Introduction to linguistics

Morphology
 Morphology
In many languages, what appear to be single
forms actually turn out to contain a large number
of “word-like” elements.
For example, in Swahili, the form nitakupenda
conveys what would have to be represented as
something like I will love you:
ni- ta- ku- penda
“I will you love”
Morphology concerned itself with the study of
words in terms of their structure and content.
What we have been describing as “elements” in
the form of a linguistic message are technically
known as “morphemes.”
 Morphemes
 “Word forms” may consist of a number of elements.
 The English word forms talks, talker, talked and talking must
consist of one element talk, and a number of other elements
such as -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these elements are described as
morphemes.
 The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or
grammatical function.”
 Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past
tense or plural, for example.
 The word reopened consists of 3 morphemes:
 One minimal unit of meaning is open,
 another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning “again”)
 and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating
past tense).
 The word tourists also contains 3 morphemes:
 There is one minimal unit of meaning tour,
 another minimal unit of meaning -ist (marking “person who
does something”),
 and a minimal unit of grammatical function -s (indicating
plural).
 Free and bound morphemes
 Free morphemes can stand by themselves as single words (open
and tour).
 Bound morphemes cannot normally stand alone and are
typically attached to another form (re-, -ist, -ed, -s (affixes)).
 The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of
separate English word forms such as basic nouns, adjectives,
verbs, etc. When they are used with bound morphemes attached,
the basic word forms are technically known as stems. For example:

 Some stems in English are not free morphemes:

 receive, reduce and repeat consist of the bound morpheme
re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce and -peat
are not separate word forms and hence can’t be free morphemes
 These types of forms are sometimes described as “bound
stems” to keep them distinct from “free stems” such as dress
and care.
Lexical and functional morphemes
 Free morphemes fall into two categories.
 1. Ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs that we think
of as the words that carry the “content” of the
messages we convey.
These free morphemes are called lexical
morphemes (girl, house, tiger, sad, yellow, sincere,
open, look,).
We can add new lexical morphemes to the
language rather easily, so they are treated as an
“open” class of words.
 2. Functional morphemes refer to words in the
language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles
and pronouns (and, but, when, because, on, near,
above, in, the, that, it, them)
Because we almost never add new functional
morphemes to the language, they are described as a
“closed” class of words.
 Derivational and inflectional morphemes
 Bound morphemes can also be divided into 2 types.
 1. Derivational morphemes are used to make new
words or to make words of a different grammatical
category from the stem:
The addition of the derivational morpheme -ness
changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.
The addition of -ful or -less changes the noun care
to the adjectives careful or careless.
 2. Inflectional morphemes are not used to produce
new words in the language, but rather to indicate
aspects of the grammatical function of a word.
Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word
is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and
if it is a comparative or possessive form.
 Derivational and inflectional morphemes
 English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or “inflections”):
 Jim’s two sisters are really different.
 One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
 The other liked to read as a child and has always taken things
seriously. One is the loudest person in the house and the other is
quieter than a mouse.
 In the first sentence, both inflections (-’s, -s) are attached to nouns,
one marking possessive and the other marking plural.
 There are four inflections attached to verbs: -s (3rd person
singular), -ing (present participle), -ed (past tense) and -en (past
participle).
 There are two inflections attached to adjectives: -er (comparative)
and -est (superlative).
 N.B. In English, all inflections are suffixes.
 There is some variation in the form of these inflectional
morphemes. For example, the possessive sometimes appears as -
s’ (those boys’ bags) and the past participle as -ed (they have
finished).
 Morphological description
 An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical
category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives.
 However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical
category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher .
 So, the suffix -er can be an inflectional morpheme as part of an
adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun.
 Whenever there is a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix
attached to the same word, they always appear in that order. First
the derivational (-er) is attached to teach, then the inflectional (-s) is
added to produce teachers.
 For example, in the sentence The child’s wildness shocked the
teachers, we can identify eleven morphemes.
 Problems in morphological description
 The inflectional morpheme -s is added to cat and we get the plural cats.
 What is the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of
sheep, or men the plural of man? And if -al is the derivational suffix
added to the stem institution to give us institutional, then can we take
-al off the word legal to get the stem leg? Unfortunately, the answer is
“No.”
 For example, the relationship between law and legal is a reflection of
the historical influence of different languages on English word forms.
 The modern form law is a result of a borrowing into Old English
(lagu) from a Scandinavian source over 1,000 years ago.
 The modern word legal was borrowed about 500 years later from the
Latin form legalis (“of the law”).
 Consequently, there is no derivational relationship between the noun
law and the adjective legal in English, nor between the noun mouth
(from Old English) and the adjective oral (a Latin borrowing).
 An extremely large number of English words owe their morphological
patterning to languages like Latin and Greek. Consequently, a full
description of English morphology will have to take account of both
historical influences and the effect of borrowed elements.
 Morphs and allomorphs
 Morphs are treated as the actual forms used to realize morphemes.
 For example, the form cats consists of two morphs, cat +-s, realizing a lexical
morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”). The form buses also consists of
two morphs (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme
(“plural”).
 So, there are at least two different morphs (-s and-es, actually /s/ and /əz/) used to
realize the inflectional morpheme “plural.”
 It is well noted that there are allomorphs of a particular morpheme. That is, when we
find a group of different morphs, all versions of one morpheme, we can use the prefix
allo- (= one of a closely related set) and describe them as allomorphs of that
morpheme.
 Take the morpheme “plural.” Note that it can be attached to a number of lexical
morphemes to produce structures like “cat + plural,” “bus + plural,” “sheep + plural,”
and “man + plural.”
 In each of these examples, the actual forms of the morphs that result from the
morpheme “plural” are different. Yet, they are all allomorphs of the one
morpheme.
 So, in addition to /s/ and /əz /, another allomorph of “plural” in English seems to be a
zero-morph because the plural form of sheep is actually “sheep + ø.”
 When we look at “man + plural,” we have a vowel change in the word (æ → ɛ) as the
morph that produces the “irregular” plural form men.
 There are other morphological processes, such as those involved in the range of
allomorphs for the morpheme “past tense.” These include the common pattern in
“walk + past tense” that produces walked and also the special pattern that takes “go +
past tense” and produces the “irregular” past form went.
 Other languages
 When we look at the morphology of other languages, we can find
other forms and patterns realizing the basic types of morphemes we
have identified. The first example below is from English and the
second from a language called Aztec (from Central America). In
both cases, we attach a derivational morpheme to a stem, then add an
inflectional morpheme.

