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MORFOSINTASSI E LESSICO INGLESE
Per accedere all’oxford english dicionary:
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- scrivere OED (oxford english dictionary)
- German : we are referencing a given ethic group, a group of people speaking German language
- Germanic : a fast amount of language which are not spoken in Germany, but in a variety of countries outside (Britain, Netherlands). The language spoken is a Germanic language. We are talking about a family of languages (we have others such as Romance languages). Originally shared commons features. English is a Germanic language, originally shared lots of features.
- Analytic : specific auxiliary and function words. - Synthetic : languages such as German, Italian, which express main grammatical structures by synthetic rules. English used to be synthetic, but now it’s more analytic. - Derivational : adjectives or nouns that can derivate (book-bookshop) - Inflectional: the form in terms of number (sing/plur), case (genitive, nominative), verb (past tense, present tense). WHAT KIND OF LANGUAGE IS PDE (present English)? LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATION
- Typologically :
- we are describing languages according to the features they share
- We are not making references to language history
- Focus on: morphology, syntax and lexis
- Synesthetic language : those languages that combine multiple concepts into one word. Grammatical and syntactic relationships through inflections and affixes. Ex. present German is more synthetic that present English. Present English is less synthetical than present Italian - Analytic language: analyse a concept into separate words. Grammatical and syntactic relationships through word order and function words. Little or no inflection.
Present English is more analytic than synthetic. In English we can have an example of synthetic adjective: clear-clearer-clearest, and an example of analytical adjective: effective-more effective-the most effective. Even if Modern English is more analytic than synthetic we can have examples that show the analytical nature of the language, as it was when it was born, the most of their inflection has been lost. English used to be an highly synthetic language Old English had:
. Case: nominative, genitive, accusative, dative. -->nouns: genitive (synthetic/analytic-periphrasis) accusative (WO) dative+other ins.cases (analytic-periphrasis) -->pronouns Genitive: pronouns are inflected for the genitive, by means of inflection (whose) Accusative: for relative pronoun is synthetic Dative: by means of periphrasis, they are so introduced by a preposition followed by the inflected form of the relative pronoun -->adjectives: It’s lost, they are not inflected . Number: singular, plural, dual only for 1 st and 2 nd person plural pronouns (we both, both of us) -->pronouns/nouns: Singular or plural For pronouns (pl. pers.): dual . Gender (grammatical): was only grammatical, had nothing to do with the real gender in the real word. We had feminine, masculine and neuter. (boy is masculine, girl is feminine, but if we think about singer it could be both masculine and feminine). -->pers pronouns: only the 3 rd pers. Singular (we have three genders: he, she, it, they are used by the gender that the thing they describe has in the real world) Present English words receive the gender that the thing has in the real world.
- verbs : OE we had a well developed system of strong and weak verbs. . strong: root vowel alternation for tense (now irregular verbs). Suddivisione in base all’alternanza delle vocali (7 classi di verbi forti) . weak: dental suffix for past tense (now regular verbs). Only 4 groups, verbs derived from strong verbs, but the strong verb indicated the state, while the weak indicates the action, they had a causative meaning. They were only inflected by adding a dental suffix. In PDE: irregular VS regular verbs.
- East
- West These languages have some basic features and other features that they share with only other Germanic languages. There’s a base group with basic features and other small groups. COMMON FEATURES OF PDE AND OTHER GERMANIC LANGUAGES :
- Regular sound correspondences and other phonetic evidence
- Grammatical (and morphological) evidence
- Basic vocabulary (it’s the least reliable feature of all, because many words have entered thanks to the borrowing) REGULAR SOUND CORRESPONDENCE (according to the Grimm’s law):
- I-umlaut (i-mutation): internal vowel modification caused by -i in following syllable Ex. foot/feet Mouse/mice
- World stress fixed on root (radice)/first syllable-->syllables following the root always unstressed and weak --->loss of inflectional endings (all the vocalic endings) apart from the -s in the plural number. (l’inglese aveva l’accento sulla prima sillaba, le altre erano deboli, questo ha portato ad una perdita delle sillabe atone, soprattutto di quelle che avevano le desinenze flessive, la desinenza aveva perso importanza e sonorità, così queste sillabe sono andate a scomparire, per questo molte parole e verbi non hanno più la desinenza. Cadendo le flessioni cade la loro funzione, così si perde la flessione in tutte le parti, così come il genere, che passa dall’essere grammaticale ad essere un genere naturale.) GRAMMATICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE:
- Strong verbs and weak forms
- Past tense of weak verbs: dental suffix
- Comparative and superlative degree of adj/advs
- Flexibility and resourcefulness of vocabulary: in OL much more than in PDE, new words were created starting from original words by means of: . compounding: putting two or more words together . derivation: by means of prefixes and suffixes English coined new words by words that were part of its vocabulary and by adding other words or suffixes/prefixes. LEXICAL CORRESPONDENCE There are correspondences between Germanic languages even in lexicon. LAYERS IN THE LEXIS OF LANGUAGES PDE is classified as a hybrid language: its vocabulary is a melting pot of the varieties of languages, we can distinguish:
- Native layer (anglosaxon, those words that get back to English as a Germanic language)
- Foreign layer (borrowing)
- Word formation (can combine the first two, ex. skyline=sky non è una parola inglese, presa a prestito dal germanico settentrionale + line: parola che è un prestito latino, è un composto che consiste di due parole, due prestiti.)
