Languages & Linguistics
Lexical Morphology
Lexical morphology refers to the study of the structure and formation of words in a language. It focuses on how words are built from smaller units called morphemes, which carry meaning or grammatical function. This field examines processes such as affixation, compounding, and derivation to understand how words are created and how their meanings are modified.
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11 Key excerpts on "Lexical Morphology"
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The forms of words may be simple or extremely complex; our knowledge of the mental rules and categor-ies that enable us to produce and interpret them makes up the subject of morphology. Morphology: the study of word structure The branch of linguistics that is concerned with the relation between meaning and form, within words and between words, is known as morphology . Morphology literally means ‘ the study of form ’ – in particular, the forms of words. Although “ form ” in this context usually refers to the spoken sound or phonological form that is associated with a particular meaning, it doesn ’ t necessarily have to – signed languages also have word forms. Instead of the articulators of the vocal tract, signed languages make use of the shape and movement of the hands. All languages, whether spoken or signed, have word forms. Morphologists describe the constituent parts of words, what they mean, and how they may (and may not) be combined in the world ’ s languages. The pairing of a meaning with a form applies to whole words, like sleep , as well as to parts of words like the ‘ past ’ meaning associated with the ending -ed as in frimped . Morphology applies within words, as in the addition of a plural ending to cat /kæt/ to change its form to cats /kæts/ and its meaning to ‘ more than one cat. ’ It also applies across words, as when we alter the form of one word so that some part of it matches, or agrees with, some feature of another word, as shown in (8) : (8) a. That cat sleep s all day. b. Those cat s sleep all day. 67 Words and their parts In the sentence in (8a) , the word cat is a third-person singular (3SG) subject, which in most varieties of English requires that we add an -s to another word – the verb – when they occur together in a sentence. This verbal suf fi x “ means ” something like ‘ my subject is third person and singular. ’ In (8b) , however, the word cats is plural, which in English doesn ’ t require the verb to add any special agreeing form.
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 - PDFLinguistics for Everyone
An Introduction
- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 142 • CHAPTER 5 Morphology: Words and Their Parts I n this chapter and the next, we will investigate morphology , which, you might remember from Chapter 1, is the study of words and parts of words. As in the previous chapters, we will focus on uncovering uncon-scious knowledge, revealing what you don’t know that you already know about the structure of words in your language. What exactly do we know about words? What is a word? Knowing words includes knowing the meanings attached to combinations of sounds, but it is much more. Speakers share some kind of common knowledge that allows us to recognize words as English even when we don’t all use the same vocabu-lary. We recognize nonsense words as English, and we recognize a child’s words as English even though these words do not conform to those we use as adults. We even recognize words from earlier varieties of English that are no longer spoken. This understanding of “what is a word” comes from a vast amount of unconscious knowledge about the structure of words in our language. Morphology includes the study of the system of rules underlying our knowledge of the structure of words; the word morphology is from the Greek words morph- ‘form/structure’ and -logy (study). Morphology is closely linked to the study of our mental dictionary, or lexicon . The operations and systems we use to form words are called word formation rules or lexical rules . As we discussed in Chapter 1, the pieces or elements of any commu-nication system are called signs. Signs can be iconic or non-iconic, where the relation between the form and the meaning of the sign is arbitrary. For example, English speakers call a domesticated feline cat ; a Spanish speaker calls it gato ; a Japanese speaker, neko ; and a Witsuwit’en (spoken in northern British Columbia, Canada) speaker, dus .
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.
- Oliver Bonami(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
Part I Lexemes in standard descriptive and theoretical lexeme-based morphology Chapter 1 Morphology and words: A memoir Mark Aronof Stony Brook University Lexicographers agree with Saussure that the basic units of language are not morphemes but words, or more precisely lexemes. Here I describe my early journey from the former to the later, driven by a love of words, a belief that every word has its own properties, and a lack of enthusiasm for either phonology or syntax, the only areas available to me as a student. Te greatest infuences on this development were Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization , in which it was shown that not all morphologically complex words are compositional, and research on English word-formation that grew out of the European philological tradition, especially the work of Hans Marchand. Te combination leads to a panchronic analysis of word-formation that remains incompatible with modern linguistic theories. Since the end of the nineteenth century, most academic linguistic theories have de-scribed the internal structure of words in terms of the concept of the morpheme , a term frst coined and defned by Baudouin de Courtenay (1895/1972, p. 153): that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reason not further divisible. It consequently subsumes such concepts as the root (radix), all possible afxes, (sufxes, pre fxes), endings which are expo-nents of syntactic relationships, and the like. Tis is not the traditional view of lexicographers or lexicologists or, surprising to many, Saussure, as Anderson (2015) has reminded us. Since people have writen down lexicons, these lexicons have been lists of words. Te earliest known ordered word list is Egyptian and dates from about 1500 BCE (Haring 2015). In the last half century, linguists have distinguished diferent sorts o f words. Tose that constitute dictionary entries are usually called lexemes .
