Morphology Flashcards
Morphology
deals with morphemes (the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words
phonology
deals with phonemes (the meaningless elements that “spell out” the sound of morphemes)
phonetics
studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking, the resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception
syntax
deals with the way that words are combined into phrases and sentences
semantics
deals with how sentences are connected with things in the world outside of language
pragmatics
deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate
Peculiar Nature of Morphology
English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: thus dogs means “more than one dog”; whereas Chinese does not have this and to specify plurality of dogs you need more words
English can make iconify from icon and -ify, (from noun to verb); or -ize to vapor (vaporize); combinatoric irregularity (think Nationalities - Peruvian v Japanese), Pole/Polish
Whether a morpheme sequence is written “solid” (sparkplug v shot glass) is largely a matter of orthographic convention, and in any case may be variable even in a particular writing system
Morpheme
the minimal unit of form and meaning (in, come, ing for incoming); can be word, cannot be word, can be less or greater than a syllable (under, spider), syllables can be smaller than morphemes
Clitics
“little words”
An unstressed word that normally occurs only in combination with another word, for example ῾m in I’m
elements whose status as separate words seems ambiguous; ‘d for would or ‘ve for have ‘s for possessive
Words
word is made up of one or more morphemes
trickier than morphemes, because of clitics and making distinction between words and phrases
Words v Phrases
Words can be made up of several morphemes, and may include several other words, it is easy to find cases where a particular sequence of elements might arguably be considered either a word or a phrase (picture frame, swim team)
Non-concatenative morphemes v concatenative morphemes
-ing v Arabic for “write” which is /ktb/
infixes; un-friggin-believable
Division of words
parts of speech (8 in English):
noun pronoun verb adjective adverb preposition (postpositions) conjunction interjection
Types of morphemes
Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own (de, tion, cran)
Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car, yes
basic or core morpheme in such cases is referred to as the stem, root, or base; add-ons are known as the affixes (prefix/suffix); infixes
In English, some stems that occur with negative prefixes are not free, giving us problematic unpairs (-kempt, -scourage)
More divisions of morphemes
Content (open-class): express informational content, in a way that is independent of the grammatical system of a particular language; stems (nouns, adjectives, verbs)
Function (closed-class): tied to a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence, or obligatorily-marked categories such as number or tense (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns)
