Languages & Linguistics
Morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure and formation of words in a language. It focuses on the internal structure of words, including their roots, prefixes, suffixes, and other meaningful units. Morphology also examines how words are formed and how they can be modified to convey different meanings and grammatical functions within a language.
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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 - PDFLanguage Files
Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition
- Department of Linguistics(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Ohio State University Press(Publisher)
C H A P T E R 4 Morphology © 2015 by Julia Porter Papke 154 F I L E 4.0 What Is Morphology? Morphology is the component of mental grammar that deals with types of words and how words are formed out of smaller meaningful pieces, including other words. Every speaker of English knows that do is an English word, as are undo, redo, doing, doable, etc. But we also know that none of the following are possible: undanger, redanger, dangering, danger- able, etc., even though danger is an English word too. Why is it that you can add re- to do and get another word, but adding re- to danger does not result in a word? Morphology as a subfield of linguistics studies the internal structure of words. It tries to describe which meaningful pieces of language can be combined to form words and what the consequences of such combinations are on the meaning or the grammatical function of the resulting word. For example, the addition of re- to do modifies the meaning of do in a certain way, and in fact, it does so in the same way when added to unite (reunite) or to play (replay). Contents 4.1 Words and Word Formation: The Nature of the Lexicon Introduces the mental lexicon, the idea that words can have their own internal structure, and relationships between words and word forms due to derivation and inflection, and then discusses the representation and classification of different types of morphemes. 4.2 Morphological Processes Introduces various processes by which inflection and derivation may be accomplished. 4.3 Morphological Types of Languages Shows various ways in which the world’s languages make use of morphological processes. 4.4 The Hierarchical Structure of Derived Words Focuses on the process of affixation, exploring in more detail the way that multi-morphemic words are put together. 4.5 Morphological Analysis Provides a way to identify and discern information about the morphological structure of languages you do not know.
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 - 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.
- Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams, , Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
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. 60 CHAPTER 2 Morphology: The Words of Language Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes Case Study 1 As we have seen in this chapter, speakers of a language know the internal struc- ture of words because they know the morphemes of their language and the rules for their combination. This is unconscious knowledge of course and it takes a trained linguist to make this knowledge explicit as part of a descriptive gram- mar of the language. The task is challenging enough when the language you are analyzing is your own, but linguists who speak one language may nevertheless analyze languages for which they are not native speakers. Suppose you were a linguist from the planet Zorx who wanted to analyze English. How would you discover the morphemes of the language? How would you determine whether a word had one, two, or more morphemes, and what they were? The first thing to do would be to ask native speakers how they say various words. (It would help to have a Zorxese–English interpreter along; otherwise, copious gesturing is in order.) Assume you are talented in miming and manage to collect the following forms: Adjective Meaning ugly “very unattractive” uglier “more ugly” ugliest “most ugly” pretty “nice looking” prettier “more nice looking” prettiest “most nice looking” tall “large in height” taller “more tall” tallest “most tall” To determine what the morphemes are in such a list, the first thing a field linguist would do is to see whether some forms mean the same thing in different words, that is, to look for recurring forms.
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)
(1931), “Gedanken über Morphonologie”. In: Re ´union phonologique inter-nationale tenue a ` Prague 1930. Prague: Jednota C ˇ eskoslovensky ´ch matematiku ˚ a fysiku ˚ (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 4), 160 163 Vennemann, Theo (1972), “Rule Inversion”. Lin-gua 29, 209 242 Wurzel, Wolfgang U. (1981), “Problems in Mor-phonology”. In: Dressler et al. (eds.), 413 434 Geert Booij, Amsterdam (The Netherlands) which dealt with the systematic means by which new words were formed and added to the lexicon; and syntax, which dealt with the arrangement of words into phrases and sen-tences (although compounding was some-times included in syntax). In addition, both inflection and word formation were often grouped together under the rubric of mor-phology, inasmuch as they are both con-cerned with bound formatives or affixes (as opposed to compounding and syntax). Tradi-tional grammar was thus word-based, as British scholars have emphasized (Robins 2 1979) and consisted very largely of morphol-ogy, in practice and sometimes in theory. Saussure, for example, considered syntax to be part of parole and not part of langue , and thus completely outside the purview of gram-mar. There was also little connection between Morphology and the lexicon in this system, although it was acknowledged that word for-mation was a mechanism for enlarging the lexicon. Sometime before 1881, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay coined the term morpheme to refer to the minimal meaningful forms of lan-guage. Baudouin defined the morpheme as 345 36. Morphology between lexicon and grammar “that part of a word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reasons not further divisible” (Bau-douin 1972: 153). Bloomfield later gave the term a characteristically formal definition free of mentalist baggage. In his postulates, he defined the morpheme as “a recurrent (meaningful) form which cannot in turn be analyzed into smaller recurrent (meaningful) forms” (1926 [1970: 130]).
