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Fall 2009
1. Morphology
1.1. How to do morphological analysis (or any other kind of linguistic analysis) Morphology is the study of word formation – how words are built up from smaller pieces. When we do morphological analysis, then, we’re asking questions like, what pieces does this word have? What does each of them mean? How are they combined? In general, when you’re asked to do any sort of linguistic analysis, you’ll be given a set of data – words or sentences from some language that generally isn’t, but occasionally is, English – and asked to find patterns in it. Cree (Algonquian) t∫i:ma:n canoe nit∫i:ma:n my canoe so:niya money niso:niya my money wiya: ∫ meat niwiya: ∫ my meat How to do morphological analysis? When you don’t know anything about the language:
- Find a pair of words whose English translations differ only in a single way that’s relevant to the task at hand.
- Find the corresponding difference in the non-English words – often some letters will be added, or the word will be changed in some systematic other way. Making this change in the non-English word therefore produces the relevant change in the English meaning.
- Check your theory: find another pair of foreign words whose English translations also differ only in this relevant way, and make sure this pair of foreign words change in the same way as the last. We’ll encounter kinds of morphology that are more complex than this, but this basic method of looking for forms with minimal differences and figuring out how to describe that difference is always a good approach.
Fall 2009 1.2. Types of morphemes Morpheme A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning we have – that is, the smallest piece of a word that contributes meaning to a word. Example The word trainings has 3 morphemes in it: train-ing-s. To break a word into morphemes, try starting at the beginning of the word and seeing how far into the word you need to go to find a sub-part of the word that has some meaning. For example, in the word unbreakable , the first two letters un- are independently meaningful in a way that just the first letter, u- , is not – un- means something like ‘not (whatever)’, and changes the meaning of the word it attaches to in a predictable way; sub-parts of un- , like u- or – n- , don’t have this property. This means that un- is a morpheme. Once you’ve found the first morpheme, ask yourself whether there’s another meaningful sub-part of the word after that first morpheme. Again, - break- is independently meaningful; so is the last part of the word, - able. So unbreakable has three morphemes: un-break-able. Some words just have one morpheme, of course – you can’t break down the word love into any meaningful sub-parts, for example. We define different kinds of morphemes based on various properties like where they show up in words. All morphemes are either free or bound. Free A free morpheme is one that can stand on its own – that is, it’s an entire word. Examples the, cat, run, pretty, trapezoid Free morphemes may appear with other bound morphemes attached to them; crucially, though, they don’t need to have other morphemes on them. Bound A bound morpheme cannot stand on its own, but rather must be attached to a free morpheme whenever you say it. Examples re- , un- , - est , - er, - fer (see below) Some morphemes are roots; others are affixes. Root The primary piece of meaning in a word, to which affixes can be added. In English, a root is often a word itself. Examples cat, pretty, - fer Affix A morpheme which attaches to roots (or stems), changing their meaning in regular ways.
Fall 2009 Ex 2: Michoacan Aztec: find every single morpheme in the data below.
- nokali ‘my house’ 9. mopelomes ‘your dogs’
- nokalimes ‘my houses’ 10. ipelo ‘his dog’
- mokali ‘your house’ 11. pelo ‘dog’
- ikali ‘his house’ 12. nokwahmili ‘my cornfield’
- kali ‘house’ 13. mokwahmili ‘your cornfield’
- kalimes ‘houses’ 14. ikwahmili ‘his cornfield’
- nopelo ‘my dog’ 15. ikwahmilimes ‘his cornfields’
- mopelo ‘your dog’ 16. kwahmili ‘cornfield’ How to proceed:
- Find a pair of words whose English translations differ only in a single way that’s relevant to the task at hand.
- Find the corresponding difference in the non-English words – often some letters will be added, or the word will be changed in some systematic other way. Making this change in the non-English word therefore produces the relevant change in the English meaning.
- Check your theory : find another pair of foreign words whose English translations also differ only in this relevant way, and make sure this pair of foreign words change in the same way as the last. Ex 3: Isleta Consider the following data from Isleta (a Native American language spoken in New Mexico), and then answer the questions that follow: a. temiban I went. d. mimiay He was going. b. amiban You went. e. tewanban I came. c. temiwe I am going. f. tewanhi I will come. I. List the Isleta morphemes corresponding to the following English translations:
Fall 2009 (a) I _____ (d) come ______ (h) future _____ (b) he _____ (e) go _____ (i) past ______ (c) you _____ (f) present progressive (is ... - ing) ______ g) past progressive (was ... - ing) ______ II. What is the order of morphemes in Isleta? III. Write a rule that produces in Isleta the second person singular subject ( “You ___ “). IV. Translate each of the following sentences in to Isleta: (a) He went. (b) I will go. (c) You were coming. 1.4 Word formation process in English The affixes we just talk about are distinctive in one more way. They are acting in a particular way when attached to the base. Either they are giving grammatical information or they are creating a new word. INFLECTION = the process by which affixes combine with roots to indicate basic grammatical categories such as tense or plurality (e.g. in 'cat-s', 'talk-ed', '-s' an d'-ed' are inflectional suffixes). Inflection is viewed as the process of adding very general meanings to existing words, not as the creation of new words. DERIVATION = the process by which affixes combine with roots to create new words (e.g. in 'modern-ize', 'read-er', '-ize' and '-er' are derivational suffixes). Derivation is viewed as using existing words to make new words.
