Languages & Linguistics
Grammatical Morphemes
Grammatical morphemes are the smallest units of language that carry grammatical meaning. They include prefixes, suffixes, and infixes, and are used to indicate tense, number, gender, and other grammatical features. In English, examples of grammatical morphemes include the -s for plural nouns and the -ed for past tense verbs.
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eBook - PDFPathways to Language
From Fetus to Adolescent
- Kyra Karmiloff, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Kyra KARMILOFF(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
5 b e c o m i n g a g r a m m a t i c a l b e i n g Language is infinitely creative, yet this creativity does not really stem from the number of words we have in our vocabu-lary. Rather, it is how we combine words grammatically that allows us to share every new thought, feeling, or experience. But first, what is grammar? Defined most simply, grammar refers to the set of rela-tionships that structure language. The term includes both morphol-ogy and syntax (and is therefore sometimes referred to as the morphosyntax of language). Morphology involves the analysis of structure at the word level. It focuses on how morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) are organized and combined to form words and alter meaning in different linguistic contexts. In English, for instance, morphemes include suffixes (for example, plural “s” as in “dogs,” past-tense “ed” as in “walked”), and prefixes (“un” as in “undo,” “para” as in “paramilitary”). These are called bound morphemes because they are attached to the words that they modify. Although these bound morphemes represent only very small parts of words, their addition or omission can completely transform the meaning of sentences. Some languages, like Tagalog, also have what are known as infixes. These morphemes occur within words, rather than at the beginning or end, and also alter meaning. Suffixes, prefixes, and infixes are collectively known as affixes. In contrast to bound morphemes, unbound morphemes stand alone within sen-tences. They are not parts of words, but rather whole words, and in-clude not only nouns and verbs that have no extra morphemes at-tached to them (like “dog” and “go” without the addition of plural or tense markers), but also function words, which alter meaning in similar ways to the bound morphemes.
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
CHAPTER 2 Morphology: Introduction #7 Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language, usually consisting of a sequence of phones paired with concrete meaning. Morphology is the subfield oflinguistics concerned with the formation and internal structure of words. It encompasses morphotactics, or questions of which morphemes are allowed to combine within a word and in what order; morphophonology, how the form of morphemes is conditioned by other morphemes they combine with; and morphosyntax, how the morphemes in a word affect its combinatoric potential. 1 In all three cases, the units under consideration are morphemes, which can be defined as the smallest meaningful units oflanguage. A morpheme is typically a sequence of phones (sounds) paired with a concrete meaning. 2 A simple example is given in (6) where the boundaries between morphemes (with words) are indicated by'+': (6) Morpheme+s are the small+est mean+ing+ful unit+s oflanguage. This example, however, belies the actual complexity of morphological systems. As described be- low, both the 'form' and the 'meaning' part of the pairing can vary from the prototypes in impor- tant ways. Specifically, the form can be made up of phones which are not contiguous (#8), it can be made up of something other than phones (#9), it can in fact be null (#10), and finally the form can vary with the linguistic context (#23-#26). On the meaning side, in addition to core lexical meaning (#11), morphemes can convey changes to that meaning (#12) (which furthermore can be idiosyncratic (#13)) and/or syntactically or semantically relevant features (#14, #28-#43) #8 The phones making up a morpheme don't have to be contiguous. While prototypical morphemes are sequences of phones (sounds, represented by letters in alphabetic writing systems) which furthermore have easily identified boundaries between them, there are several ways in which morphemes can depart from this prototypical case.