eBook - PDF- Olga Akhmanova(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
As always, changes on both planes may be more or less advanced, with borderline cases, when the language 'has not quite made up its mind yet'. (See also A. I. Smirnickij, Analiti£eskie formy, Voprosy Jazykoznanija 2 [1956], 41-52). Morphology in the 'narrow' (or shall we say 'proper'?) sense is concerned with the system of grammatical inflections of a language (sistema form slovoizmenenija). It would, however, be a great mistake not to understand that the system in question is a system of 'two-sided' units, that their study cannot be confined to 'formal' analyses (which should be and usually is, taken care of by mor-phonology). What Morphology is mainly concerned with is the system of grammatical categories, the meaningful morphological 104 Morphology oppositions which form the basis of a language's grammatical system. 14 3.2.4 Categorisation and Categories To understand why 'categorisation' and 'categories' have not been introduced before (i.e. in Sections 1 and 2 of this book) we must try to formulate as clearly as we can the difference between the three linguistic disciplines, i.e. phonology, morphonology and mor-phology. It may be assumed that PHONOLOGY can (with all the necessary reservations, of course) on the whole be satisfied with such underlying concepts as the concept of semiological relevance or 'otherness' (a special kind of otherness, of course, one that can be shown to be significant, to be important as a means of commu-nication). One is free, of course, to substitute the term 'category' for 'concept' to make the latter stand out as one of the more im-portant or basic or more general concepts. But here again no special explanations or theoretical disquisitions are called for. There would appear to be little ground for philosophical specula-tion even in the case of morphonology.
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
No longer available |Learn moreUnderstanding Language
A Basic Course in Linguistics
- Elizabeth Grace Winkler, Elizabeth Winkler(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
In English these are the prepositions (e.g. of , in , on ), articles (e.g. a , an , the ) and conjunctions (e.g. although , but , and , nor ) among other words. They are termed function words because their most significant role is connecting the content words in a sentence together – showing how the nouns and verbs of the sentence relate to each other. This group is also called the closed class of words because it is a limited set that is not being added to as our cultures change or our technology grows. Morphology: The Structure of Words 113 2. Morphemes A more complete way to describe words and their parts is to look at their mor-phology . Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the structure of words and their components. All words are made up of one or more parts that have meaning. For example, the word unhappy has two meaningful parts: happy , describing an emotional condition and a prefix un - meaning not . The combination of these two parts gives us the complete meaning of the word unhappy . Each of these distinct parts is called a morpheme. Any further divi-sions of the word unhappy would leave a string of letters that have no mean-ing. Un- is not the only prefix that performs the same function. Think of all the other prefixes that we use to mean not : dis - (disappear), 3 il - (illogical), im - (impossible) and in - (incorrect). Unhappy could just as easily be dishappy or inhappy . Second language speakers of English often struggle with this aspect Understanding Language 114 of Morphology in English because there seem to be a number of suffixes or prefixes that have the same function and no simple rule for them to follow in choosing which one is correct. They do not always get it right as can be seen in the sign on the previous page from a national park in China. The two morphemes in the word unhappy are quite different. The mor-pheme happy can appear by itself in many different sentences; the morpheme un-cannot.
eBook - PDF- A. H. Sayce(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Egypt, when the monuments first cast light upon her some 6,000 years ago, is in the height of her culture and advancement; but she comes before us as a pharos of light in the midst of utter darkness, self-contained and self-sufficient, but surrounded on all sides by tribes and nations even more barbarous than the untaught Negro of to-day. And such as was the civilization, such too was the language ; the civilizations of the Nile, of the Euphrates, and of the Hoang-ho, were not more isolated and peculiar than the languages which embodied them. It is difficult for us with our steamers and railways and telegraphs to realize the separation and practical immobility of the ancient world. Geographical barriers cut off tribe from tribe, race from race, language from language, and war instead of peace was the sole means that existed of overcoming them. It is to these barriers, however, that we owe the persistency of racial and linguistic type which we may still note in so many parts of the world. It has often been remarked that the fauna and flora of America take us back to a geological rather than a historical age; the same may also emphatically be said of the American type of speech. The Eskimaux may or may not be the survivor of the man of the reindeer age ; his grammar, at all events, is a relic of a bygone era of speech. The Morphology of speech, then, deals with the rela tion of the parts of the sentence one to another. This THE Morphology OF SPEECH. 383 relation is expressed by what we term grammatical forms. Position, it is true, as well as accent, frequently takes the place of grammatical forms, especially in languages like Burman or English, but in this case both position and accent will have to be considered as belonging to the pro vince of Morphology. The rule which in Burman makes the first of two substantives a genitive or in English a substantive which follows a transitive verb an accusative ;s itself a grammatical form.
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