Week 8: Morphology and Syntax

Question 1

Are morphemes added in any random order?

Answer 1

No - they are added in a fixed order

Question 2

What does the order of morphemes in a word reflect?

Answer 2

The hierarchical structure of the word

Question 3

How must the structure of a word be represented?

Answer 3

In a tree diagram

Question 4

What are the two classes of derivational morphemes?

Answer 4

• Class 1 = -ity, -ian, -y, -ive, -ize trigger a change on the pronunciation of the root/stem
• Class 2 = -er, -ful, -ish, -less and -ness do not affect the pronunciation

Question 5

In what order do the two classes of derivational morphemes appear in words?

Answer 5

Class 1 + Class 2

Question 6

Bound morphemes that have a strictly grammatical function are called what? What properties do they mark in many languages?

Answer 6

• Inflectional morphemes

- Properties such as tense, number, person, gender etc

Question 7

Do inflectional morphemes add lexical meaning? Explain

Answer 7

• no, they represent relationships between different parts of the sentence

Question 8

What are the 8 inflectional morphemes in English?

Answer 8

• s = third person singular (he walks)
• ed = past (he walked)
• ing = progressive aspect (he is walking)
• en (/-ed) = past participle (he has eaten, he has walked)
• s = plural (books)
• ’s = possessive (Jim’s books)
• er = comparative (bigger)
• est = superlative (biggest)

Question 9

Do inflectional morphemes generally change the basic grammatical category of a word?

Answer 9

• not generally - e.g big, bigger and biggest are all adjectives

Question 10

What do inflectional morphemes generally express?

Answer 10

• grammatically-required features or indicate relations between different words in the sentence

Question 11

Where do inflectional morphemes generally occur?

Answer 11

“outside” any derivational morphemes (so not sandwiched within but at the end or something)

Question 12

What are the five characteristics of derivational morphemes?

Answer 12

• Lexical function
• May cause word class change
• Show some meaning change
• Precede inflectional morphemes in a word
• Some productive and many non productive

Question 13

What are the five characteristics of inflectional morphemes?

Answer 13

• Grammatical function
• No word class change
• Small or no change in meaning
• Follow derivational morphemes in a word
• Productive

Question 14

In terms of language typologies, what do languages divide into? (2)

Answer 14

• Analytic (all words are invariable and syntactic relations are shown primarily by word order)
• synthetic or polysynthetic (words contain more than one morpheme)

Question 15

What is another term for analytic languages?

Answer 15

• Isolating languages

Question 16

In analytic/isolating languages words tend to consist of how many morphemes?

Answer 16

One

Question 17

Do isolating languages have inflection?

Answer 17

No

Question 18

In synthetic languages, a word tends to consist of how many morphemes?

Answer 18

• More than one

Question 19

What’s the difference between synthetic and polysynthetic languages?

Answer 19

• Polysynthetic languages are extremely synthetic languages

Question 20

Synthetic and polysynthetic languages can be further divided into what two types?

Answer 20

• Agglutinating languages

- Inflectional languages

Question 21

What is an agglutinating language?

Answer 21

• A synthetic or polysynthetic language where there is a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form (each piece of information is given by a single morpheme)

Question 22

What are the 3 main properties of agglutinating languages?

Answer 22

• Each morpheme expresses only one meaning
• There is a clear-cut boundary between each morpheme
• Grammatical processes are expressed through prefixes and suffixes and do not affect the form of the individual morphemes

Question 23

What about inflectional languages differs from agglutinating languages?

Answer 23

• There is no one-to-one correspondence

Question 24

What are the 2 main properties of inflectional languages?

Answer 24

• Cumulation - one inflection carrying a set of morphological information
• Syncretism - one inflection carrying more than one set of morphological functions (like how hablaba can be I was speaking or he/she/it was speaking)