 Kanuri (spoken in Nigeria):

 From this set, we can propose that the prefix nəm- is a derivational
morpheme that can be used to derive nouns from adjectives.
Discovering a regular morphological feature of this type will enable
us to make certain predictions when we encounter other forms in the
language. For example, if the Kanuri word for “length” is
nəmkurugu, then we can be reasonably sure that “long” is kurugu.
 Other languages
 Ganda (spoken in Uganda):

 From this small sample, we can observe that there is an inflectional prefix
omu- used with singular nouns, and a different inflectional prefix aba- used
with the plural of those nouns. If you are told that abalenzi is a Ganda plural,
meaning “boys,” you should be able to work out the singular form meaning
“boy.” It is, of course, omulenzi.
 Ilocano (spoken in the Philippines): In these examples, there
seems to be repetition of the
first part of the singular form.
When the first part is bi- in
the singular, the plural begins
with this form repeated bibi-.
The process involved here is technically known as reduplication (= “repeating
all or part of a form”). There are many languages that use this repetition device
as a means of inflectional marking. Having seen how plurals differ from
singular forms in Ilocano, you should be able to take this plural form talta´lon
(“fields”) and work out what the singular (“field”) would be. If you follow the
observed pattern, you should get ta´lon.
 Other languages
 Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines):

 If we assume that the first form in each column can be treated as a

stem, then it appears that, in the second item in each column, an
element -um- has been inserted after the first consonant, or more
precisely, after the syllable onset. It is an example of an infix
(described in chapter 5). In the third example in each column, note
that the change in form involves, in each case, a repetition of the
first syllable. So, the marking of future reference in Tagalog appears
to be accomplished via reduplication. Using this information, you
should be able to complete these examples:

 In the second column, with an infix, you’ll have lumakad and lumapit,
while in the third column, with reduplication, you’ll have lalakad and
lalapit.
Thank you