eBook - PDFMorphology
From Data to Theories
- Antonio Fábregas, Sergio Scalise(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
what is morphology? 3 syntactic structure, depending on the tense and aspect of the sentence and the person and number of its subject. These formal changes that words experience depending on their role inside sentences and other bigger syntactic constructions are considered ‘inflectional processes’, and are studied in Chapter 4. (4) a. live b. lives c. lived d. living Because morphology studies the relations between words, it is also its object of study to determine what procedures a given language has to build new words from existing forms. For instance, given the form in (5), a study of English morphology can tell us that there are several ways of forming new words from it, adding affi xes or combining it with other roots (6a, 6b). Some of these morphological procedures are able to create a large number of new forms whose meaning and form are predict-able and do not need to be learnt by heart by speakers. Such processes are said to be productive. Other processes, such as the one in (6c), are non-productive and produce forms which, in one sense or another, have special properties in their form, meaning or both, so they need to be learnt by heart. Word formation is studied in more depth in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book. (5) alcohol (6) a. alcohol-ic b. alcohol abuse c. workaholic The object of study of morphology – the word – is a kind of unit that interacts with all the other components of the grammar. It interacts with syntax because in order to form phrases and sentences, we must combine words. It also interacts with pho-nology, because words are pronounced. Finally, it interacts with semantics, because words come associated with some meaning and the way in which speakers use words is generally determined by this. Therefore, the study of morphology is also the study of how words interact with these three components.
eBook - PDF- Olga Akhmanova(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Taxonomies of this kind are 'ethno-centric' and are useless in the quest for linguistic universals. Of great interest are comparative-historical investigations which show that there are no distinct lines between derivation and inflexion from a diachronic point of view. In the history of language there are constant transitions from the former into the latter. (Very interesting illustrations are found in J. Kurytowicz, On the Meth-ods of Internal Reconstruction, Proc. of the 9th Intern. Congr. of Linguists, 17). 3.2.3 Inflectional Morphemes and Morphology in the Narrow Sense The 'lexical' (or 'root-', 'source-') morphemes are like words in many respects. They are endowed, to a greater or less degree, with the power of individual reference. They are often polyseman-tic, in a lexical sense. It is true, that derivational morphemes do not possess these qualities in the same marked degree, that many of them are on the border-line between lexical and grammatical morphology. Nevertheless (as will be shown later) it is not only possible, but also necessary to distinguish between derivational and inflexional morphemes as a matter of principle. A more detailed discussion of the field with its specific problems 102 MORPHOLOGY should be preceded by some metalinguistic clarification. First of all the term 'grammatical' which is a complex bundle of concepts : (1) expressing relationship; (2) systemic, standard, recurring; (3) auxiliary, concomitant in form. It follows that grammatical mor-phology deals with units (and processes?) (1) connected with the expression of relations between objects; (2) connected with rela-tions, expressed by means of regular, standard recurrent devices; and (3) auxiliary, concomitant subservient with respect to the 'material' (vescestvennoj) or 'lexical' part of words. The morphonological processes of lexical morphology are com-paratively speaking simple, even for most of the phenomena of derivation.
eBook - PDFIntroducing Linguistics
Theoretical and Applied Approaches
- Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The study of meaning-making considers how speakers/writers encode it and how listeners/readers comprehend it. We compared and contrasted different types of meaning in language; we explored how meaning is reflected in words and how words are inter-connected in semantic fields based on meaning. We also described how we put together word meanings to come up with phrase meaning, and how we take structure into account to get to sentence meaning. Sentence interpretation is intimately connected to the sentence syntax and the grammatical meanings of its functional morphology. Finally, we looked at some theoretical approaches to studying meaning in language, the main philosophical difference between them being whether reality is considered to be objective or subjective. Computing meaning in everyday communication may come from our language faculty enriched with general cognitive mechanisms and our knowledge of the world. 247 Exercises EXERCISES A few more activities and resources can be found in ‘Delving Deeper’ in Chapter 6’s resources on the website to accompany this book at www.cambridge.org/introducing-linguistics 6.1 Technically speaking, the mental lexicon contains morphemes, not just words. Recall that morphemes are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language (Chapter 4 Morphology). Your English mental lexicon contains entries like these, where meanings are given in small caps: a. dog = DOMESTIC CANINE b. –s = PLURAL c. pave = COVER WITH STONE, TILES, OR OTHER HARD MATERIAL d. –ment = SUFFIX CREATING NOUNS e. –ing = ACTION IN PROGRESS, etc. Keeping in mind the lexical and grammatical meanings we discussed in the chapter, it is easy to see which are the lexical and which are the Grammatical Morphemes above. Dog and pave are certainly lexical morphemes, because they have idiosyncratic meanings of their own, such that no other word has exactly the same meaning.
