Morphology. Word formation rule

1.

MORPHOLOGY
WORD FORMATION RULE

2.

MORPHEME
• Linguists define a morpheme as the smallest
unit of language that has its own meaning.

3.

WORD
A word can be defined as one or more
morphemes that can stand alone in a
language.

4.

• We each have a mental lexicon, a sort of
internalized dictionary that contains an
enormous number of words that we can
produce, or at least understand when we
hear them. But we also have a set of word
formation rules which allows us to create
new words and understand new words when
we encounter them.

5.

• Each person’s mental lexicon is sure to contain
things that are different from other people’s
mental lexicons. One person may know lots of
words for types of birds or flowers, another
might know all the specialized vocabulary of
sailing, and so on. But our individual mental
lexicons overlap enough that we speak the
same language.

6.

• Psycholinguists estimate that the average
English-speaking six-year-old knows 10,000
words, and the average high-school graduate
around 60,000 words.
• Psycholinguists calculate that between the
ages of one and 18 we would have to learn
approximately ten words every day to have a
vocabulary of 60,000 words.

7.

The organization of the mental lexicon: storage versus
rules.
• The mental lexicon is not organized
alphabetically like a dictionary. Rather, it is a
complex web composed of stored items
(morphemes, words, idiomatic phrases) that
may be related to each other by the sounds that
form them and by their meanings. Along with
these stored items we also have rules that
allow us to combine morphemes in different
ways.

8.

• It is the rules of word formation that we know
that most distinguish our mental lexicon from
the dictionary. The dictionary does not need
to list all the words that we know or that we
could create, because once we know word
formation rules we can produce and
understand potentially infinite numbers of
new words from the morphemes available to
us.

9.

Affixation
• Prefixes and suffixes usually have special
requirements for the sorts of bases they can
attach to. Some of these requirements
concern the phonology (sounds) of their
bases, and others concern the semantics
(meaning) of their bases, but the most basic
requirements are often the syntactic part of
speech or category of their bases.

10.

• The prefix un- attaches to adjectives (where it
means ‘not’) and to verbs (where it means
‘reverse action’), but not to nouns:
• a. un- on adjectives: unhappy, uncommon,
unkind, unserious
b. un- on verbs: untie, untwist, undress,
unsnap
c. un- on nouns: *unchair, *unidea,
*ungiraffe

11.

• The suffix -ness attaches to adjectives, as the
examples in (a) show, but not to verbs or nouns
(b–c):
• a. -ness on adjectives: redness, happiness,
wholeness, commonness,
• niceness
• b. -ness on nouns: *chairness, *ideaness,
*giraffeness
• c. -ness on verbs: *runness, *wiggleness,
*yawnness

12.

• Challenge
• Look at the following words and try to work out
more details of the rule for un- in English. The (a)
list contains some adjectives to which negative
un- can be attached and others which seem
impossible. The (b) list contains some verbs to
which un- can attach and others which seem
impossible. See if you can discern some patterns:
• (a) unhappy, *unsad, unlovely, *unugly,
unintelligent, *unstupid
• (b) untie, unwind, unhinge, unknot, *undance,
*unyawn, *unexplode, *unpush

13.

• The negative prefix un- in English prefers to
attach to bases that do not themselves have
negative connotations. This is not true all of
the time – adjective like unselfish is attested in
English – but it’s at least a significant
tendency.
• The un- that attaches to verbs prefers verbal
bases that imply some sort of result, and
moreover that the result is not permanent.

14.

• A word formation rule:
a rule which makes explicit all the categorial,
semantic, and phonological information that native
speakers know about the kind of base that an affix
attaches to and about the kind of word it creates.
• The full word formation rules for negative un-:
rule for negative un- (final version): un- attaches to
adjectives,
preferably those with neutral or
positive connotations, and creates negative
adjectives. It has no phonological restrictions.

15.

Word structure
• When you divide up a complex word into its
morphemes, it’s easy to get the impression that
words are put together like the beads that make
up a necklace – one after the other in a line:
Unhappiness = un+happy+ness
But morphologists believe that words are more like
onions than like necklaces: onions are made up of
layers from innermost to outermost.

16.

• Challenge
• In English, the suffix -ize attaches to nouns or
adjectives to form verbs. The suffix -ation attaches to
verbs to form nouns. And the suffix -al attaches to
nouns to form adjectives. Interestingly, these suffixes
can be attached in a recursive fashion: convene →
convention → conventional → conventionalize →
conventionalization.
See if you can find other bases on which you can attach
these suffixes recursively. What is the most complex
word you can create from a single base that still
makes sense to you? Are there any limits to the
complexity of words derived in this way?

17.

