MORPHOLOGY
Introduction to Linguistics
•WHAT IS A WORD?
•Grammatical categories of words
• Words
belongs to different grammatical
categories/parts of speech.
Nouns
• Verbs
• Adjectives
• Prepositions
•
•Classes of words
Content
words
Function/
grammatical
words
• Open class
• New words can be added.
• Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
• Closed class
• Impossible to add new function
words
• Conjunctions, prepositions, articles,
pronouns.
•Morpheme
• The
minimal unit of meaning
• A smallest linguistic form in which its sound
and meaning cannot be further divided and
analyzed.
• Example:
Boy-s
• Teach-er
•
Morphemes
Bound morphemes
-Attached to other
morphemes
Free morphemes
-Occur independently
•Bound morphemes 1
Prefix
• The morpheme attached to
the word-initial position
• Un-organized
• pre-pare?
Suffix
• The morpheme attached to
the word-initial position
• Teach-er, lingu-ist
•Bound morphemes 2
Infix
Circumfix
• The morpheme attached in
the middle of a word
•B-um-ili ‘bought’ (Tagalog)
• The morpheme attached to
the word-initial and wordfinal positions
• ge-spiel-t (German past
participle)
•HOW NEW WORDS ARE CREATED
How to create new words
• Compounds
• Reduplication
• Alternations
• Acronyms
• Back-formation
• Abbreviations
• Words from names
• Blends
• Borrowings
•Compounds
•
•
Two or more words are joined to form a new word
Example
• English
• Girlfriend, Blackboard, Overdoes
• German
• Rheindampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsstellvertreter
•
("Rhine
steamship-company vice-captain").
• Eisenbahn ("railway"): Eisen, "iron", + bahn, "track"
• Autobahn
Japanese
• 神風 kamikaze
• kami
(god) and kaze (wind)
•Reduplication
• Total
•
reduplication
The plurals of nouns (Indonesian)
• Rumah
• Partial
•
‘house’ => Rumahrumah ‘houses’
reduplication
The future tense (Tagalog)
• Bili
‘buy’ => bibili ‘will buy’
• Pasok ‘enter’ => papasok ‘will enter’
•Alternations
• Morpheme-internal
Woman – women
• Foot – feet
• drink- drank-drunk
• Give-gave-given
•
modifications
•Acronyms
Initials of several words
•
NASA
•
•
FAQ
•
•
Frequently Asked
Questions
FYI
•
•
National Aeronautics and
Space Agency
For Your Information
SARS
•
Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome
•More ACRONYMs
•Abbreviations
Alphabetic
abbreviations
(acronym)
• Each letter is
separately
pronounced.
• PC: personal
computer
• CD: compact disc
Clipped
abbreviations
• Spelling and
pronunciation are
both shortened.
• Prof : Professors
• Gas: Gasoline
• Doc: doctor
Orthographic
abbreviations
• Spelling is
shortened, but
pronunciation is
not.
• Dr.: doctor
• MB: megabyte
•Back-formation
Words resulted from an incorrect morphological analysis
Editor
• Edit
Interpretation
• Interpretate ?
• Interpret
•Words from names (eponyms)
Names of products Proper names
Xerox
Sandwich
Kleenex
Nobel
Mac
Google
•Blends
Two words are partially joined to a new word.
•
Motel
•
•
Brunch
•
•
Motor + hotel
Breakfast + lunch
karaoke
•
Japanese word kara (meaning empty) + the clipped form oke of
the English loanword "orchestra" (ōkesutora オーケストラ)
•Borrowings
Direct: a language ‘borrows’ a term directly from another language
•
•
•
•
•
•
Croissant
Kindergarten
Sushi
Dim sum
Oolong
Feng shui
•Borrowings
Indirect : a certain word is passed on from the source language to another (as
a direct borrowing), and then from that language to another and to another
Turkish
kahveh
Arabic
kahva
Dutch
koffie
English
coffee
•Exercise
•
Does Mandarin Chinese have the following
ways to create new words?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Compounds
Acronyms
Abbreviations
Words from names
Blends
Borrowings
•MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES OF
LANGUAGES
Morphological types of langauges
Synthetic langauges
Agglutinating
langauges
Fusional
languages
Polysynthetic
langauges
Analytic
languages
•Analytic/isolating langauges
• They
are made up of sequences of free
morphemes used itself with meaning and
function intact.
•
Mandarin Chinese
•Synthetic langauges
• Bound
morphemes are attached to other
morphemes.
• The bound morphemes are attached
To add another element of meaning ot he stem
• To indicate the grammatical function of the stem in
a sentence.
•
•Sythetic languages 1: agglutinating languages
Personof-thesubject
prefix
Tense
prefix
Verb
stem
Agglutination
Swahili
[ni-na-soma]
I-present-read
‘I am reading’
[u-na-soma]
you-present-read
‘You are reading’
[a-na-soma]
s/he-present-read
‘S/he is reading’
[ni-li-soma]
I-past-read
‘I was reading’
[u-li-soma]
you-past-read
‘You were reading’
[a-li-soma]
s/he-past-read
‘S/he was reading’
•Sythetic languages 2: fusional/inflecting languages
Stem
affixes
Spanish
[habl-e]
‘I spoke’
[habl-o]
‘I am speaking’
[habl-a]
‘She is speaking’
Fusion/inflection
•Sythetic languages 3: polysynthetic languages
•
•
Extreme long agglutinating
A certain degree of corporation (e.g., verbs and nouns
together)
Yup’ik Inuit (Payne, 1997)
Tuntu-
ssur-
reindeer hunt
qatar-
ni-
ksaite-
ngqiggte-
uq
FUT
say
NEG
again
3SG:
IND
'He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer.'
•HOW WORDS ARE WRITTEN
•Types of writing system
• Logographic
writing system
• Syllabic writing system
• Alphabetic writing system
•Logographic writing system
The system uses a a single written character to
represent a complete grammatical word (=a logogram)
• Example
• Chinese/hanzi; Japanese/kanji; Korean/hanja
• Maya
• Ancient Egyptian
•
•Syllabic writing system
• The
system uses a set of syllabic symbols to
compose words.
• Japanese hiragana, katakana.
•Alphabetic writing system
• The
system uses a set of phonetic symbols
(letters) to represent the sounds/phonemes of
a language.
• Examples
Roman/Latin alphabet
• Cyrillic alphabet
• Arabic alphabet
•
Questions?