Week 8: Morphology and Syntax Flashcards
Are morphemes added in any random order?
No - they are added in a fixed order
What does the order of morphemes in a word reflect?
The hierarchical structure of the word
How must the structure of a word be represented?
In a tree diagram
What are the two classes of derivational morphemes?
- 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
In what order do the two classes of derivational morphemes appear in words?
Class 1 + Class 2
Bound morphemes that have a strictly grammatical function are called what? What properties do they mark in many languages?
- Inflectional morphemes
- Properties such as tense, number, person, gender etc
Do inflectional morphemes add lexical meaning? Explain
- no, they represent relationships between different parts of the sentence
What are the 8 inflectional morphemes in English?
- 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)
Do inflectional morphemes generally change the basic grammatical category of a word?
- not generally - e.g big, bigger and biggest are all adjectives
What do inflectional morphemes generally express?
- grammatically-required features or indicate relations between different words in the sentence
Where do inflectional morphemes generally occur?
“outside” any derivational morphemes (so not sandwiched within but at the end or something)
What are the five characteristics of derivational morphemes?
- Lexical function
- May cause word class change
- Show some meaning change
- Precede inflectional morphemes in a word
- Some productive and many non productive
What are the five characteristics of inflectional morphemes?
- Grammatical function
- No word class change
- Small or no change in meaning
- Follow derivational morphemes in a word
- Productive
In terms of language typologies, what do languages divide into? (2)
- Analytic (all words are invariable and syntactic relations are shown primarily by word order)
- synthetic or polysynthetic (words contain more than one morpheme)
What is another term for analytic languages?
- Isolating languages
In analytic/isolating languages words tend to consist of how many morphemes?
One
Do isolating languages have inflection?
No
In synthetic languages, a word tends to consist of how many morphemes?
- More than one
What’s the difference between synthetic and polysynthetic languages?
- Polysynthetic languages are extremely synthetic languages
Synthetic and polysynthetic languages can be further divided into what two types?
- Agglutinating languages
- Inflectional languages
What is an agglutinating language?
- 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)
What are the 3 main properties of agglutinating languages?
- 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
What about inflectional languages differs from agglutinating languages?
- There is no one-to-one correspondence
What are the 2 main properties of inflectional languages?
- 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)