eBook - PDFEnglish Language, The
From Sound to Sense
- Gerald P. Delahunty, James J. Garvey(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Parlor Press, LLC(Publisher)
121 5 Morphology and Word Formation KEY CONCEPTS Words and morphemes Root, derivational, inflectional morphemes Morphemes, allomorphs, morphs Words English inflectional morphology English derivational morphology Compounding Other sources of words Registers and words Internal structure of complex words Classifying words by their morphology INTRODUCTION This chapter is about words—their relationships, their constituent parts, and their internal organization. We believe that this information will be of value to anyone interested in words, for whatever reason; to anyone inter-ested in dictionaries and how they represent the aspects of words we deal with here; to anyone involved in developing the vocabularies of native and non-native speakers of English; to anyone teaching writing across the curric-ulum who must teach the characteristics of words specific to their discipline; to anyone teaching writing who must deal with the usage issues created by the fact that different communities of English speakers use different word forms, only one of which may be regarded as standard. Exercise 1. Divide each of the following words into their smallest meaningful parts: landholder, smoke-jumper, demagnetizability. 2. Each of the following sentences contains an error made by a non-native speaker of English. In each, identify and correct the incorrect word. a. I am very relax here. b. I am very boring with this game. c. I am very satisfactory with my life. d. Some flowers are very attracting to some insects. e. Many people have very strong believes. Delahunty and Garvey 122 f. My culture is very difference from yours. g. His grades proof that he is a hard worker. h. The T-shirt that China drawing. (from a T-shirt package from China) In general terms, briefly discuss what English language learners must learn in order to avoid such errors.
eBook - PDF- Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The traditional distinctions between syntax and morphology, inflection and word formation, were also largely ignored, except in discussions of such peripheral questions as the relation between linguistics and lexicography (Gleason 1967; Hoenigswald 1967) and even then they were given only marginal attention. 2. Lexicalist conceptions of the lexicon The Lexicalist Hypothesis (cf. Art. 22), which questioned the reductionist Baudouin/Bloom-field program, brought to the theoretical fore again questions concerning the relations among inflection, word formation and syn-tax, but based on a better understanding of syntax. In addition, the Lexicalist Hypothesis drew special new attention to word forma-tion and its relation both to the lexicon and to inflection and syntax. The traditional no-tions of inflection, word formation, deriva-tion, morphology and syntax had encoded two useful distinctions: that between word-internal and word-external phenomena (mor-phology vs. syntax) and that between rules by which the vocabulary of a language was enriched (derivation and word formation) and rules of grammar that referred crucially to syntactic notions (inflection and syntax). In addition, the opposition between grammar and lexicon expressed the fundamental dis-tinction between a list and rules. Within a lexicalist framework, however, the lexicon is no longer simply a list of unanalyzeable atomic units, for the fundamental point of lexicalist theories was that the units that pre-viously had always been treated as lexical atoms (Chomsky’s lexical formatives ) could have internal structure. A basic characteristic of almost all lexicalist theories is therefore that word formation, which is responsible for the analysis of existing complex members of major lexical categories and for the morpho-logical creation of new members of major lexical categories, operates inside the lexical component or lexicon.