- Phonoymbolism Even though English was originally a Germanic language, in terms of its vocabulary, from being a purely Germanic language, it has become a hybrid language=much of his vocabulary is the result of the borrowing from other languages. Borrowing is the result of language contact. The vocabulary of Present English consists of a variety of words witch have different origins. A high proportion of words in PE have always been in the language, not been borrowed by other languages: anglo-saxon layer , because they were created by the Germanic origin, or because they have been coined using native Anglo-Saxon words : basic vocabulary of the language (the vocabulary used everyday, non technical, non academic): These words represent very ordinary common notions. FOREIGN LAYER:
- Celtic languages , Celtic survives in some words, example.
- Latin influence: when English isles were Christianized, they are words that regard religious or military aspect. Ex the word “Chester”-->from castrum (fortificazione). -->these words came in touch directly with English. Some words entered from the evangelization opera. . A second way of latin words entered the language by the mediation of French, after the Norman conquest.-->these words came into English not directly. . A third way entered the language during the renaissance.
Sets of 2/3 words that share more or less the same meaning but come from different languages, they came into English in different stages and from different languages. words from:
- Anglo-saxon/Germanic (low register)
- French/latin (high register=used in more formal contexts) Guts and courage share the same meaning, but their origin is different, guts is from a lower register than courage Climb/rise, mount, ascend: 1)salire/scalare, 2)can be the physical movement, but also the mountain itself, 3)now only used in her figurative meaning, not in the physical movement In conclusion we can see that all these words have more or less the same meaning, but the words coming from Latin of French are of a higher register, while words that have a anglo-saxon origin are from a lower register. Originally all these words were synonyms, but later on they got some differences in their meaning. !!!A PATTERN OBSERVED WIDELY IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES: A loan-word synonym of an indigenous expression typically develops some semantic difference from the native word. THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY: Once a word enters the dictionary, it never leaves the dictionary, it’s like a biography of the English language, even if the word is no more used, it remains in the dictionary.
THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS
1. WORD FORMATION (WF):
it is a set of processes that enables speakers to coin new words from existing ones (from words which are already part of the lexicon: native words or borrowed ones). What qualifies as a word?:
- Protrude
- Protrudes
- Protruding
- Protruded -->there are four different lexical items, but how many words? What do these words have in common?: they are all verbs. They distinguish from each other because they are different inflected form of the same verb, which is protrude. As a result the verb takes different inflectional endings, that show tense, person, aspect… There are four different words, this notion correspond of WORD FORM. There is only one word, and the other are inflections, this notion correspond of LEXEME , which, in this case is “protrude”. What changes is the grammatical meaning, but the lexical meaning is the same in all inflections. Basically the meaning is the same, they do not bring about any new meaning. --->in conclusion word formation is the process of production new words from other lexemes that are already existing, every new lexeme introduces a new concept, but we don’t coin new words into the vocabulary. --->the number of word forms that we can create from a lexeme is limited. Word formation: processes for coinage of new lexemes form existing ones.
All these are LEXICAL INNOVATION. Only by means of word formation processes we can extend the vocabulary of the language. Column 2: We have here word forms of the lexemes in column 1 Column 3: How the relationship is reflected?
- The relationship is reflected in a shared form, they all end in -ly.
- Their relationship is also reflected in a shared word class, grammatical category, they’re all adjectives.
- They are also sharing a meaning characteristic, “in the same manner as…” Assembly Belly Early Lily Silly
- They all share the formal feature with the lexeme in column 3
- But this likeliness is not shared in meaning, we cannot paraphrase them in the same way we do with words in column 3.
- If we leave the suffix -ly we don’t get the original lexeme as we can do with words in column 3, but we just get nonsense words.
- -->even though they share structural relationship with words in column 3, the relation is only in phonological and orthographic relatedness, they do not share a morphological relationship. Column 4: How is the relationship reflected?
