MORPHOLOGY
26th February
II lecture
Today’s (wishful) plan
What is a word?
Word-forms
Lexemes
Grammatical words
Inflectional and derivational morphology
What are words made up of?
Morphemes, morphs and allomorphs
Free and bound morphemes
Phonaesthemes and onomatopoeia
How languages treat words and morphemes
Isolating
Agglutinating
Inflecting - synthetic
Polysynthetic languages
What is a word?
• Intuitive notion
• writing is easy – orthographic words:
Most kids went to school yesterday,
but my kid didn’t go, he stayed at
home with a stomachache.
• What about speech? Hm…
…more…
• Word in one language is not a word in
another
Paiute: Wu-to-kuchum-punku-rugani-yugwiva-ntu-mu
“they who are going to sit and cut up with a
knife a black bull”
Turkish: everinde “in their house”
Serbian: vladah “I used to rule”
English: easy-to-use dishes
• set of criteria by which we can
diagnose an item as a word – a
phonological word
• Content words and function words
• Stress pattern
• Ordering of elements within a word or
a phrase (doctor’s bag, the bag of the
doctor)
• Morphological conditioning (ox – oxen)
• phonotactic rules
Word forms and lexemes
Most kids went to school yesterday,
but my kid didn’t go, he stayed at
home with a stomachache.
Kid = child - lexeme
Kids, kid – representation – word form
Go = meaning to move - lexeme
Go, went – representation – word form
• Write – write, writes, writing, wrote,
written
• Smart – smart, smarter, smartest
• Cat – cat, cats
• Good – good, better, best
• A word-form can belong to different
lexemes – homonyms (serve)
• If only the phonemic representation
is the same – homophones (hoarse,
horse)
• Polysemy – closely related meanings
of the same word-form (force)
• Context, ambiguity, relevance
Grammatical words
• Words from grammatical perspective
• Morpho-syntacitc words
Representations (word-forms) of
lexemes which fill in a certain
syntactic place
I saw the sheriff after I had seen the
deputy.
• Syncretism: You hit me.
Morphology
Inflectional
• Child, children
• Break, broke,
broken
(word-forms,
paradigms)
Derivational
• Child-childhood
• Nation - nationalize
Morpheme, morph,
allomorph
UNTOUCHABLES
un-touch-able-s
un – negation
touch – meaning
-able – assigns the quality of X
-s – the marker of plurality
• MORPHEME – the minimal unit of
grammatical analysis
• Morphemes are realized as MORPHS,
either as a phonetic or orthographic
form
MORPH is a segment of a word-form
which represents a particular
morpheme
•
•
•
•
This cow is eating grass.
These cows are eating hay.
Can you substitute cow with cows?
What about sheep?
• WAS – cannot be segmented, but it is a
morpheme = BE + PRETERITE (past tense)
+ SIGULAR at the same time
• PORTMANTEAU MORPH
– Think about: radila –
raditi+past+feminine+singular
– Stolovima?
ALLO what?
• ALLOMORPHS!
• Phonologically, lexically or grammatically
conditioned realizations of the same
morph
• Books, churches, boys
• imperfect, irregular, illiterate
• Books vs. oxen
• Article in German (conditioned by the
gender of the noun)
Free and Bound
• Free morphs can occur in isolation
(can also be word-forms)
• Bound morphs can only occur in
conjunction with at least one other
morph
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Blender
Happiness
Unhappy
Unbelievably
Denationalization
Volim
nismo