Slide Linguistics Word Structure, Part II

Ling 001, Week 4 Linguistics Word Structure, Part II Outline In looking at morphology we are examining the relationships that words have to one another, and to the morphemes that are assembled into complex structures Two further themes Different kinds of morphology inflection vs derivation What is a word? What can go into a word? We’ll see along the way how languages differ in terms of the distinctions we’ve introduced Conclude with questions about morphology and syntax I Inflection and Derivati.

Word Structure, Part II

• In looking at morphology we are examining the

relationships that words have to one another, and to

the morphemes that are assembled into complex

structures

• Two further themes

– Different kinds of morphology: inflection vs derivation

– What is a word? What can go into a word?

• We’ll see along the way how languages differ in terms

of the distinctions we’ve introduced

• Conclude with questions about morphology and

syntax

I Inflection and Derivation

• Inflection: Creates new forms of the same word in a way that introduces or expresses different grammatical properties, while retaining some core notions of meaning (and category)

• Example:

Play and Played describe the same action, but situate it

differently in time

Inflectional categories

• Languages differ with respect to which categories are

expressed inflectionally on e.g verbs English, for instance,

expresses Person (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd) in a limited

way, as well as tense:

Comparison, cont.

• In the English and Latin comparison, we are talking about the

same abstract categories in some sense: Tense and

Person/Number

• Languages express different notions in verbal marking:

• Classical Greek: Dual as well:

• Lu-ei `he/she/it looses’

• Lue-ton `they-2 loose’

• Luo-usi `they loose’

Another example

• Example 2 : (Some) verbs in Tepetotula Chinantec

differ for whether the object is animate or inanimate:

The verb here is ‘abandon’:

So, if you want to say ‘I abandoned my friend’ versus ‘I

abandoned the house’, you have to use different verb forms

• Languages differ in terms of

– What type of information is expressed in different categories

of words; and

– How many distinct means of marking such differences there

are

• A further point of cross-linguistic difference concerns how much

can fit into a single word, and how we are going to define word

for different languages in the first place (see below)

Inflection, cont.

• Some general properties associated with inflection,

generalizations which hold for the most part:

– Inflection does not change syntactic categories E.g kick-s

is still a verb, even with its inflectional suffix

– Inflection expresses grammatically required features or

relations (e.g agreement, tense, etc.)

– Inflectional morphemes occur outside of derivational (see

below) morphemes: ration-al-iz-ation-s

• As a general way of thinking of this, inflection creates

new forms of the same word; derivation is thought to create a ‘different’ (but related) word

• Some inflectional morphemes in English:

ed (past tense), -s (plural), etc.

• As a basic working definition, derivational morphology

creates new words from existing ones Basic

properties:

– Change of category or part of speech (noun, verb, adjective)

is possible: pay, pay-ment

– New meaning added: e.g re-do means to ‘do again’

– Inflection often has syntactic connections outside of the

word, (e.g agreement relates a subject to a verb) This is

not so if we have e.g kind/unkind; the change doesn’t relate

to anything external

– Sometimes not productive (it sometimes doesn’t attach to

some words) or unpredictable meanings:

• Destroy/destruction; employ/*empluction/employment

• Transmit ‘send’; transmis-sion ‘sending’; ‘car part’

Further aspects of derivation

• Derivation is not necessarily category-changing; sometimes it creates a new word with the same category as the root/stem, but with a different meaning:

king, king-dom star, star-dom

• But nounhood is a property of -dom in this case, as is clear from instances in which it attaches to other categories:

free, free-dom

This is in a sense allomorphy: the form of the nominalizing affix

is something that depends on what host the affix is attached

to (put differently, the different affixes only attach to certain hosts)

Additional Interactions

• Often the distinction between derivation and inflection is used

as a helpful tool, not an absolute distinction

• Consider some additional cases in terms of our criteria above:

Formation of gerunds in -ing:

John destroyed the house

John’s destroying the house (upset me)

Gerunds, cont.

• Formation of the nominalization in -ing is

– General: we can take whatever verbs we think of and form

such nominals

– Shows no allomorphy: all such nominals show -ing

Sometimes there is more than one denominal verb:

1) John’s destroying the city 2) John’s destruction of the city There is a sense in which the second is more ‘nounlike’

than the first

• General point: This type of case meets some of the

criteria for both inflection (regularity, productivity)

and for derivation (category change)

II What’s in a word?

• Recall our division of morphemes along two lines: free vs bound and content vs function:

Content Function

• Languages differ in terms of how they divide up this

cross-classification; many languages have more morphological

(bound) marking than e.g English

– Relatedly, languages differ in terms of what can go in a

‘word’ (we can try to define word below)

I’ll eat the apples later.

I will eat the apples later

I didn’t eat any apples yesterday

I’ll eat the apples later.

Here I’ll is a single phonological word But if we think that this

sentence has the same syntax as I will eat the apples later, this single phonological word is composed of two syntactic words

They treated us in that way

Hupa (California, Athabascan)

‘a:yanohch’ilah

• The Hupa example:

‘a:yanohch’ilah

‘a- ya- noh- ch’i- lah

thus PL 1Pl-Obj 3rdPl-Subj treat

• In this language and many others, what is expressed in English with many free morphemes is expressed in a single

phonological word, with many bound morphemes

‘my father is looking for the cows’

• Here, the meaning of the phrase “look for cows” is expressed in

a single word (they can express it with a separate noun as well)

• This is similar in many ways to what happens in compounding in

English; remember truck driver In English, though we can’t use this as a verb *I truck-drive.

• But, in Mapudungun (and many other languages!) these

strutures are not restricted to nouns; they happen with verbs as well

‘How much’ Morphology

• Languages are often described in terms of whether

they have little (English, Chinese) or rich (e.g Hupa, Latin) morphological systems

• Further distinctions: whether meanings are

“combined” in morphemes, or separated into different morphemes:

– English: from our islands

– Latin: insul-i:s nostr-i:s

island-ABL.PL our-ABL.PL

– Turkish: ada-lar-ImIz-dan

island-PL-OUR-ABL

• What do the examples on the last slide show? At some level of description, languages express the same meanings in different ways, ranging from “more syntactic” (English) to “more

morphological” (Turkish)

• This suggests that there is no sharp dividing line between a

“word system” (morphology) and a system for assembling words into phrases etc (syntax)

• Some more thoughts along these lines…

Morphology and Syntax, cont.

• With morphology we refer to the study of words and their

structure, while with syntax we refer to the structure of larger

objects (phrases, clauses)

• Examples:

– The black board (phrase = syntax)

– The blackboard (2nd part is a word=morphology)

• In some cases, the distinction between these two domains of study is blurred as well

Interactions between syntax and morphology

• Consider how comparatives and superlatives work in

English

– Comparative: tall, tall-er

• In cases of this type, the comparative seems to be a

kind of (inflectional?) morpheme, creating a

comparative adjective from an adjective

• But:

Think of more adjectives

smart, smart-er intelligent, *intelligenter

Note that the comparative of intelligent requires a

phrase:

more intelligent

More examples

phenomenon called do-support

John play-ed football yesterday.

Notice that the (bold-faced) past tense morpheme -ed

appears on the verb play

Now the negative equivalent:

John di-d not play football yesterday.

Here we see past on do, in did, which is the past tense of that verb

The past tense, which appears as part of the word in the first

example, occurs in a different word in the second example

the tense morpheme -ed occupies a different syntactic position

from that occupied by the verb