- It is reflected in a shared form, by adding -ness from the lexemes in column 3 and by adding -li-+-ness from the lexemes in column 1
- It is also reflected in a shared meaning. Shopkeeper Party-goer Singer Higher -->do they exhibit some relationships?
- The first 3 all nouns
- The first two are compound lexemes
- They all have the same suffix (-er)
- From a semantic point of view this likeliness is not reflected also in a shared meaning. In the first 3 -er is used to reference the person who does the action represented by the verb, but in the care of higher -er is simply a suffix that signals that the adj is in the comparative degree. Stretcher Cooker Spreader Tooth-picker Hammer Corner -->are these lexemes related to each other from?
- They all end in -er
- Grammatical point of view: -er does not perform the same function in all these words. In the ones on the right -er is part of the word, cannot be separated, it’s part of the original lexeme. In the words of the left -er references to the object/tool that is used to perform the action referred by the verb (cooker: the tool used to cook, spreader: the tool used to spread something over something else, for ex. the knife used to spread butter on bread).
LEZIONE 5-
ST MARCH 2022 DUAL SUFFIXES : suffixes which are on the border between inflection and derivation, i.e. suffixes which have both a derivational as well as an inflectional function. There are suffixes that are only inflectional: ex. EST-->this is not a dual use suffix, but just an inflectional suffix. -->when a suffix is only or inflectional or derivational is not DUAL, but it’s dual only when it’s both derivational, both inflectional. MORPH : can’t be subdivided into its constituent element. Definition: “a morph is the smallest unit of analysis in morphology”. When we talk about a morph we talk about the internal structure of a lexeme. When you can divide a lexeme into elements, each element is called “morph”. FREE MORPH : morph that can stand on its own in the language. BOUND MORPH : cannot stay on its own as independent lexical units within the language. -->this distinction particularly applies to languages such as English, and languages which are poor in their inflectional morphology. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ROOTS AND AFFIXES : relies on the meaning they have
- ROOTS : the original input lexeme, the original morph of a complex lexeme. Its meaning conveys the core meaning of the lexeme. (parliamentarian has to do with parliament) all the morphs in green type it can’t be subdivided Most roots are free morphs in PDE
- AFFIXES : are all bound morphs, they can either precede the root ( prefixes ), but also follow the root ( suffixes ). They are all bound morphs. A further distinction has to be made between derivational affixes and inflectional ones: . DERIVATIONAL SUFFIXES: can either be prefixes of suffixes. . INFLECTIONAL SUFFIXES: they are more properly called “ ENDINGS ” (desinenze)
-->derivational:
- Can either be prefixes or suffixes
- Optionally more than one per word (unfriendly, dismissal)
- Attach to a limited number of free morphs: -ment: can’t be attached to all words which turn into nouns, -cation: only attached to a limited number of noun
- They have to function: 1)convert one part of speech to another (V>N, A>N: freedom…) 2)change the meaning of original word
- Always Precede the inflectional suffix (ex. consumables) -->inflectional suffixes:
- Only suffixes (endings)
- Only one per word (cars: “s” stands for plural)
- Attach to all members of a word class: -s can be attached to many words in order to make the singular person of a verb or a plural noun
- Have one function:
- indicate grammatical meaning (plural, number, tense, aspect, degree)
- Follow derivational suffix (consumables) ORDER OF MORHPS: Which is the criteria? We have to add the first derivational morph thinking about if with what we add we get a lexeme that actually refers to an existing lexeme of PDE vocabulary. Ex. the order of morphs in DE-FOREST-ATION is: forest + 1)de-, 2)-ation FUNCTION WORDS : include prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs: for, at, in, and, do/did, have/has/had, be/was/were/been -->they are free morphs, because they can stand on their own, their sounds combined form an independent element. They are all independent lexical units in
PRODUCTIVE INFLECTIONAL ENDINGS OF MODERN ENGLISH:
Those endings that are not on this list are non-productive inflectional endings , they indicate how language worked in past times, they are traces of how the language was before HOW MANY MORPHS CAN THERE BE? We can have a limit of 6 derivational morphs in a complex lexeme, from a minimum of 1, which is the root. MORPHS CAN REALIZE:
- Lexical information (meaning)>lexical morpheme-->the case of roots and derivational affixes
- Grammatical information>grammatical morpheme-->inflectional suffixes In morphology each piece of information that a morph creates is called MORPHEME. Only on the base of the distinction between morphs and morphemes we can realize what kind of language English is in term of language typology. GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES: A Closet set Grammatical categories motivated by grammar/syntax
- Number (countalbe nouns, demonstratives, personal/reflexive pronuns, 3 rd person..)
