Languages & Linguistics
Morphosyntax
Morphosyntax is the study of the relationship between the structure of words and the structure of sentences in a language. It examines how words are formed and how they are combined to create meaningful sentences. This field of linguistics focuses on the morphological and syntactic aspects of language, including word formation, inflection, and sentence structure.
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10 Key excerpts on "Morphosyntax"
eBook - PDFLinguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing
100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax
- Emily M. Bender(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Springer(Publisher)
CHAPTER 4 Morphosyntax #28 The Morphosyntax of a language describes how the morphemes in a word affect its combinatoric potential. 35 To recap so far: a morpheme is a minimal pairing of form and meaning in a language, and morphology is the study of how those pieces combine together to form words. Chapter 2 described several ways in which both the 'form' and 'meaning' part of the form-meaning pairing can differ from the simplest case. Chapter 3 explored morphophonology, or the ways in which the form of a morpheme can vary depending on its morphological and phonological context. This chapter is concerned with a specific subset of'meanings' associated with morphemes, namely, those which reflect grammatical properties of the word and constrain its possible distribution within syntactic structures. The term Morphosyntax is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can be used to describe the totality of morphological and syntactic systems or facts within a language (or the study of those systems). This is the sense in which it was used in #1--#3 above. Here, it is used in a narrower sense to refer to those aspects of morphology which interface with syntax (as opposed to those which interface with phonology). By providing an overview of various kinds ofinformation which are expressed in inflectional morphology, the goal of this chapter is to convince the reader that morphological complexity is not there just to increase data sparsity. Rather, in languages with elaborate inflectional morphology especially, the differences in word form encode information which can be highly relevant to NLP tasks. Furthermore, given the existence of nearly perfectly isolating languages (see #20), anything that can be expressed morphologically in some language is likely to be expressed via periphrastic means (i.e., through a string of separate words) in some other language. 1 #29--#37 briefly explain and illustrate a range of types of information that are marked mor- phologically in some languages.
eBook - PDF- Rochelle Lieber(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
In this chapter you will learn about the intersection between morphology and syntax, which is the study of sentence structure. ◆ ◆ We will examine morphological processes like passivization and causativization that change the number of arguments of a verb. ◆ ◆ We will look at phenomena that sit on the borderline between word formation and syntax: clitics, phrasal verbs like call up in which the two parts can sometimes be separated in sentences, and compounds that contain whole phrases or even whole sentences. ◆ ◆ We will look at the competition between syntactic and morphological expression of grammatical concepts. KEY TERMS valency argument active passive anti-passive causative applicative noun incorporation clitic phrasal verb phrasal compound CHAPTER OUTLINE Words and Sentences: The Interface between Morphology and Syntax 8 CHAPTER 166 8 WORDS AND SENTENCES 8.1 Introduction As you’ve learned so far in this book, morphology is concerned with the ways in which words are formed in the languages of the world. Syntax, in contrast, is concerned with identifying the rules that allow us to com- bine words into phrases and phrases into sentences. Morphology and syntax, then, are generally concerned with different levels of linguistic organization. Morphologists look at processes of lexeme formation and inflection such as affixation, compounding, reduplication, and the like. Syntacticians are concerned, among other things, with phrase struc- ture and movement rules, and rules concerning the interpretation of anaphors and pronouns. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which morphology and syntax interact, and indeed where the line between syntax and morphology is blurred. 1 We saw in Chapter 6 that inflectional morphology is defined as mor- phology that carries grammatical meaning; as such it is relevant to syntactic processes. Case-marking, for example, serves to identify the syntactic function of an NP in a sentence.
