BA-Basismodul: Introduction to Linguistics – Basic Questions, Concepts and
Methods (Di 16-18; R. 208)
Florian Haas
Tel.: 838-72314
f.haas@fu-berlin.de
Handout 3: Morphology II
1. Introduction
Morphology is concerned with the internal structure of words
1.1 Defining the word
We need criteria that go beyond orthographic conventions:
(i)
(ii)
Orthographic: a word is what occurs between spaces in writing.
Semantic: a word has semantic coherence; it expresses a unified semantic
concept.
Phonological: we can pause between but not in the middle of words.
Morphological: a word has an internal cohesion and is indivisible by other
units.
Syntactic: a word has external distribution or mobility; it is moved as a unit,
not in parts.
(iii)
(iv)
(v)
1.2 Lexeme vs word form
• a lexeme is a dictionary entry and includes different word forms
SING
lexeme
– sing, sings, sang, sung, singing
word forms
1.3 Word type vs word token
• In a text one word type may correspond to more than one word token
2. Morphemes and morphs
Morpheme = The smallest meaningful unit in a language
Morph = the concrete realization of a morpheme
•
•
•
•
The morpheme is an abstraction, because it can be realized differently: The
morpheme {pl}, for instance, may be realized as /-z/ (as in bugs), /-s/ (as in
cats), /-ız/ (as in wishes), /n/ (as in oxen), zero (as in fish or sheep) or as a
vowel change (as in mice). One morpheme may thus correspond to different
morphs.
A distinction is made between free and bound morphs
content words are an open class: new words can easily be added, e.g. by
borrowing
function words are a closed class: the addition of new words is very rare
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Types of morphs:
free
content words
(open)
bound (= affix)
function words
(closed)
derivational
prefix
•
suffix
inflectional
(prefix)
suffix
unique morphemes are special in that they appear only in particular words
(cran- in cranberry and huckle- in huckleberry)
3. Roots, bases and stems
•
three different terms for those elements to which affixes are attached
(sometimes used rather confusingly in the literature)
base = a form to which an affix is attached
stem = what remains if all inflectional suffixes are taken away
root = a form that cannot be analysed any further
N
N
V
Aff
Aff
listen
-er
-s
4. Morphological and morphemic analysis
•
if we want to analyse the structure of a given word, we must distinguish
between a morphological and a morphemic analysis. The former segments a
word into morphs and the latter segments the word into morphemes
Examples:
morphological analysis
singers sing-er-s
(3 morphs)
danced dance-d
(2 morphs)
fish (pl.) fish
(1 morph)
morphemic analysis
{SING} + {-ER} + {pl}
{DANCE} + {past}
{FISH} + {pl}
Reading for next week: Plag et al. 77-88
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