eBook - PDFProductivity and Creativity
Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck
- Mark Janse(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
morphemes when considered as to their formal aspect. And these linguistic forms are primarily char-acterized by their arrangement, i.e. the various features (or habits) of grammatical form. 258 Pierre Swiggers Notes 1. In Bolinger (1963) the word is taken to be a basic unit, which is unique in form and unique in meaning. For the word defined as a unit of integration, see Swiggers (1987). 2. The view is incisively formulated in Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias, 16a: Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks sym-bols of spoken sounds. Just as the written marks are not the same for all men, neither are the spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of— viz. affections of the soul—are for all the same; and what these affections are likenesses of—viz. real things—are also the same ... Just as some thoughts in the soul are neither true nor false while some are necessarily one or the other, so also with spoken sounds. For falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation. So, names and verbs on themselves—like man or white when nothing more is added—are like the thoughts that are without com-bination and separation; for so far they are neither true nor false. 3. According to Bolinger (1963: 136), the meaning of a sentence must be discussed in terms of the meanings of the component words and traffic-rule morphemes. 4. I will not be concerned here with generative (and post-generative) proposals. 5. Nor is it used in Sapir (1921). In French linguistics the term morpheme was introduced, as a concept in the theory of grammar, by Vendryes (1921, written in 1914). In Vendryes (1921) the morpheme is opposed to the semanteme, a distinction which has its roots in the traditional (lexically slanted) distinction between function-words (or relational words) vs. content-words. See also the discussion of grammatical concepts in Sapir (1921: Chapter IV).
eBook - PDFContemporary Stylistics
Language, Cognition, Interpretation
- Alison Gibbons, Sara Whiteley(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
42 4 Morphemes to words 4.1 Words In the previous chapter, our stylistic analyses concentrated on the lin-guistic units of sound called phonemes. Phonemes come together to form more meaningful units – morphemes (which we’ll begin to discuss in section 4.2) and words. Words have different grammatical functions depending on their lexical category or word class . There are two types of word class: major and minor word classes. Major word classes are often also called lexical words or content words and may already be familiar to you: nouns, often characterised as ‘naming words’, primarily designate people or things (e.g. boy , cat , table ); lexical verbs, considered as ‘doing words’, tend to express actions, processes, and events (e.g. walked , write , thinking ); adjectives, as ‘describ-ing words’, impart attributes or traits (e.g. beautiful , red , bright ) and can be made comparative ( brighter , stronger ) or superlative ( strongest , worst ); adverbs, as optional parts of speech that modify or ‘add to the verb’, typically provide further information about manner, place, or time (how, where, when) (e.g. slowly , somewhere , today ). In contrast, minor word classes are sometimes called grammatical words or function words. Many of these resurface in analyses throughout the book, but some cat-egories of minor word class include: • articles/determiners (e.g. definite: the ; indefinite: a, an ) • conjunctions (e.g. coordinating: and , but , so ; subordinating: because, although ) • modifiers and intensifiers (e.g. rarely , very , extremely ) • prepositions (e.g. for , in , off , on , out , to ) • personal pronouns (e.g. personal: I , you , he/she ; impersonal: it , one ) • possessive pronouns (e.g. my , our , your , his/her ) • relative pronouns (e.g. who ) • demonstrative pronouns/demonstratives (e.g. this , that )
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
The word is derived from the Greek word morphe, meaning “form.” If Goldwyn had taken a linguistics course, he would have said, more correctly, “In two morphemes: im-possible.” The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed, is morphology. This word itself consists of two morphemes, morph 1 ology. The morpheme -ology means “branch of knowledge,” so the meaning of morphology is “the branch of knowledge concerning (word) forms.” Morphol- ogy also refers to our internal grammatical knowledge concerning the words of our language, and like most linguistic knowledge we are not consciously aware of it. A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes: One morpheme boy desire meditate two morphemes boy 1 ish desire 1 able meditate 1 tion three morphemes boy 1 ish 1 ness desire 1 able 1 ity four morphemes gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness un 1 desire 1 able 1 ity more than four un 1 gentle 1 man 1 li 1 ness anti 1 dis 1 establish 1 ment 1 ari 1 an 1 ism Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 38 CHAPTER 2 Morphology: The Words of Language A morpheme may be represented by a single letter such as the morpheme a- meaning “without” as in amoral and asexual, or by a single syllable, such as child and ish in child 1 ish. A morpheme may also consist of more than one syllable: of two syllables, as in camel, lady, and water; of three syllables, as in Hackensack and crocodile; or of four or more syllables, as in hallucinate, apoth- ecary, helicopter, and accelerate.