eBook - PDF- Olaf Koeneman, Hedde Zeijlstra(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Syntax and Morphology 8 CHAPTER In this chapter, we will look at the interaction between syntax and morphology. You may wonder why this is of interest, because this is not immediately obvious. Syntax gives us a syntactic tree with words dangling from it. These have to be expressed in a particular order, but that is the job for phonology (to be explored in chapter 9), not morphology. So is there anything intriguing about the relationship between the tree and the dangling words that requires our attention? Morphology would be of little interest to a syntactician if the rules of morphology (the science of word structure) operated fully independently from the rules of syntax (the science of sentence structure). One could say that morphology produces words, syntax subsequently uses these words, and that is all there is to it. Reality, however, turns out to be much more complex. Instead of saying that morphology provides the elements that syntax uses, some observations force us to say the exact opposite: syntax provides the input that morphology uses to create words. This in turn suggests that morphology is not a mere delivery service for syntax but that it becomes active after the syntactic representation has been built. Since the relationship between syntax and morphology is more complex than initially envisaged, it makes sense to study the processes that take place at the interface between these two components of grammar. This is exactly what this chapter will do. KEY TERMS grammatical modules terminal nodes spell-out rules morpho- phonological forms under- specification markedness (un)bound morpheme M-merger impoverishment CHAPTER OUTLINE 8: Syntax and Morphology 195 8.1 Insight: Morphology and Syntax are Different Grammatical Modules The relationship between syntax and morphology is not always transpar- ent; this justifies its study.
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 - PDF- Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
V. Die Rolle der Morphologie in Grammatik und Lexikon The role of morphology in grammar and lexicon 34. Morphology and syntax 1. Morphology-syntax interactions 2. Syntax and internal word structure 3. Theoretical approaches 4. Morphology as a module or a component 5. Conclusions 6. References 1. Morphology-syntax interactions There are several respects in which morphol-ogy and syntax interact, and which have to be accounted for in any theory of grammar. These can be listed under the following head-ings: (i) ways in which morphology and syn-tax share representations or principles of or-ganization at the interface between the two, (ii) ways in which syntactic processes might appeal to or affect morphological structure, (iii) ways in which morphological processes might appeal to or affect syntactic structure, (iv) ways in which morphology and syntax appeal to the same processes or types of rep-resentations. The most salient set of questions concern (i), the interface between morphology and syntax. At its simplest this is reflected in the fact that both components (or modules) of grammar deal in words. Syntax governs the distribution of words while morphology gov-erns the structure of words. There is a sense, then, in which morphology constructs the ob-jects which are then manipulated by syntax. Lexical categories such as noun and verb, and inflectional properties such as agreement features then form part of a vocabulary shared between morphology and syntax. However, there are several other ways in which the interface manifests itself. In an ‘ideal’ world we would expect a clear-cut distinction between the principles governing word formation and those govern-ing phrase formation. On the one hand, this means that we would expect parts of words to be impervious to syntactic processes. In other words, we would not expect to find much interaction under the heading (ii) above.
eBook - PDFMorphology
From Data to Theories
- Antonio Fábregas, Sergio Scalise(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
133 7 MORPHOLOGY’S RELATION TO SYNTAX 7.1 THE PLACE OF MORPHOLOGY IN GRAMMAR: LEXICALISM AND CONSTRUCTIONISM One of the main controversies in modern morphology is the exact nature of its relation to syntax. Theories dealing with the relation between these two components fall into two main classes: those which argue that morphology is a distinct generative component, and those which claim that the only generative component in grammar is syntax, and morphology either does not exist or is an interpretative component that follows syntax. The first hypothesis is gener-ally called Lexicalism or Projectionism, while the second has been labelled Constructionism. 7.1.1 LEXICALIST THEORIES Lexicalism’s main claim is that grammar contains two distinct components able to create new forms: syntax, which is responsible for creating phrases and sen-tences, and the lexicon, which creates new words. The lexicon in this approach is a complex component that contains both a list of forms (the mental dictionary) and a set of rules which create new words. Thus, the component that generates the phrase a person who writes is syntax, while the word writer is built in the lexicon. As these two linguistic objects have been formed in different components of the grammar, they are expected to be different in nature: they would be affected by different processes and have different properties. The architecture of grammar according to Lexicalism is presented in (1). The first generative component is the lexicon, which feeds units to syntax, the second generative component. Once syntax has combined these units into phrases, they are transferred to two further components, called interfaces: LF (Logical Form), responsible for the semantic interpretation, and PF (Phonological Form), which deals with its materialization as a physical signal.
