Morphology

Overview of morphology

• Words and morphemes
• Distinctions: bound and free, inflectional and derivational, content and function, compounding
• Kinds of morphological processes
• Morphological structure
• Allomorphs and paradigms
• Morphophonemics
• Morphological typology
• Productivity and exceptions
• Coinage
• Functions of grammatical morphemes
• Acquisition of morphology
• Morphological change

Some basic concepts

• Units, combinations, and structure:
  formal (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, discourse) and semantic/pragmatic
• Composition and compositionality
• Productivity

Words and morphemes

• Senses of word
• Content (lexical, open class) words
• Function (grammatical, closed class) words
• Morphemes: minimal units of meaning
• Monomorphemic and polymorphemic words
• Identifying morphemes

Some morphological distinctions

• Bound and free morphemes
• Stems, roots, and affixes
• Content and grammatical morphemes
• Derivational morphemes
• Inflectional morphemes
• Compounding

Lexical vs. grammatical meaning

• What's part of the "message" vs. what's obligatory and incidental
• What's inferrable and what's not
• What's obligatory and what's optional
• Lexical and grammatical ways of expressing similar meanings
• Differences in what's oblibatory across languages

Kinds of morphological processes

• Affixation (grammatical morpheme is added to stem)
  • Suffixes
  • Prefixes
  • Infixes
  • Circumfixes
• Deletion (very rare)
• Mutation
• Templates
• Reduplication
• Identity
• Suppletion

Morphological structure

• Tree diagrams and bracketing
• Constraints on the syntactic category an affix attaches to
• Constraints on morpheme order
• Semantic relationships
• Bound morphemes added to phrases

Paradigms, allomorphy, and morphophonemics

• Allomorphs
• Syntagmatic relations: relationships among constituents in a construction
• Paradigmatic relations: relationships among units which appear in the same context
• Morphological paradigms
• Morphophonemic rules

What bound morphology means

• Verbs
• Nouns
• Adjectives

Morphology acquisition

• Acquisition of grammar
• Length of time required for acquisition of morphology depends on language
• Factors affecting rate of acquisition
• Overregularization in morphology and the "U-shaped curve"
• Separate regular and irregular systems vs. a single system

Morphological change

• Grammaticalization
• Simplification of morphology: phonological and analogical motivations
• Morphology responding to neutralization in phonology
• Regularization
• Formation of new words

Morphological typology