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: How is the meaning of a combination of units related to the meanings of the units?
• Productivity: How freely are particular novel combinations of units made?

Words and morphemes

• Senses of word
• Words: native-speaker intuitions, phonological and orthographic clues, stability of internal structure, cohesiveness, completeness; degrees of wordhood
• Content (lexical, open class) words
• Function (grammatical, closed class) words
• Morphemes: minimal units of meaning
• Monomorphemic and polymorphemic words
• Identifying morphemes: straightforward for walked , but what are the morphemes in sang (more on this under "Mutation" here) and how many morphemes are in sheep when it is plural?

Some morphological distinctions

• Bound and free morphemes
• Stems, roots, and affixes
• Content and grammatical morphemes
• Derivational morphemes: changing grammatical category; closeness to root; changing semantics, rather than grammatical function
• Inflectional morphemes: no change of grammatical category; often affixed to stem, which may include derivational affixes; grammatical function
• Compounding

Lexical vs. grammatical meaning

• What's part of the "message" vs. what's obligatory and incidental
• What's inferrable and what's not: speaker encodes lexically portions of message which are "important" and not inferrable but may also encode grammatically portions which are inferrable
• What's obligatory and what's optional: grammatical morphemes are often obligatory whether or not their meaning is inferrable
• Lexical and grammatical ways of expressing similar meanings:
  I wouldn't go out there if I were you. It's mosquito city! (plurality expressed lexically)
  There are mosquitoes out there. (plurality expressed grammatically)
• Differences in what's obligatory across languages:
  
  Japanese does not require any indication of subject or object if these are inferrable from context but in this case requires an indication of formality and gender of the speaker.
  Amharic forces the speaker to refer to gender for any mention of 2nd person.

Kinds of morphological processes

• Affixation (grammatical morpheme is added to stem)
  • Suffixes
  • Prefixes
  • Infixes: s-um-ulat 'to write (subject focus)', s-in-ulat 'to write (direct object focus)' (Tagalog)
  • Circumfixes: ge-mach-t 'made (past participle)' (German)
• Deletion (very rare): lasaplin 'lick (singular)', laslin 'lick (plural)' (Koasati)
• Mutation (some portion of the root is modified)
  
• Templates (grammatical morpheme specifies a phonological template which the root is fit into)
  
• Reduplication (some portion of the root is copied to form the grammatical morpheme): buwaqan 'fruit', waq-buwaqan 'fruits' (Madurese)
• Metathesis (two segments are switched; very rare)
• Identity (two forms of a word are identical): cut, cut; sheep, sheep
• Suppletion (the "addition" of a grammatical morpheme produces a form which is historically unrelated to the root): go --> went

Morphological structure

• Tree diagrams and bracketing
• Constraints on the syntactic category an affix attaches to
• Constraints on morpheme order
• Semantic relationships
• rehaired
  re + V: 'V again', V + ed: 'V in the past'
  [re [hair ed]]: '[hair in the past] again'
  [[re hair] ed]: '[hair again] in the past' (the right analysis)
• monogenism
  mono + N: 'one N', N + ism: 'belief in N'
  [mono [gen ism]]: 'one belief in species'
  [[mono gen] ism]: 'belief in one species' (the right analysis)
• Bound morphemes added to phrases
  • picker up, pick upper, picker upper
  • transformational grammarian
    "bracketing paradoxes": the bound morpheme -ian is apparently affixed to a phrase rather than a stem

Paradigms, allomorphy, and morphophonemics

• Allomorphs: phonologically related and unrelated
  ,
  -en / -ed
  go / went
• Syntagmatic relations: relationships among constituents in a construction
• Paradigmatic relations: relationships among units which appear in the same context
• Morphological paradigms, e.g., conjugations, declensions
• Morphophonemic rules: phonological changes which take place as a result of morphological processes: assimilation, insertion, deletion

What bound morphology means

• Verbs: tense, aspect, mood, polarity, subject agreement, object agreement, voice, other derivation (verbs, nouns, adjectives)
• Nouns: number, case, gender, definiteness, possession, diminutive, augmentative, derivation (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
• Adjectives: number, case, gender, comparison, derivation (nouns, verbs, adverbs)

Morphology acquisition

• Acquisition of grammar: bound morphology and syntax from about the age of 2
• Length of time required for acquisition of morphology depends on language
• Factors affecting rate of acquisition
  • Degree of irregularity
  • Ease of identifiability
  • Semantic/syntactic factors
• Overregularization in morphology and the "U-shaped curve"
• Separate regular and irregular systems vs. a single system

Morphological change

• Grammaticalization
  • Content morpheme to grammatical morpheme, accompanied by semantic bleaching and phonological reduction
    Examples: demonstrative that to complementizer that, lexical go to future marker (becoming gonna), be at/on to marker of progressive (for example, in Dutch)
  • Free grammatical morphemes to clitics to affixes, for example, French subject pronouns
• Morphology responding to neutralization in phonology and the resulting homonymy problem; example: in Mandarin Chinese formerly monomorphemic words became bimorphemic to overcome homonymy
• Simplification of morphology: phonological and analogical motivations
• Regularization and (less often) irregularization
• Formation of new words
  • Back formation
  • Blends
  • Others

Morphological typology

• Isolating (analytic) languages: words are monomorphemic or compounds
• Synthetic languages: some bound morphology
  • Agglutinating languages: affixes attached with relatively clear boundaries and with simple meanings
  • Fusional languages: affixes often "fused" with stem, single affix may convey multiple meanings
  • Polysynthetic languages (may be agglutinating or fusional): words may be composed of more than one stem as well as grammatical morphemes (for example, a single word in Cheyenne can mean 'I truly do not pronounce Cheyenne very well' or 'he moved the water with his foot')