eBook - ePubMorphological Structure, Lexical Representation and Lexical Access (RLE Linguistics C: Applied Linguistics)
A Special Issue of Language and Cognitive Processes
- Dominiek Sandra, Marcus Taft, Dominiek Sandra, Marcus Taft(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
In textbooks on morphology and in introductory courses to general linguistics, morphemes are almost invariably defined as the smallest linguistic units of form and meaning. In accordance with this definition, an English word like boys is said to consist of the stem morpheme boy and the plural suffix - s, as these segments reveal a constant form-meaning relationship across the English lexicon. Examples attesting to their morphemehood are boyish, boyhood, boy's school, boy's book for boy and cats, mugs, dolls for - s. Can psycholinguists modelling the mental lexicon rely on this traditional definition of the morpheme for making proposals on the way polymorphemic words are represented? It is very tempting to answer this question in the affirmative. Indeed, the definition almost naturally suggests that morphology could be put to the purpose of reducing the amount of information to be stored for these words in the mental lexicon. Two variants of this idea are discussed below with respect to different types of polymorphemic words, and then the explanatory nature of the concept of representational economy is evaluated. The Mental Lexicon as a Morpheme Inventory If the above definition is correct, the morpheme rather than the word could be considered as the basic unit of lexical description. If words can be broken down into their constituent morphemes and the latter behave as constants of form and meaning, it must be possible (even desirable) to treat words as simple integrations of morphemic units, at the levels of both form and meaning. Within such a “building-block” perspective, the word itself is epiphenomenal and uninteresting for a scientific study of the lexicon. Its formal and semantic aspects being rule-governed, it would seem to claim the same status in the lexical realm that sentences have in syntax
- Jan Don(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Such theo-ries are often referred to as lexical morphological theories . Later in this book we will see that other theoretical positions are also possible, and indeed have been defended. In this chapter we go into the details of the lexical view on word-formation, seeing what arguments have been given for this position and what insights these theories have brought us. List of Morphemes Rules of Word Formation Filter Dictionary of Words output Phonology Syntax Figure 2.1 Halle’s (1973) model of the lexicon, redrawn after Halle (1973: 8) WORD - FORMATION IN THE LEXICON 37 The chapter is organised as follows. In Section 2.3 we will start by looking at a generalisation about the ordering of affixes that lies at the heart of many lexical theories of English morphology. A distinc-tion is made between two types of affixes that behave differently with respect to a certain class of phonological rules and also seem to stand in a specific ordering relation. This distinction in classes only refers to affixation. In Section 2.4 we review several arguments that have been given for the inclusion of compounding in the lexicon. We are then in a position to present an influential and detailed lexical model of English morphology, dubbed level-ordered morphology, in Section 2.5. In Section 2.6 we focus our attention on the form of WFRs and the status of affixes. We then turn to some criticism of level-ordered morphology and alternatives that have been proposed in Section 2.7. Section 2.8 pre-sents an alternative to the model discussed in Section 2.5, maintaining the lexicalist position and its explanatory goals. 2.3 Morphology and phonology Compare the following complex forms: (7) A A-ity A-ness ágile agílity ágileness fátal fatálity fátalness prodúctive productívity prodúctiveness The adjectives in the left-hand column all have stress on the penulti-mate syllable.
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Languages such as Finnish and Japanese have a dazzling array of inflectional processes for conveying everything from “temporary state of being” (Finnish nouns) to “strong negative intention” (Japanese verbs). English spoken 1,000 years ago had considerably more inflectional morphology than Modern English, as we shall discuss in Chapter 8. The differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes in Modern English are summarized in the table below and in Figure 2.1 that follows it: Inflectional Derivational Grammatical function Lexical function No word class change May cause word class change Small or no meaning change Some meaning change Often required by rules of grammar Never required by rules of grammar Follow derivational morphemes in a word Precede inflectional morphemes in a word Productive Some productive, many nonproductive 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. Rules of Word Formation 49 The Hierarchical Structure of Words We saw earlier that morphemes are added in a fixed order. This order reflects the hierarchical structure of the word, entirely analogous to the hierarchical structure of sentences that we observed in the previous chapter. A word is not a simple sequence of morphemes just as a sentence is not a simple sequence of words. It has an internal structure. For example, the word unsystematic is com- posed of three morphemes: un-, system, and -atic. The root is system, a noun, to which we add the suffix -atic, resulting in an adjective, systematic.
- R. Frost, Marian Katz(Authors)
- 1992(Publication Date)
- North Holland(Publisher)
This may be done by proposing, in the framework of a hierarchical model of a connectionist type, a level of morphological representation different from the lexical level per se (for example, Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985; Grainger, Cole, & Segui, 1991). Despite the importance of research carried out in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology on the mode of representation of morphologically complex words, none of the previously examined interpretations has received sufficient empirical support and the debate remains largely open. If it is legitimate to think that information concerning, on the one hand, the whole word form of derived words and, on the other, their morphemic components, is represented at one or different levels in the processing system, the problem remains to establish in what measure this information is effectively used during the visual or auditory recognition of words: in other words, to what extent does this information constrains the on-line processing of derived words? In the third part of this chapter we shall examine certain recent findings suggesting that the nature of the information used by the system during the recognition of derived words varies according to its internal structure and in particular according to the respective position of the root and the affix. Before examining this point, we shall present in the following section certain data which suggest that morphological relations are represented in an explicit manner in the internal lexicon. Are morphological relations different from orthographic and semantic relations? The favored procedure for tackling the study of relations between words in the internal lexicon is probably that of priming and a great deal of research has been devoted to evaluating the extent to which the effects of morphological priming differ from that of formal or semantic priming.
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