root
Word trees
show the internal structure of words
Drawing morphological trees
-At the top:part of speech of the whole constituent
-For the roots: part of speech
-For affixes, X-Y, where X is the part of speech that the affix attaches to and Y is the part
of speech that the affixation leads to
Base
- affix attaches to is a subconstituent of the word, which may or may not be a root.
- base for derivational affixation can always stand alone in a word
Criteria for determining the morphological structure of a word
- The base is an independent word
2. An affix attaches to bases of the same category
Agreement
property of inflection to mark certain grammatical properties of another word
agreement with subject
-Each sentence has a verb and a subject
-verb commonly carries a morpheme(s) that indicate person, number + gender of the subject
o Person – 1st, 2nd, 3rd
o Number – sg, dual, pl
o Gender – masculine, feminine, neuter.
Conversion
- (zero derivation) changes the word category without overt affixation
- I run every morning.-It was a long run.
Cliticization
- Clitics: morphemes that cannot stand on their own phonologically; they attach to a host.
- members of a lexical category (unlike affixes)
- Jean t’aime
Compounding
- word-formation method that involves putting together two existing words.
- Head: morpheme that determines the category of the word
- Stress pattern is usually fixed depending on the internal structure of the compounds.
- same linear order of morphemes can have different internal structure, resulting in different meanings
Blends
- produced by combining parts of two existing words.
- parts used do not correspond to morphemes, but may correspond to an initial/final syllables/strings of segments
- situation comedy-sitcom
Back formation
Create new word by removing affix
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