Introduction to Linguistics - Lecture 7

Lecture Seven, 28 of Novemer 2007

The structure of words - Morphology


1. Introduction
2. Learner's Diary
3. Tasks and Quizzes
4. Evaluation
5. References


1. Introduction

Topic of today the structure of words, the hierarchy of words which includes simple and complex words and again morphemes and allomorphs.


2. Learner's Diary


Definition of word

Function - a word is the smallest meaning bearing part of a sentence.
External structure - a word is the smallest indivisible part of a sentence.
Internal structure - a word is a stem with an inflection.
Rendering - consists of orthography and phonology.


Revision of internal structure of a word

A root is the smallest kind of a stem.

An inflection. Affixes + prefixes or suffixes. It binds words to the context and has a grammatical meaning, means it relates a word to its syntactic or semantic context.

A circumfix, e.g ge-schafft, a prefix and a suffix which are related to each other.

A stem represents the category itself, but also affects the category of the following word, it has lexical meaning.

Inflections

German inflections: Nominativ, Genitiv, Dativ, Akkusativ. In English only the nomination (he/she) and the oblique (him/her). In German a verb can often be a noun and nouns have a number case and a gender, English nouns have only a number case. Verbs have a number case, aspect, tense and a passive.

Example sentence

The car should have been being repaired today

should = tense; auxiliary (modal verb)
have = indicator for the perfect (aspect)
been = past participle of to be
being = passive
repaired = main verb

Transformation of the sentence to show that the English language has got only two tenses: present and past. There is no future suffix, the future is not a real tense.

The car d+should have en+be + ing+be ed+repair today



Three kinds of parts of words

1. Morphology

- Inflection (stem + affx)
- Word-Formation

2. Derivation

3. Compounding change the meaning and the part of speech from a noun e.g. to an adjective.



Morphemes and allomorphs

Morphemes

are the smallest meaningful part of words.
- lexical morphemes: open set can be free or bound
- grammatical morphemes: closed set can be free or bound.


Allomorphs

are special kinds of morphemes.

The plural morpheme in English, usually written with "s" at the end has at least three allomorphs:

- [iz]: after sibilants (s, z, tz): horses
- [z]: after voiced phonemes (vowels, voiced consonants) dogs,
- [s]: elsewhere (voiceless consonants) cats


Inflexions of English words

suffixes (person, number, case)

in other languages
prefixes
suffixes
circumfixes
superfixes


In English, the word stem in general corresponds to the word form with singular inflection.

simplex word stems (roots and lexical morphemes)

complex word stems
- derivations (a stem and a derivational affix)
- compounds ( a stem plus another stem)
- both synthetic compounds ( a derivation plus a stem)

- endocentric: honeypot
- bicentric: whisky-soda
- exocentric: red-head


Stem

is a root (simplest case)
is a stem plus an affix (complex case)

Example beautiful

stem = root = beauty
stem = stem + affix = beauty + ful
stem = stem + affix = beauty + ful + ly



3. Tasks and Quizzes


Define

Morpheme

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words.

Lexical morpheme

Lexical morphemes or content morphemes are the main components of words, they are also called roots. There is an open set of them.

Grammatical morpheme

Grammatical morphemes are structural morphemes. There are free ones: prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs and there are bound ones affixes and suffixes in inflection and word formation. There is a limited number of these as it takes a very long time for new grammatical morphemes to develop.

Stem

A stem (or base) is either a root (lexical morpheme) or a derived stem i.e. stem + affix (derivation) or a compound stem i.e. stem + stem (compounding) and nothing else is a stem.

Derived stem

A derived stem is either a root (zero derivation) or a stem plus an affix. Nothing else is a derived stem.

Compound stem

A compound stem is a derived stem or a word plus a derived stem or a word or a compound stem plus a compound stem. Nothing else is a compound stem.


What is the difference between inflection and derivation?

Inflection and word formation? Inflections do not change the basic meaning of a word, they only have grammatical meanings and they are used to put words into context and produce for example subject-verb-agreements or : he walks/ she walked/ we walk (the action stays the same only the time at which this action takes place and the number of people who do it change).

What is the difference between derivation and compounding?

In derivation you only use one stem and add an affix to create a new word, in compounding you put together two or more stems to create a new word. Synthetic compounds are a combination of both namely derivation plus a stem. There is also blending where you create new stems (blend two different words to create a new simple word).

Collect 5 longish words and divide them into morphemes

misplaced mis-place-d
biannually bi-annu-al-ly
antisocialism anto-social-ism
disagreement dis-agree-ment
surrealism sur-real-ism

show construction of a word from their stems as tree diagrammes

4. Evaluation


Morphology is a very interesting topic and a revision helps to understand all the technical terms. Sometimes it is difficult to understand everything, it flows into each other.


5. References


http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2007WS/ITL/index.html