• Languages frequently have affixes that fall into
common semantic categories. Among those
categories are:
• personal affixes: These are affixes that create
‘people nouns’ either from verbs or from
nouns. Among the personal affixes in English
are the suffix -er which forms agent nouns
(the ‘doer’ of the action) like writer or runner
and the suffix -ee which forms patient nouns
(the person the action is done to).

18.

• negative and privative (ˈprɪvətɪv) affixes:
Negative affixes add the meaning ‘not’ to their
base; examples in English are the prefixes un-,
in- and non- (unhappy, inattentive, nonfunctional). Privative affixes mean something
like ‘without X’; in English, the suffix -less
(shoeless, hopeless) is a privative suffix, and
the prefix de- has a privative flavor as well (for
example, words like debug or debone mean
something like ‘cause to be without
bugs/bones’).

19.

• prepositional
and
relational
affixes:
Prepositional and relational affixes often
convey notions of space and/or time.
Examples in English might be prefixes like
over- and out- (overfill, overcoat, outrun,
outhouse).

20.

• quantitative affixes: These are affixes that
have something to do with amount. In English
we have affixes like -ful (handful, helpful) and
multi- (multifaceted). Another example might
be the prefix re- that means ‘repeated’ action
(reread), which we can consider quantitative if
we conceive of a repeated action as being
done more than once.

21.

• evaluative affixes: Evaluative affixes consist of
diminutives (dɪˈmɪnjʊtɪv), affixes that signal a
smaller version of the base (for example in
English -let as in booklet or droplet) and
augmentatives (ɔːɡˈmɛntətɪv), affixes that
signal a bigger version of the base. The closest
we come to augmentative affixes in English
are prefixes like mega- (megastore, megabite).

22.

• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/bri
tish-grammar/word-formation/prefixes
• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/bri
tish-grammar/word-formation/suffixes

23.

• Infixation in English
English doesn’t have any productive processes of infixation, but
there’s one marginal process that comes close. In colloquial
spoken English, we will often take our favorite taboo word or
expletive – in American English fucking, goddam, or frigging,
in British English bloody – and insert it into a base word:
• fan-bloody-tastic
• Ala-friggin’-bama
This kind of infixation is used to emphasize a word, to make it
stronger.
What’s particularly interesting is that we can’t insert fuckin just
anywhere in a word. In other words, there are phonological
restrictions.
(CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY)

24.

INFLECTION
• Morphology can be divided into two domains:
inflectional and derivational word formation.
• Inflection:
word formation process that
expresses a grammatical distinction.
• Inflection refers to word formation that does
not change category and does not create new
lexemes, but rather changes the form of
lexemes so that they fit into different
grammatical contexts.

25.

• Inflection in English

26.

• English has only a tiny bit of case marking on
nouns: it uses the morpheme -s
(orthographically -’s in the singular, -s’ in the
plural) to signal possession.
Nouns
singular non-possessive mother child
singular possessive mother’s child’s
plural non-possessive mothers children
plural possessive mothers’ childrens’

27.

• In verbs, number is only marked in the third person
present tense, where -s signals a singular subject.
English verbs inflect for past tense, but not for future,
and there are two participles (present with -ing and
past with -ed) that together with auxiliary verbs help
to signal various aspectual distinctions:
Verbs
3rd person sg. present walks, runs
all other present tense forms walk, run
past tense walked, ran
progressive (be) walking, running
past participle (have) walked, run

28.

Why English has so little inflection?

29.

• There are probably two reasons. The first one
has to do with the stress system of English: in
Old English, unlike modern English, stress was
typically on the first syllable of the word. Ends
of words were less prominent, and therefore
tended to be pronounced less distinctly than
beginnings of words, so inflectional suffixes
tended not to be emphasized. Over time this
led to a weakening of the inflectional system.

30.

• Some scholars attribute the loss of inflection
to language contact in the northern parts of
Britain. For some centuries during the Old
English period, northern parts of Britain were
occupied by the Danes, who were speakers of
Old Norse. Old Norse is closely related to Old
English. The actual inflectional endings,
however, were different, although the two
languages shared a fair number of lexical
stems.

31.

Analogy
• Sometimes new complex words are derived
without an existing word formation rule, but
formed on the basis of a single (or very few)
model words. For example, earwitness
‘someone who has heard a crime being
commited’ was coined on the basis of
eyewitness, cheeseburger on the basis of
hamburger, and air-sick on the basis of seasick. The process by which these words came
into being is called analogy.

32.

• Rochelle Lieber “Introducing Morphology”
(Cambridge Introductions to Language and
Linguistics), 2009.
• Geert Booij “The Grammar of Words. An
Introduction to Linguistic Morphology “
(OXFORD TEXTBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS), 2005.