eBook - PDF- Erika Hoff(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
However, the units that are combined in language include something smaller than words. To illus-trate what is referred to as the morphology of language, consider the following: One book Two books 172 Chapter 6 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. In English, a plural noun is usually indicated by adding an s to the end of the singular form. This s means something; it indicates the plurality of the noun. Even though the s conveys meaning, it does not stand by itself as a word. In linguistics, this kind of lan-guage unit is called a bound morpheme , where morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. Most units of meaning in English are words that stand alone, and these are free morphemes . However, bound morphemes, such as the plural marker, must be attached to a word. We are talking in this chapter about grammatical morphology, also known as inflectional morphology. Inflectional morphemes add grammatical information to words, but they do not change the meaning or the grammatical category of the word. That is, cats is just more of the same thing that cat is, and they are both nouns. This is in contrast to derivational morphemes (e.g., the er in dancer and runner , the ish in pinkish and smallish ), which actually form new words, potentially of a different grammatical cat-egory. That is, run refers to a manner of locomotion and is a verb; runner refers to a person who locomotes in that manner and is a noun.
eBook - PDFMeaning as Explanation
Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory
- Ellen Contini-Morava, Barbara S. Goldberg, Ellen Contini-Morava, Barbara S. Goldberg(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
But since, in our analytical experience, we have never been prompted to hypothesize a unit called sentence, we make free to use the term meaning to refer to the communicative output of some smaller unit, one that we do hypothesize, such as the morpheme. 3.2.1. The process of communication When analysis is undertaken in terms of a sentence, a certain role for the morpheme naturally follows. The total meaning of the sentence, as recognized in whatever way it is, is divided into its component parts, and syntactic analysis establishes the relation between these parts and the various morphemes; in this way is built up such categorizations in the syntax as The Uses of the Cases. In that line of analysis the assumption is that every part of the totality of the meaning of the sentence is corre-lated with some morpheme. And since there are many more sentences, and thoughts, than there are morphemes, the consequence is usually a fairly long list of quite distinct uses of individual morphemes; for just as, in the phonetics of speech, no two sequences of sound waves are ever exactly alike, so also no two components of thoughts are ever exactly alike. But when we begin from the morpheme rather than from the sentence, the relation between the two presents rather a different picture, since the analytical procedure is essentially different. Our first hypothesis about the meaning of the morpheme is likely to be based on some small number of fairly obvious examples, and we are likely to be able to see how a single meaning would cover these examples. From there on, we gradually expand the collection and modify the hypothesis as necessary. 3.2.1.1. The relation of meaning to message As we go through this procedure we very soon encounter another kind of relationship of imprecision.
eBook - PDFLinguistics for Everyone
An Introduction
- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Accent on Field Linguistics Farah Nosh/Getty Images Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Sources and Resources • 175 Summary In this chapter, we have explored our complex knowledge of words and how they are made up of one or more morphemes. We have examined different types of morphemes, how they can be bound or free, and how some are roots and some are affixes. We’ve looked at how words fall into two basic classes, content words and function words. We have closely investigated the inter-nal structure of words and how they are built, particularly through deriva-tional affixation. We have discussed how words express inflection through affixation, vowel mutation, suppletion, and even through their order in the sentence, and we’ve seen how morphology provides clues about a word’s syn-tactic category as a noun, verb, adjective, and so on. We’ve seen that although not all of us share the same knowledge of morphology and etymology, we nevertheless all use morphological rules to break words into their component parts, and that each of us has a rich and complex store of words in our mental lexicons. All of these investigations have helped demonstrate the complexity of the morphological system of English as well as the enormous amount of unconscious knowledge we all have about words and their parts. Sources and Resources Anderson, S. 1976. On the notion of subject in ergative languages. In C. H. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic , 1–24. New York: Academic Press. Apostrophe Protection Society. http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/.
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