Linguistics week 12 Morphology 2 We looked at

Linguistics week 12

• Morphology 2

We looked at

• Words, word-forms and lexemes
• She’s a good cook, but I can cook better
• Function words and content words

Two kinds of words

• Function words
• Restricted in number
• A closed class
• Have a grammatical function
• Usually just one morpheme (a grammatical morpheme)
• Content words
• An open class
• New content words often come into use in every language
• Which words on this slide …? Chinese examples?

You think English is hard?

• Ha! When I was at school I had to do Latin
• See if you can find out what this is:
• amo amamus
• amas amatis
• amat amant
• Or this
• dominus domini
• domine domini
• dominum dominos
• domini dominorum
• domino dominis
• domino dominis

They were Latin inflections

• The two lists each show the different word-forms, for a Latin noun or verb
• dominus is the nominative (subject form)
• domine is the vocative form (Oh Master!)
• dominum is the accusative (object form)
• domini is the genitive (the master’s, of the master)
• domino is the dative (to or for the master)
• domino is the ablative (in some words, this is different from the dative) (by, with or from the master)
• English has a genitive form. What is it?
• Does Chinese have one?
• In some lexemes, English attests nominative, accusative and genitive forms
• What are these lexemes?

Inflectional morphology

• In English, inflection includes things like
• Number
• Tense
• Fromkin 101 gives a complete list
• Although she doesn’t explain that -s and -es (for example) are two realizations (two allomorphs!) of the same morpheme
• Also on p101: does the Italian verb inflection list seem familiar?
• BUT inflection does NOT allow for making a new lexeme
• so sleepy is not an inflection of sleep
• unkind is not an inflection of kind
• artistic is not an inflection of artist (which is not an inflection of art (Inflection and derivation task)

Inflectional vs derivational morphology

• Inflection does not change the word class (syntactic category, part-of-speech, 詞類)
• Derivation may or may not change word class
• Derivation makes a new lexeme
• create  creative
• Inflection just changes the grammatical ending of the original lexeme
• create  creates
• Inflection is productive
• You can add –s to any verb, to make it plural
• Derivation is not necessarily productive
• You cannot always add un- to an adjective, or -ive to a verb

Roots and affixes

• Unbelievable contains
• One free morpheme
• A root and two affixes
• One prefix and one suffix
• In English, there are derivational prefixes and suffixes
• There are no inflectional prefixes
• Suffixes are more common in the world’s languages
• But Thai has only prefixes – no suffixes
• Fromkin 78: plural in the Zapotec language is relized by a prefix, not a suffix

Infixes

• In Tagalog
• sulat = write
• sumulat = wrote
• sinulat = was written
• What is the root morpheme here?
• What are the affixes?
• Fromkin describes a kind of infix used in English
• I don’t want to go to uni-bloody-versity
• Is there any infixing in Mandarin, do you think?

Reduplication

• Afrikaans
• dik = ‘thick’; dikdik = ‘very thick’
• Motu (Papua New Guinea)
• mero = boy; memero = boys
• meromero = little boy
• How do you say ‘little boys’ in this language?
• And – you guessed it – what uses does reduplication have in Mandarin?

Hierarchical structure of words (Fromkin 84)

• unbelievable and unsystematic have only one structural analysis each:
• believe 相信 + -able 可相信 + un- 不可相信
• Unlockable, Fromkin shows on 85-6, is morphologically ambiguous
• It can be understood in two ways
• Try to understand why, by looking at the trees

Reading and exercises

• 69 to 74 (or further if you like)
• Ex 2, 3, 4, 5A, 6
• You will probably enjoy these!
• You might like to take a look at my master’s thesis
• It contains a short section on reduplication in Chinese
• It has some ideas about compounding (for next week)
• You will get an idea of the structure of a Western-style essay: study, especially, the way the references and bibliography work