eBook - PDF- Frank Van Eydne(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
3 The interaction of syntax and morphology in machine translation Paul Bennett Morphology has been relatively neglected within MT research. For instance, the few references in Hutchins (1986) are to morphological processing, the treatment of inflection, spelling rules, and so on. In this chapter, however, we shall explore the possibility of translating subparts of words along the same compositional lines as the constituents of sentences. It should be immediately obvious that a phenomenon realized morphologically in one language may be a syntactic construct in another. For instance, the comparative is represented by a separate word in French (plus grand), by a suffix in German (grower), and by either in English depending on the adjective (bigger, more attractive). Sometimes, moreover, adjective and comparative morpheme are fused together in a non-compositional form (meilleur, besser, better). The examination of compositional translation, therefore, cannot be confined to syntax, but must consider word structure also. The problems encountered in morphology, though, may be rather different from those occurring in the sentence domain. A subsidiary aim of the chapter is to discuss a number of proposals in the literature on theoretical morphology in order to see how helpful they are. We shall take our examples from the Eurotra languages, and from two other languages that have been the subject of MT research, Chinese and Japanese. This chapter is structured as follows. In section 1, we survey the various kinds of morphological formation which occur, and examine how they have been handled within linguistics. We then focus on translation problems and examine cross-linguistic differences, comparing them with those found in syntax. Sections 2-4 consider how different morphological constructions should be represented in MT, and the contribution which can be made to simplifying transfer; section 2 deals with inflection, section 3 with derivation and section 4 with compounding.
eBook - PDF- Jerrold M. Sadock(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
147 5 Morphology and morphophonology 5.1 Pure morphology Morphology concerns the makeup of those segments of language that we call words. The word word, however, is multiply ambiguous, having been applied also to the atoms of syntax, phonological stretches defined in terms of allowable initial and final sequences of segments or intonational properties, the smallest elements that can be pronounced as whole utterances, and contiguous stretches of utterances with meanings that cannot be derived from shorter components. But these are not morphological features per se. We might call elements of lan- guage defined according to these various criteria syntactic words, phonological words, discourse words, and lexical words, respectively. While these conceptu- ally distinct notions often align, they also sometimes don’t, and that makes the identification of the word a matter of some controversy. In this chapter we are interested in morphological words whose defin- ition cannot be reduced to a combination of properties in other components. Morphologically complex words are structured in a way that often corresponds to properties in other components, but they are essentially independent of any of them. That is to say, morphology is an autonomous component with its own categories and its own rules of combination, just as is the case with the other autonomous components of grammar. 1 Its categories are connected most closely with phonology and with syntax, but it must be sharply distinguished from both morphophonology (Woodbury 1995) and Morphosyntax, two sub- jects with which pure morphology is frequently confused. As is the case with other major components of grammar, the morphological component of a natural language can be formalized in terms of an order-free, context-free phrase structure grammar.
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 - PDF- Erika Hoff(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
These three rules generate a large number of sentences (limited only by the number of different nouns, verbs, and so on in your vocabulary), and they also describe the hierarchical structure of sentences. Words are combined to form phrases, and phrases are combined to form simple sentences. Complex sentences are formed by combining simple sentences, and this is how the system acquires the capacity to generate an infinite number of sentences with a finite vocabulary. You can endlessly conjoin sentences ( “ The runner stole second base, and the crowd roared ” ), and you can embed sentences in larger sentences. For example: The catcher swore. The umpire noticed that the catcher swore. The crowd saw that the umpire noticed that the catcher swore. In sum, then, the standard linguistic account of speakers ’ ability to produce combina-tions of words that they have never heard before but that form grammatical sentences in the language is to posit that speakers know a system of rules that specifies how words belonging to different linguistic categories can be combined into structured sen-tences. The rules we have discussed do not nearly constitute the entire system for English, but they illustrate some basic features of syntactic knowledge we want to account for in discussing language development. That is, we need to explain the origin of rules and of the linguistic categories over which the rules operate — or we need another way of explaining the structured and productive nature of language. Morphology It is easy for English speakers to think of sentences as combinations of words. 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.
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