Morphology

  

Morphology

Basic Facts

Morphemes are the smallest parts that have meaning. Words may consist of one or several morphemes in much the same way as they consist of one or more syllables. However, the two concepts, that of a morpheme and that of a syllable, are radically different.

Word Classes

  Morphology is the study of the minimal meaningful units of language. It studies the structure of words, however from a semantic viewpoint rather than from the viewpoint of sound. Morphology is intimately related to syntax. For everything that is larger than a word is the domain of syntax. Thus within morphology one considers the structure of words only, and everything else is left to syntax. The first to notice is that words come in different classes. For example, there are verbs (/to imagine/) and there are nouns (/a car/), there are adverbs (/slowly/) and adjectives (/red/). Intuitively, one is inclined to divide them according to their meaning: verbs denote activities, nouns denote things adverbs denote ways of performing an activities and adjectives denote properties. However, language has its own mind. The noun /trip/ denotes an activity, yet it is a noun. Thus, the semantic criterion is misleading. From a morphological point of view, the three are distinct in the following way. Verbs take the endings /s/, /ed/, and /ing/, nouns only take the ending /s/. Adjectives and adverbs on the other hand do not change. (They can be distinguished by other criteria, though.)

We imagine.

He imagines.

We are imagining.

He imagined.

 Thus we may propose the following criterion: a word w is a verb if and only if we can add [z] (/s/), [d] (/ed/) and [ıŋ] (/ing/ and nothing else; w is a noun if and only if we can add [s] (/s/) and nothing else.

This distinction is made solely on the basis of the possibility of changing the form alone. The criterion is at times not so easy to use. Several problems must be noted. The first is that a given word may belong to several classes; the test using morphology alone would class anything that is both a noun and a verb, for example /fear/ as a verb, since the plural (/fears/), is identical to the third singular. Changing the wording to replace ‘if and only if’ to ‘if’ does not help either. For then any verb would also be classed as a noun. A second problem is that there can be false positives; the word /rise/ [ aız] cannot be taken as the plural of /rye/ [ aı]. And third, there some words do not use the same formation rules. There are verbs that form their past tense not in the way discussed earlier, by adding [d]. For example, the verb /run/ has no form ∗/runned/. Still, we classify it as a verb. For example, the English nouns take a subset of the endings that the verb takes. The word /veto/ is both a noun and a verb, but this analysis predicts that it is a verb. Therefore, more criteria must be used. One is that of taking a context and looking which words fit into it.

 The governor _______the bill.

If you fill the gap by a word, it is certainly a verb (more exactly a transitive verb, one that takes a direct object). On the other hand, if it can fill the gap in the next example it is a noun:

 The_______ vetoed the bill.

When we say ‘fill the gap’ we do not mean however that what we get is a meaningful sentence when we put in that word; we only mean that it is grammatically (= syntactically) well-formed. We can fill in /cat/, but that stretches our imagination a bit. When we fill in /democracy/ we have to stretch it even further, and so on. Adjectives can fill the position between the determiner (/the/) and the noun:

 The ________governor vetoed the bill.

Finally, adverbs (/slowly/, /surprisingly/) can fill the slot just before the main verb.

The governor __________vetoed the bill.

Another test for word classes in the combinability with affixes. (Affixes are parts that are not really words by themselves, but get glued onto words in some way.) Table 11 shows a few English affixes and lists the word classes to which it can be applied. We see that the list of affixes is heterogeneous, and that affixes do not always attach to all members of a class with equal ease (/anti-house/, for example, is yet to be found in English). Still, the test reveals a lot about the division into different word classes.

                                                  English Affixes and Word Classes 

                                                                                                                     

Affix                   Attaches to             Forming               Examples                

anti-                    nouns                   nouns                      anti-matter, ant-aircraft 

                           adjectives            adjectives                anti-democratic 

un-                      adjective             adjectives                un-happy, un-lucky 

                           verbs                   verbs                        un-bridle, un-lock 

re-                      verbs                    verbs                       re-establish, re-assure 

dis-                    verbs                    verbs                     disenfranchise, dis-own             

                          adjectives            adjectives        dis-ingenious, dis-honest

-ment                verbs                   nouns                       establish-ment, amaze-ment 

-ize                   nouns                  verbs                        burglar-ize 

                       adjective              verbs                         steril-ize, Islamic-ize 

-ism                nouns                   nouns                        Lenin-ism, gangster-ism 

                      adjectives              nouns                        real-ism, American-ism 

-ful                nouns                    adjectives                  care-ful, soul-ful 

-ly                adjectives              adverbs                      careful-ly, nice-ly 

-er                adjectives              adjectives                   nic-er, angry-er

Morphological Formation

Words are formed from simpler words, using various processes. This makes it possible to create very large words. Those words or parts thereof that are not composed and must therefore be drawn from the lexicon are called roots. Roots are ‘main’ words, those that carry meaning. (This is a somewhat hazy definition. It becomes clearer only through examples.) Affixes are not roots. Inflectional endings are also not roots. An example of a root is /cat/, which is form identical with the singular. However, the latter also has a word boundary marker at the right and (so it looks more like (/cat#/, but this detail is often generously ignored). In other languages, roots are clearly distinct from every form you get to see on paper. Latin /deus/ ‘god’ has two parts: the root /de/, and the nominative ending /us/. This can be clearly seen if we add the other forms as well: genitive /dei/, dative /deo/, accusative /deum/, and so on. However, dictionaries avoid using roots. Instead, you find the words by their citation form, which in Latin is the nominative singular. So, you find the root in the dictionary under /deus/ not under /de/. (Just an aside: verbs are cited in their infinitival form; this need not be so. Hungarian dictionaries often list them in their 3rd singular form. This is because the 3rd singular reveals more about the inflection than the infinitive. This saves memory!)