Morphology (linguistics)
Not to be confused with Morphological typology.
In linguistics, morphology (/
/[1]) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.[2][3] It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words,[4] and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.[5]
While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their innate knowledge of English's rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese ["Mandarin"], however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using, and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Phonological and orthographic modifications between a base word and its origin may be partial to literacy skills. Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand and that the absence of modification between a base word and its origin makes morphologically complex words easier to understand. Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word.[6]
Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. For example, the Chukchi word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən", meaning "I have a fierce headache", is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed. The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while the grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme.
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.[7] Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[8]
The linguistic term "morphology" was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[a][9]
Fundamental concepts
Lexemes and word forms
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning.[10] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals.[11] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts.
Prosodic word vs. morphological word
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'noun-phrase1 and noun-phrase2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[b] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. Unlike most languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[c]
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-​pivot-determiner
bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-​accusative-determiner
q'asa-s-is = otter-​instrumental-3sg-possessive
t'alwagwayu = club
"the man clubbed the otter with his club."
(Notation notes:
That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (pivot-'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma ("man") but to the verb; the markers -χ-a (accusative-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'), etc. In other words, a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:
Inflection vs. word formation
Types of word formation
Main article: Word formation
There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (i.e. non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent, for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of the new word represents a specific word in the representation i.e. NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization, borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and finally coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept.[13]
Paradigms and morphosyntax
A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs and the declensions of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case, organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive).
The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is used. However, no syntactic rule for the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are nouns and the second two are adjectives.
An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation. The relationship between syntax and morphology is called "morphosyntax" and concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, not with word formation or compounding.
Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es) affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
Lexical morphology
Morpheme-based morphology
Morpheme-based morphology tree of the word "independently"
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[d] In words such as dogs, dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called "item-and-arrangement", treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other ("concatenated") like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology, seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches.
Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms:[15]
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian[16] and one Hockettian.[17] For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.[clarification needed] For Hockett, morphemes are "meaning elements", not "form elements". For him, there is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s, -en and -ren. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to "the morpheme plural" and "the morpheme -s" in the same sentence.
Lexeme-based morphology
Word-based morphology
Morphological typology
Main article: Morphological typology
Pingelapese is a Micronesian language spoken on the Pingelap atoll and on two of the eastern Caroline Islands, called the high island of Pohnpei. Similar to other languages, words in Pingelapese can take different forms to add to or even change its meaning. Verbal suffixes are morphemes added at the end of a word to change its form. Prefixes are those that are added at the front. For example, the Pingelapese suffix –kin means ‘with’ or 'at.’ It is added at the end of a verb.
ius = to use → ius-kin = to use with
mwahu = to be good → mwahu-kin = to be good at
sa- is an example of a verbal prefix. It is added to the beginning of a word and means ‘not.’
pwung = to be correct → sa-pwung = to be incorrect
There are also directional suffixes that when added to the root word give the listener a better idea of where the subject is headed. The verb alu means to walk. A directional suffix can be used to give more detail.
-da = ‘up’ → aluh-da = to walk up
-di = ‘down’ → aluh-di = to walk down
-eng = ‘away from speaker and listener’ → aluh-eng = to walk away
Directional suffixes are not limited to motion verbs. When added to non-motion verbs, their meanings are a figurative one. The following table gives some examples of directional suffixes and their possible meanings.[19]
Directional suffixMotion verbNon-motion verb
-daupOnset of a state
-didownAction has been completed
-laaway fromChange has caused the start of a new state
-doatowardsAction continued to a certain point in time
See also
Morphome (linguistics)
  1. ^ Für die lere von der wortform wäle ich das wort « morphologie», nach dem vorgange der naturwißenschaften [...] (Standard High German "Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort „Morphologie“, nach dem Vorgange der Naturwissenschaften [...]", "For the science of word-formation, I choose the term "morphology"...."
  3. ^ Example taken from Foley (1998) using a modified transcription. This phenomenon of Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in van Valin & LaPolla (1997).
  2. ^ Anderson, Stephen R. (n.d.). "Morphology". Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan Reference, Ltd., Yale University. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
  3. ^ Aronoff, Mark; Fudeman, Kirsten (n.d.). "Morphology and Morphological Analysis"(PDF). What is Morphology?. Blackwell Publishing. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
  4. ^ Brown, Dunstan (December 2012) [2010]. "Morphological Typology" (PDF). In Jae Jung Song (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. pp. 487–503. doi​:​10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0023​. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
  5. ^ Sankin, A.A. (1979) [1966]. "I. Introduction"(PDF). In Ginzburg, R.S.; Khidekel, S.S.; Knyazeva, G. Y.; Sankin, A.A. (eds.). A Course in Modern English Lexicology (Revised and Enlarged, Second ed.). Moscow: VYSŠAJA ŠKOLA. p. 7. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
  6. ^ Wilson-Fowler, E.B., & Apel, K. (2015). "Influence of Morphological Awareness on College Students' Literacy Skills: A path Analytic Approach". Journal of Literacy Research. 47 (3): 405–32. doi​:​10.1177/1086296x15619730​. S2CID 142149285.
  7. ^ Beard, Robert (1995). Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology: A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation. Albany: NY: State University of New York Press. pp. 2, 3. ISBN 0-7914-2471-5.
  8. ^ Åkesson 2001.
  9. ^ Schleicher, August (1859). "Zur Morphologie der Sprache". Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg. VII°. I, N.7. St. Petersburg. p. 35.
  10. ^ Haspelmath & Sims 2002, p. 15.
  11. ^ Haspelmath & Sims 2002, p. 16.
  12. ^ Anderson, Stephen R. (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 74, 75.
  13. ^ Plag, Ingo (2003). "Word Formation in English" (PDF). Library of Congress. Cambridge. Retrieved 2016-11-30.
  14. ^ Haspelmath, Martin; Sims, Andrea D. (2002). Understanding Morphology. London: Arnold. ISBN 0-340-76026-5.
  15. ^ Beard 1995.
  16. ^ Bloomfield 1993.
  17. ^ Hockett 1947.
  18. ^ Bybee, Joan L. (1985). Morphology: A Study of the Relation Between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 11, 13.
  19. ^ Hattori, Ryoko (2012). Preverbal Particles in Pingelapese. pp. 31–33.
Further reading
Last edited on 7 May 2021, at 18:11
Privacy policy
Terms of Use
HomeRandomNearbyLog inSettingsDonateAbout WikipediaDisclaimers