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Linguistics 201, October 22, 2001 Kordula De Kuthy 1 Linguistics 201, October 22, 2001 Kordula De Kuthy 2
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Derivational Morphemes Inflectional Morphemes
Derivational morphemes create new words. They Inflectional morphemes, on the other hand, do not
derive new words from other words. change meanings or parts of speech, but instead
simply make minor grammatical changes necessary for
e.g., unhappy ← un + happy; agreement with other words.
happiness ← happy + ness; preview ← pre + view.
e.g., cats ← cat + s; cooler ← cool + er.
Further properties
• There are only eight inflectional morphemes: -s,
• change part of speech or the meaning of a word -ed, -ing, - en, -s, -’s, -er, -est
(3) a. part of speech: us-able (V → A), trouble-
some (N → A), judg-ment (V → N) • They do not change meaning or part of speech:
b. meaning: dis-comfort, ex-boyfriend cat - cats - cat’s → nouns
c. both: use-less (V → A)
• They are required by the syntax
• are not required by syntax
• They are very productive
• are not very productive: dis-like, *dis-hate
• They occur after derivational morphemes, usually at
• usually occur before inflectional suffixes: work-er-s the very end of the word (in english)
• can be either suffixes or prefixes (in english) • They can only be suffixes (in english)
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In the word cranberry, is cran an affix? Morphemes (bound or free) can be either content or
function morphemes.
No, it is a bound root, a so-called cranberry
morpheme.
• Content morphemes carry some semantic content
Cranberry morphemes are morphemes that occur only as opposed to performing a grammatical function.
as bound roots and that have no constant associated For example car, -able, -un.
meaning.
• Function morphemes act solely to provide
• cranberry, boysenberry grammatical information and syntactic agreement.
and, plural -s
• permit, commit, submit
• Note that these are not simply different names
• receive, perceive, conceive for the derivational/inflectional distinction – D/I
morphemes are all bound, while content/function
morphemes may be free as well (e.g, prepositions
are free function morphemes)
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Pitfalls Of Identifying Morphemes The Hierarchical Structure Of Words
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re- use There are (a very small number of) examples of affixes
which combine with more than one part of speech
• Because trees have a particular order of morphemic (e.g., pre-).
combination associated with them, we can say that
their structure is hierarchical. (9) a. preexist, precede, predetermine (V → V)
b. preseason, prewar (N → A)
• There is a hierarchy among the various morphemes c. prefrontal, predental, prehistoric (A → A)
as to the order in which they were added to the
word. We want to say that all these ”pre-s” are the same
morpheme and not just different morphemes which
• Some words can have multiple structures associated happen to be phonetically identical, since the meaning
with them because of various combinatorial of the prefix does not change, regardless of which part
possibilities for the constituent morphemes. This is of speech it is combined with. The combinations are
usually due to phonetically identical but otherwise nevertheless rulegoverned.
differing morphemes causing some sort of ambiguity,
e.g., unlockable. These are ambiguous in their word
structure.
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Word Formation Processes Word Formation Processes (cont.)
• Reduplication: process of forming new words either
by doubling an entire word (total reduplictation) or
part of a word (partial reduplication).
• Affixation: process of forming words by adding – English: humpty-dumpty, higgledy-piggeldy
affixes to morphemes. (partial reduplication)
– V + -able → A: predict+ -able – Creole: blak “black”, blakblak “very black” (total
– V + -er → N: sing+er reduplication)
– un + A → A: un-productive • Morpheme-internal Changes: a type of word
– A + en → V: deep+ -en, thick+ -en formation process wherein a word changes internally
to indicate grammatical information.
• Compounding: word formation process by which
new words are formed by combining two or more – ablaut: sing, sang, sung; swim, swam, swum
independent words. – other changes: man, men; mouse, mice, goose,
geese
– A + A → A: bittersweet
– N + N → N: rainbow • Suppletion: a relationship between forms of a
– V + V → V: sleepwalk word wherein on form cannot be phonologically or
– P + P → P: without morphologically derived from the other, this process
– V + N → N: pickpocket is rare.
– N + V → V: spoonfeed – am - was; go -went
– P + V → V: overdo – good - better; bad - worse
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• Acronyms: Abbreviations formed by taking the • Back formation: word formation process in which a
initial sounds (letters) of the words of a phrase and new base form is created from an apparently similar
uniting them to form a pronouncable word. form by using proportional analogy.
– laser : light amplification by simulated emission – revise : revision; televise : television
of radiation – actor : act; editor : edit
– scuba: self-contained underwater breathing – create : creation; donate : donation
apparatus
– radar : radio detecting and ranging • Clipping: process of creating new words by
– AIDS : Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome shortening parts of longer words.
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Morphological Types Of Languages Subtypes of synthetic languages
There are two basic morphological types of language There are 3 major subtypes of synthetic languages:
structure: analytic vs synthetic. agglutinating, fusional, polysynthetic.
• (purely) Analytic languages have only free • Agglutinating: morphemes are combined ”loosely”
morphemes – sentences are sequences of single- – morphemes are attached to each other ”cleanly”,
morpheme words. so it is simple to pick out where one morpheme ends
and the next one begins. (e.g., Hungarian, LF – p.
• Synthetic languages make use of both free and 130)
bound morphemes. In general, polymorphemic
words consist of a stem onto which various affixes • Fusional: like agglutinating, but affixes tend to
are added. ”fuse together”, making them difficult or impossible
to separate from each other (and the stem). (e.g.,
Spanish – LF p. 131)
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