Morphology and word formation Flashcards
def.: morpheme
smallest linguistic unit with a meaning of its own, basic unit of word formation
and many grammatical processes;
Types:
free, bound, inflectional,
derivational morphemes;
conventionally, morphemes appear in braces ({})
Morphemes can be classified with respect to autonomy, function and position.
autonomy: free or bound
- free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
- bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes.
further distinction by function:
–> free:
1. lexical (content-word) or 2. grammatical (function-word)
–> bound:
1. lexical: derivational or 2. grammatical: inflectional
position: prefix, suffix
[inflectional bound morphemes never as prefix]
def.: allomorph
realisational variant of a morpheme, e.g. {[s]}, {[z]} and {[Ǻz]} as the
allomorphs of the regular plural morpheme
def.: parts of speech
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, etc.
def.: constituents [of clauses]
subject, object, complement of subject, complement of
object, adverbial;
seven basic clause patterns in English: SP, SPO, SPA, SPC, SPOO, SPOA,
SPOC
How are grammatical relations expressed?
Expressed through: word order function words inflection intonation
What are the four major types of English morphemes?
Free (lexemes)
- free lexical (e.g. table, fire, greed) –> content word
- free grammatical (e.g. of, to, on - the cover OF the book, give a present TO someone, depend ON) –> function word
Bound (affixes)
- bound lexical (e.g. electro-; -phile) –> derivational affix
- bound grammatical (e.g. -s for plural; -ed for past) –> inflectional affix
word formation strategies
major:
- compounding (typewriter, apple pie)
- derivation (density, unsavoury)
- conversion (to partition [a room], to forward [a letter]
minor:
- clippings (demo, prof)
- blends (brunch, modem)
- acronyms/alphabetisms (AIDS, CPU)
- back-formations (televise, babysit)
What problems remain despite word formation strategies?
Give examples
Ex. (1): opaque morphemes and semi-transparent forms
– proceed, recede, succeed, concede, …
– quality (vs. reality, density, etc.) [‘qual’ not a moprheme? but ‘real and ‘dense’ are]
– eatable vs. edible
Ex. (2): interactions between morphology and phonology
– act vs. action, electric vs. electricity
Ex. (3): fuzzy boundaries between derivation and compounding …
– Anglophile / bibliophile / etc. (“neoclassical formations”, “combining forms”) here [prefix is combined with suffix]
Ex. (4): … and between compounds and (syntactic) phrases
– black-board, black market, black tie, White House, green belt, red carpet
– wine merchant, lumber merchant, London merchant
Morphological derivation
…in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.
It is differentiated from inflection, which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories without changing its core meaning: determines, determining, and determined are from the root determine.
unproductive and productive derivational morphemes - what is the difference?
give examples
– unproductive derivational morpheme: -en
harden, whiten, soften, blacken, strengthen, widen, ….
*politen, *hotten, *greenen, *yellowen, …
– productive derivational morphemes: -(e)y, -ish, -type
“I smoke the Toscanelli, a unique kind of cigar or cheroot, which is a cut-down
version of something called a Tosca. It’s a kind of great flaring, trumpet-type
thing of very, very dark black tobacco. I think that they are hand-rolled – I can’t
conceive how machines could make them so idiosyncratic. Even in a pack of
five you will get some that are kind of spindly and fox-turdy … They have a
very strong flavour, they are sort of tetanus-ey and meaty, raunchy and dead
bodyish.” (Will Self, Independent Magazine)
Morphology
“The branch of lingistics concerned with describing the structure of words, generally separated into onflection and word formation” (Mair)
inflection: inflectional or grammatical endings serve to express grammatical relations in sentences (nouns/pronouns/articles/adjectives: declension; verbs: conjugation)
word formation: Morphological processes that create new words
By means of which word-formation processes have the following lexems been arrived at? a) polymorphemic b) childish c) to photocopy d) modernism e) to bottle f) pub ... m) girl friend n) radio station o) interpol
derivation derivation conversion derivation conversion clipping derivation ... compounding compounding blend
Explain the difference between clipping
and backformation.
Provide two examples each.
Clippings (bike, lab) never change
the word class (or the meaning),
backformaJons (editor > to edit, babysijer >
to babysit) frequently do.
What are endocentric, exocentric, appositive or copulative compounds?
Give examples
endocentric: aftertaste, man purse
exocentric: turncoat, paperback
appositive: she-devil
copulative; bittersweet
What are neo-classical compounds?
They combine forms (e.g. prefix + suffix):
as in biography, photography
def.: syncretism
the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms
What is the difference between isolating, synthetic languages?
.An isolating language is a type of language with a very low morpheme per word ratio and no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Currently, the most spoken purely-isolating language is Yoruba.
A closely-related concept is that of an analytic language, which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships. Isolating and analytic languages tend to coincide and are often identified. However, analytic languages such as English and Mandarin Chinese? may still contain polymorphemic words because of the presence of derivational morphemes.
Isolating languages contrast with synthetic languages, where words often consist of multiple morphemes.[1] That linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.
fusional, (cumulating) agglutinative languages
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
For example, the Spanish verb comer (“to eat”) has the 1st-person singular preterite tense form comí (‘I ate’);
the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature.
Examples of fusional Indo-European languages are: Sanskrit, New Indo-Aryan languages such as Punjabi, Hindustani, Bengali; Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Irish, German, Faroese, Icelandic, Albanian, all Baltic and Slavic languages. Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional.
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An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions. This results in generally more easily deducible word meanings if compared to fusional languages, which allow modifications in either or both the phonetics or spelling of one or more morphemes within a word, usually shortening the word or providing easier pronunciation. Agglutinative languages have generally one grammatical category per affix while fusional languages have multiple.
Difference between synthetic and analytical languages?
In synthetic languages, there is a higher morpheme-to-word ratio than in analytic languages. Analytic languages have a lower morpheme-to-word ratio and higher use of helping verbs and word order. The four subtypes of synthetic languages are agglutinating languages, fusional languages, polysynthetic languages, and oligosynthetic languages.
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A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word.
Why are there topological issues in English due to its origins?
English changed from inflectional (synthetic) to analytical (isolating) language
- loss of categories (grammatical gender, most cases, most person marking on verbs, subjunctive)
- development of categories (continuous aspect, perfective aspect, do-periphrasis)
