Linguistics week 12
Morphology 2
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We looked at
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Words, word-forms and lexemes
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She’s a good cook, but I can cook better
Function words and content words
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Two kinds of words
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Function words
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Content words
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Restricted in number
A closed class
Have a grammatical function
Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical morpheme)
An open class
New content words often come into use in every
language
Which words on this slide …? Chinese examples?
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You think English is hard?
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Ha! When I was at school I had to do Latin
See if you can find out what this is:
amo
amamus
amas
amatis
amat
amant
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dominus
domini
domine
domini
dominum
dominos
domini
dominorum
domino
dominis
domino
dominis
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They were Latin inflections
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The two lists each show the different word-forms, for a Latin noun or
verb
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English has a genitive form. What is it?
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dominus is the nominative (subject form)
domine is the vocative form (Oh Master!)
dominum is the accusative (object form)
domini is the genitive (the master’s, of the master)
domino is the dative (to or for the master)
domino is the ablative (in some words, this is different from the dative)
(by, with or from the master)
Does Chinese have one?
In some lexemes, English attests nominative, accusative and genitive
forms
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What are these lexemes?
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Inflectional morphology
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In English, inflection includes things like
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Fromkin 101 gives a complete list
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Number
Tense
Although she doesn’t explain that -s and -es (for example) are two
realizations (two allomorphs!) of the same morpheme
Also on p101: does the Italian verb inflection list seem
familiar?
BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme
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so sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
unkind is not an inflection of kind
artistic is not an inflection of artist (which is not an inflection of
art (Inflection and derivation task)
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Inflectional vs derivational
morphology
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Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic
category, part-of-speech, 詞類)
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Derivation makes a new lexeme
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create  creates
Inflection is productive
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create  creative
Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the
original lexeme
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Derivation may or may not change word class
You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural
Derivation is not necessarily productive
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You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb
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Roots and affixes
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Unbelievable contains
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One free morpheme
A root and two affixes
» One prefix and one suffix
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In English, there are derivational prefixes and suffixes
There are no inflectional prefixes
Suffixes are more common in the world’s languages
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But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes
Fromkin 78: plural in the Zapotec language is relized by a prefix,
not a suffix
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Infixes
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In Tagalog
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What is the root morpheme here?
What are the affixes?
Fromkin describes a kind of infix used in English
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sulat = write
sumulat = wrote
sinulat = was written
I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity
Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?
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Reduplication
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Afrikaans
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Motu (Papua New Guinea)
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dik = ‘thick’; dikdik = ‘very thick’
mero = boy; memero = boys
meromero = little boy
How do you say ‘little boys’ in this language?
And – you guessed it – what uses does
reduplication have in Mandarin?
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Hierarchical structure of words
(Fromkin 84)
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unbelievable and unsystematic have only
one structural analysis each:
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believe 相信 + -able 可相信 + un- 不可相信
Unlockable, Fromkin shows on 85-6, is
morphologically ambiguous
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It can be understood in two ways
Try to understand why, by looking at the trees
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Reading and exercises
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69 to 74 (or further if you like)
Ex 2, 3, 4, 5A, 6
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You will probably enjoy these!
You might like to take a look at my master’s thesis
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It contains a short section on reduplication in Chinese
It has some ideas about compounding (for next week)
You will get an idea of the structure of a Western-style
essay: study, especially, the way the references and
bibliography work
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