Morphology Flashcards
Morphemes
Smallest units of language that carry information about meaning or function
Inflection
Modifies a word’s form to indicate grammatical subclass
Derivation
Building a new word by adding an affix
- changes the word class and/or basic meaning of the word;
Grammatical morphemes
Inflectional affixes & function words.
- Serve the same kind of role, but inflection is bound to its host, and function words are freestanding
Components of inflectional morphology
- number (singular vs. plural)
- tense (past, future)
- agreement (first, second, third person)
- gender (masculine, feminine).
To build a grammar of the structure of words, children must:
-Segment words into morphemes and assign meaning or function to each morpheme
- Learn the category types of morphemes (root vs. affix, prefix vs. suffix, derivation vs. inflection, lexical vs. functional, etc.);
- Learn the structure of morphologically complex words
- Assign a unique underlying representation to each morpheme;
* Recognize that morphemes may vary in their shape, depending on the context in which they appear (e.g. [s] in cats vs [z] in dogs)
Findings of Brown’s research on Adam, Eve and Sarah
Relatively uniform order of acquisition due to :
1. frequency (plural -s > possessive -s)
2. saliency (plural -s > past tense -ed) 3. semantic weight (plural -s > third person -s)
-ing and prepositions are acquired firrst
Methodological issues for interpreting data
- Obligatory context : a sentence can be grammatical but incorrect given the context
2.Cut-off : determining when a child has acquired a construct (Brown’s criterion: 90% use in obligatory contexts) - Variation across sessions : Brown required that the rate of use remain above 90% for three consecutive sessions
- Variation across learners : children do not learn structures at same age; solution : MLU
True or false : there is a uniform order of grammatical morphemes acquistion across languages
False, morphology is more robust in certain languages
True or false : order of grammatical morphemes acquistion is relatively stable within a given language
True
Productivity challenge to Brown’s experiment
Do children memorize the right context for inflected forms use or do they acquire productive rules and representations that they apply to new words ?
90% inflection can be attained with memorization
- You can incorrectly store keys as irregular (‘keys’ instead of ‘key’ + ‘s’ like ‘men’) , but produce it correctly
Wugs test
Tests generalization of rules to novel forms
* If children can pluralize nouns they have never heard before, they must have a rule of plural formation (suffix -s to a noun to form its plural):
Allomorphy challenge to Brown’s findings
In determination of “acquired”, how do we factor in different trajectories for different allomorphs?
* 4-year-old children can correctly pluralize forms that take the allomorph [s] (pifs) or [z] (wugs);
* But forms that take [əz] (tasses) are usually produced as uninflected (tass).
Phonological complexity challenge to Brown’s findings
Could phonological constraints lead children to delete inflectional morphology even when they have acquired target-like rules (and corresponding representations) for inflectionally complex words?
E.g. Children correctly produced plural for: vowel-final words 68%> stop-final words 51% (p = .02)
* Experiment 2: Children correctly produced plural for: son C-final 59% words > stop-final words 44% (p = .02)
Chunking
Employing memorized fixed forms
Children usually acquire the inflectional system before __ years old
4
How can children acquire most of the inflectional system of their language (morphemes and rules) by age 4 ?
Universal Grammar perspective : children have a disposition for rule learning, knowledge of the kinds of semantic categories typically encoded by inflection, and the kinds of morphological processes that languages typically exhibit
Input perspective:
* Children can get everything they need for the acquisition of inflection solely from the input; because the task of segmenting inflection from the base to which it attaches and assigning an interpretation to an inflectional affix is relatively straightforward.
Attributes of inflection
No category change: Inflectional affixes never change the grammatical category of the base to which they attach;
Semantic compositionality: The grammatical distinctions encoded by inflection are relatively easy to assign a meaning to: the meaning of an inflectionally-complex word is the sum of the meaning of its parts;
Productivity: Inflectional affixes attach to virtually all instances of the particular category (e.g., plural to virtually all nouns).
2 most common inflectional morphemes
Prefixes and suffixes
Children find ______prefixes/suffixes easier
Suffixes
Operating principle of Slobin
Idea that a rule tells children to be attentive to the end of words
Children tend to omit obligatory ______prefixes/suffixes
Prefixes
Why are infixes easy to acquire in Tagalog ?
The infix is sometimes realized as a prefix to optimize the syllable structure (phonology places constraints). The infix being realized as a prefix makes it easier for the child to identify the inflectional morpheme.
Consonant-initial roots: Agent-focus <um> is infix
Vowel-initial roots: Agent-focus <um> is prefix</um></um>
Children acquiring more morphologically rich languages acquire inflection _____earlier/later than more empoverished languages like English
Earlier