- Case
- person
- tense
- aspect
- mood
- voice
- definiteness degree
LEXICAL MORPHEMES:
There’s no limit in lexical morphemes. -->it’s the same thing that happens with morphs, but applied to morphemes Morphemes can be grammatical (function word, inflectional affix) or lexical (content word, derivational affix). There are some grammars that don’t make a distinction between morphs and morphemes, but this is absolutely wrong. It’s on the base of the distinction between morphs and morphemes that we can understand to which typology a language refers and from which language typology PDE belongs. MORPHS: the concrete units in which a word is divided MORHEME: what is realized by a morph, the info that a morph realizes. Morphs and morphemes can combine together in different ways. LEZIONE 6 - 28 TH MARCH 2022 On the basis of the distinction between morpheme and morph we distinguish languages in terms of the type the embody in language typology: synthetic or analytic languages. On criteria used to describe languages is by looking at the way morphs and morphemes combine. In English also have examples of word forms that don’t reflect a one-to-one correspondence between morphs and morphemes. How can morphemes combine or be realized in English?--> morphological and morphemic analysis (they have specific realization rules):
- into morphs following formal or structural divisions
- into morphemes, identifying abstract units of meaning present
- verbs in a past tense: . worked : two morphs: 1)work: root, 2)ed: ending. The root realize the action of working, while the ending realize the grammatical information of past tense/past participle of the verb. There are two morphemes in the word: work (verb) and worked (grammatical information). There is a one-to-one relationship as in dogs. The grammatical notion of past tense is a phonetic and orthographical information . caught : one morph, 2 morphemes: 1)to catch, 2)the morpheme of past tense/past participle. . cut : one morph, 2 morphemes: 1)cut, 2)past tense. The morpheme that realized past tense is there but doesn’t have an orthographic, phonetic realization it is said to be realized by a zero morph. Four morphological realization rules:
- agglutinative rule : two morphemes are realized by morphs which remain distinct and are simply “glued” together, e.g. {writer} + {pl} > writers One to one relationship morph-morpheme: each morpheme is realized by different morphs. Since one morph realize one morphemes, this morphs glute together . cows: two morphs, two morphemes. (cow: animal, s: plural number) . slower: two morphs, two morphemes (slow: quality, er: comparative) . taller: two morphs, two morphemes -->this shows the synthetic nature of English language
- fusion(al) rule : two morphemes are realized by morphs which do not remain distinct but are fused together, e.g. {tooth} + {pl} > teeth one morph, two morpheme. Each morpheme is not realized by a distinct morph. Morphemes are realized by morphemes that are “fused” together within the same morph. . we: one morph, three morphemes (first person, plural number, nominative case) . him: one morphs, four morphemes (third person, singular number, accusative/dative case, masculine gender) . its: one morph, four morphemes (third person, singular number, genitive case, common/neutral gender)
- zero rule : a morpheme is realized as a zero morph in particular members of a word class, e.g. {sheep} + {pl} > sheep. Note that in most other members of the class noun, {pl} has concrete realization as - s. the symbol used to show the zero rule is ⌀ morphemes of past tense and past participle: work: work#ed-work#ed-->aggkutinative rule sing: sang-sung-->fusional rule
cut: cut-cut-->where can we see the morph representing the past tense and the past participle? (as in fish-fish regarding the alternation between singular and plural): this is the rule known as zero rule -->nel fare una rappresentazione in morfi del plurale di fish dovremmo fare: fish+⌀
- null realization rule : a morpheme is never realized as a morph in any word of the relevant class, e.g. {sg} on nouns, which never has concrete realization in English. She caught a taxi to the station yesterday (lei prese il taxi per andare alla stazione ieri) Caught: one morph, what about the morph that realize the morpheme of the person, or number? Person and number are these morphemes ever realized as morphs in English verb teses? NO: they are never realized as person A morpheme is never realized as a morph in any word of the relevant class. The same applied to: . possessive on adj . singular on nouns . present tense on verbs (apart from the 3 rd person singular) . past tense on verbs (apart from to be) EXCEPTION! Sometimes two more morphological rules can be applied: Men’s: two morphs (man+s), but three morphemes: man + plural + possessive--
FUSIONAL+AGGLUTINATIVE rule. ALLOPHONES : different phonetic realization (different pronouncing) of the same morpheme. ALLOMORPHS : each variant morph of the same morpheme. the same morpheme can be realized by several different morphs. Ex. the morpheme of the plural can be realized in several ways
- adding an s
- changing the vowels: ex. foot-feet
- zero morph ex. the morpheme of past tense can be realized in several ways:
- adding ed (the only productive morph that realizes the morpheme of the past tense)
- sing-sang-sung: changing the root vowel
- zero morph -->these are all variant morphs of the same morpheme (variant di morfi che realizzano lo stesso morfema).
