READINGS
Crystal
13 Linguistic levels (82-83)
16 Grammar (88-89)
Language Files
5.1 Morphology - the Minimal Units of Meaning
5.2 Exercises in Isolating Morphemes
Note: You will not be responsible for Crystal 15 - Statistical structure of language. pp. 86-87.
HOMEWORK: due in your section meeting, week of September 29.
Language Files:
pp.138-139 - do questions 1-6
p. 142 a-e; j-n; s-w
p. 153 - 1.1 Turkish
p. 155 - 1.6 Cebuano
p. 157 - 2.1 Swahili
LECTURE NOTES
WORDS The basic concepts in any field are often the most difficult to define, and the concept of word is no exception. Crystal enumerates five tests, mentioning that the first-listed ones are the most reliable, and the most universally applicable. "Phonetic boundary" (#4) is only applicable in lucky cases; and the problems with #5, "Semantic units" can be seen by trying to figure out the contribution of on to the sentence Crystal cites to show us how problematic the concept of semantic units is.
1. Potential pause | |
2. Indivisibility | |
3. Minimal free forms (this was Bloomfield's criterion) | |
4. Phonetic boundaries: an example is German Hund (pronounced with a final -t, indicating that it is word-final), vs Bundesbank | |
5. Semantic units: I switched on the light |
Notice that this definition does not say anything about meaning.
This is because a word is not the minimal unit of meaning in linguistic
structure.
The minimal unit of meaning is the morpheme, defined as follows
by Language Files:
"the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical
function."
These definitions may give rise to lots of questions. Two of the most
important ones are:
(1) Are words and morphemes universal in human language?
(2) What is the relationship between words and morphemes?
The answer to (1) is "yes". Although not all languages have exactly the same categories of words, they all have words, and almost all share the major categories words come in. What traditional grammar calls the "parts of speech", linguists call either word classes (Crystal) or lexical categories (Language Files). Crystal gives the following list of eight, for English:
nounLanguages may differ in some details, for example, languages with a basic Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order tend not to have prepositions. Instead, they usually have "postpositions", that come to the right of the nouns an English speaker would think of them as "introducing". In the syntax section of the class (10/8), we will see that verb-final languagesare better thought of as "head-final ", in that many of their constituent structures typically occur to the right rather than to the left as in English. Here is an example of a postposition (-se) in Hindi:
pronoun
verb
adjective
adverb
conjunction
preposition
interjection
Ram cari-se kutte-ko maraAll languages also have morphemes, although the classes they fall into are not quite as constrained as the classes languages use for categorizing words.
Ram stick-with dog hit
"Ram hit the dog with an stick".
MORPHEMES, as minimal units of meaning or of grammatical function, may differ from each other in many respects. Here is an initial list of examples:
carBound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own, e.g. anti-, -tion. The main classes of bound morphemes are the prefixes and suffixes, but infixes are also possible -- an affix which is inserted within a stem.
spider
thank
true
succotash
-ed
un-
Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car, yes.
In a morphologically complex word, i.e., one composed of a free morpheme
and any number of bound affixes, the free morpheme is referred to as the
stem, root, or base.
Now we are ready to answer the second question, dealing with the relationship
between words and morphemes. The best way to explain this
relationship is to break the question down into a series of simpler questions.
Along the way, we will also consider the relationship between morphemes
and syllables.
Can a word = a morpheme?
Yes, all of the following words also consist of one and only one morpheme:
Word (=Morpheme) | Word Class | |
car | noun | |
thank | verb | |
true | adjective | |
succotash | noun | |
gosh | interjection | |
under | preposition | |
she | pronoun | |
so | conjunction | |
often | adverb |
Yes, none of the following morphemes is a word:
Morpheme | Category |
un- | prefix |
dis- | prefix |
-ness | suffix |
-s | suffix |
kempt (?) | bound morpheme |
(un-kemp-t) (?) | |
shevel (?) | bound morpheme |
(dis-shevell-ed) |
Can a word = a syllable?
Yes, all of the following words also consist of one and only one syllable:
Word | Word Class |
car | noun |
work | verb |
in | preposition |
whoops | interjection |
Yes, some of the following morphemes consist of more than one syllable; some of them are less than a syllable:
Morpheme | Word Class |
under | preposition (> syll.) |
spider | noun (> syll.) |
-s | 'plural' (< syll.) |
Yes, many syllables are "less" than morphemes. Just because you can break a word into two or more syllables does not mean it must consist of more than one morpheme!
Word | Syllables | Comments |
kayak | (ka.yak) | neither ka nor yak is a morpheme |
broccoli | (bro.ko.li) or (brok.li) | neither bro nor brok nor ko nor li is a morpheme |
angle | (ang.gle) | neither ang nor gle is a morpheme |
jungle | (jung.gle) | neither jung nor gle is a morpheme |