Fall 2009 such a way that someone could use your rule to build new words. A good test for whether your rule is right is to try to use it and make sure it gives you the right result. This will become clearer soon. Morphology rules are sentences that tell you these three (or four) things: (1) What kind of morphological category you’re expressing (noun, verb…) (2) What change takes place in the root to express this category. (3) Where in the stem this change takes place. (4) Special conditions, if any, on this change (e.g. it might only occur in certain circumstances, on certain kinds of words, etc.). We can look at a simple example rule that makes the English plural form of a noun (i.e. that takes the root cat and adds an – s to the end to make cats ). The rule looks like this: To make the plural form of a noun, add – s to the end of the noun. We can break down this rule to show super-explicitly which parts of it are doing which of the four necessary things, like this: (1) To make the plural form of a noun, (2) add – s (3) to the end of the noun. Note that in this case (well, for the purposes of our discussion, anyway), the plural is always formed by adding – s , so we don’t need any special conditions – that is, no part (4). When I talked about testing your rule, here’s what I meant: you’ll write rules based on data – here, the data is the pair of words cat and cats. You can then take the rule and the data and make sure the rule produces the data – so here, you can take the singular form cat and ‘do’ the rule to it – that is, ‘add – s to the end of the noun.’ This produces cats , as it should. This is such a simple, familiar example that testing it seems dumb, but in more complex examples, testing is a great way to make sure you’ve done everything right. Sometimes it will be harder to write a very simple description of the morpheme being added to the root, because the morpheme might be making a pretty complicated change; even when the thing that happens to the root is complicated, just make sure to explain exactly what happens and your rule will work.
Fall 2009 1.6 Parts of Speech You’ve probably heard definitions for parts of speech like this: “A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea” or “A verb is an action word.” That’s lovely, but they’re slippery definitions – we generally agree that a word like appetite is a noun, but it’s not really a person, place, thing, or idea; similarly, seem is a verb, but it’s not really an action word. So instead of these meaning- based definitions of parts of speech, in this class we’ll use structural definitions – that is, definitions based on the structure of a word, and/or its position in a sentence structure.
Fall 2009 1.7 A few other word formations a. Reduplication Schm- reduplication is a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with schm-, IPA [ʃm]. The construction is generally used to indicate irony, derision or scepticism with respect to comments about the discussed object: He's just a baby! Baby-schmaby. He's already 5 years old! Exercise 1: Indonesian rumah ‘house’ rumahrumah ‘houses’ ibu ‘mother’ ibuibu ‘mothers’ lalat ‘fly’ lalatlalat ‘flies’
- What is the Indonesian rule for forming plurals? bili ‘buy’ bibili ‘will buy’ kain ‘eat’ kakain ‘will eat’ pasok ‘enter’ papasok ‘will enter’
- What is the Indonesian rule for forming the future tense? Exercise 2: English
- Which of the following words does it sound natural to apply schm- reduplication to? (If you don’t use or hear these expressions yourself, ask someone who does.) revenge pirouette ballerina indiscretion poster Alabama bartender butterfly dance banana police complaint apple map table survey
- What do the words that take schm- easily have in common?
Fall 2009
- What is the rule for creating schm- forms? Give your answer in the form of instructions that would enable someone who didn’t know this construction to correctly produce it. b. Scattered morpheme or infix An infix is an affix inserted inside a stem (an existing word). Examples in yurok : sepolah ‘field' segepolah ‘fields' se-…-polah scattered morpheme ‘field' - ge- plural infix Exercice 1: Bontoc, Philippines
- fikas ‘strong’ 5. fumikas ‘he is becoming strong'
- kilad ‘red’ 6. kumilad ‘he is becoming red'
- bato ‘rock’ 7. bumato ‘he is becoming rock'
- fusul ‘enemy’ 8. fumusul ‘he is becoming an enemy' a) What are the different morphemes? b) What does pumusi mean if pusi means poor_?_ c) How to say 'white', when 'he is becoming white' is pumukaw? d) How to say ' 'he is becoming dark" when 'dark' is nitad? Exercise 2: English For this exercise, you will need an informant who is a native speaker of English. (“Informant” or “consultant” are terms used by linguists for native speakers of a language.) The informant should not be yourself. The informant’s job, under your instruction, is to construct novel words by the process of expletive infixation. Some examples of expletive infixation are these: fan-fuckin-tastic un-fuckin-believable Ala-fuckin-bama Cali-fuckin-fornia kanga-fuckin-roo
