Morphology
1.1
What is Morphology?
The term morphology is generally
attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749–1832), who coined
it early in the nineteenth
century in a biological context. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’,
and morphology is the study of
form or forms. In biology
morphology refers to the study of the form and
structure of organisms, and in
geology it refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms.
In linguistics morphology refers
to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics
that deals with words,
their internal structure, and how they are formed.
1.2
Morphemes
A major way in which morphologists
investigate words, their internal structure,
and how they are formed is through the identification and study of morphemes,
often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces with a gram- matical function. This definition is not meant to include
all morphemes, but it is the usual one and
a good starting point. A morpheme may consist
of a word, such as hand, or a meaningful
piece of a word, such as the -ed of
looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Another way in which morphemes have been defined
is as a pairing between sound and meaning.
We have purposely chosen not to use this
definition. Some morphemes have no concrete form or no continuous form, as we will
see, and some do not have meanings in the conventional sense of the term.
You
may also run across the
term morph. The term ‘morph’ is some- times
used to refer specifically
to the phonological
realization of a
morpheme. For example, the English past tense morpheme
that we spell
-ed
has
various morphs. It is realized as [t] after
the voiceless [p] of jump (cf.
jumped ), as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled ), and
as [@d] after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d]
of wed (cf. rooted and wedded).
We can also call these morphs allomorphs
or variants. The appearance of one morph over another in this case is
determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem.
Now consider
the word reconsideration. We can break it into
three morphemes: re-, consider,
and -ation. Consider is called
the stem. A stem is a base morpheme to which another morphological piece is attached. The stem
can be simple, made up of only one part, or complex, itself made up
of more than one piece. Here it is best to consider consider a simple
stem. Although it consists historically of more than one
part, most present-day speakers would treat it as an unanalyzable
form. We could also call consider the root. A root is like a stem
in constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach,
but the
term refers only to
morphologically simple units. For example, disagree is the stem of disagreement,
because it is the base to which -ment
attaches, but agree is the root. Taking disagree now, agree is both the stem to which dis- attaches and the root of the entire word.
Returning
now to reconsideration, re- and -ation are both affixes, which means that they are attached to the stem. Affixes
like re- that go before the stem are prefixes, and those
like -ation that go after are suffixes.
Some readers may wonder why
we have
not broken -ation down further into two pieces, -ate and -ion,
which
function independently elsewhere.
In this particular word they do not do so (cf.
*reconsiderate), and hence we treat -ation as a single morpheme.
It is important to take very
seriously the idea that
the grammatical function of a morpheme, which may include
its meaning, must be con- stant. Consider the English words lovely and quickly. They both end with
the suffix -ly. But is it the same in both words? No – when we add -ly to the adjective quick, we create
an adverb that describes how fast someone does something. But
when we add -ly to the noun
love, we create an
adjective. What on the surface
appears to be a single morpheme turns out to be two. One attaches
to adjectives and creates adverbs; the
other attaches to nouns and creates
adjectives.
There are two
other sorts of
affixes that you will
encounter, infixes and circumfixes. Both are classic challenges to the notion of morpheme.
Infixes are segmental strings that do not
attach to the front or back of a word, but rather somewhere in the middle.
The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below ( McCarthy and Prince 1993: 101–5; French 1988).
It creates an agent from a verb
stem and appears
before the first vowel of
the word:
(1)
Root -um-
/sulat/ /s-um-ulat/ ‘one who wrote’
/gradwet/ /gr-um-adwet/
‘one who graduated’
The existence of infixes challenges the traditional notion of a morpheme
as an indivisible unit. We want to call the stem sulat ‘write’ a morpheme,
and yet the infix -um- breaks it up.
Yet this seems to be a property of -um- rather than one of sulat.
Our definition of morphemes as the smallest
linguistic pieces with a grammatical function survives this challenge.
Circumfixes are affixes that
come in two parts. One
attaches to the front of the word, and the other to the back. Circumfixes are controver- sial because
it is possible to analyze them as consisting
of a prefix and a suffix that apply
to a stem simultaneously. One example is Indonesian ke . . . -an.
It applies to the stem
besar ‘ big’ to form
a noun ke-besar-an meaning ‘ bigness, greatness’ ( MacDonald 1976: 63; Beard 1998: 62).
Like infixes, the existence
of circumfixes challenges the traditional notion of morpheme ( but not the
definition used here) because
they involve discontinuity.
We
will not go any more deeply
here into classical problems with morphemes, but the reader who would like to know more might
consult Anderson (1992: 51– 6).
1.3
Morphology in Action
We would like to explore the idea
of morphology more deeply
by examining some data. These
are examples of
morphology in action – morphological facts of everyday life.
1.3.1 Novel
words and word play
If you had been
walking down the street in
Ithaca, New York,
a few years ago, you might have looked up
and seen a sign for the music store “Rebop,” a name that owes
its inspiration to the jazz term rebop.1 Rebop was originally one
of the many nonsense expressions that jazz musicians threw into their vocal
improvisations, starting in the early 1920s.
In the
1940s, rebop became interchangeable with bebop, a term of similar origin, as the
term for the rhythmically and harmonically eccentric
music played by young black musicians.
By the 1950s the name of this musical style
was quite firmly established
as simply bop.2 Today, the original use of rebop is known only
to cognoscenti, so that most
people who pass by the store
will be likely
to interpret the word as composed of
the word bop and the prefix re-,
which means approximately ‘again’. This prefix can attach only to
verbs, so we must interpret bop as a verb here. Rebop must therefore
mean ‘ bop again’,
if it means
anything at all. And this music
store, appropriately, specialized in selling used CDs.
There’s something going on here
with English morphology. Of course, rebop is not a perfectly well-formed English word. The verb bop means something like ‘bounce’, but the
prefix re- normally attaches only to a verb
whose meaning denotes an accomplishment.
The verb rebop there- fore makes little
sense. But names of stores and products
are designed to catch the
consumer’s attention, not necessarily to make sense,
and this
one does so by exploiting people’s
knowledge of English in a fairly complex
way and breaking the rules so as to attract attention, as verbal art often does.
Consider now the following phrases, taken from a Toni
Braxton song:
Unbreak my heart, uncry these tears.
We have never seen anyone unbreak something, and you certainly can’t uncry tears, but every
English speaker can understand these words. We all know what
it
means to unbreak somebody’s heart
or to wish
that one’s heart were unbroken.
If we asked somebody, “unbreak my heart,”
we would be asking them
to reverse the process of having our heart broken. We can visualize “uncry these tears,”
too – we just think of a film running backwards. We can understand these
words because we know the meaning of un-, which basically
reverses or undoes an action. The fact that these particular
actions, breaking a heart and crying
tears, can- not be reversed only adds poignancy to the song.
All human beings have this capacity for generating and understanding novel words. Sometimes someone will create an
entirely new word, as J. R. R. Tolkien did when
he coined the now-familiar term hobbit (which, despite its popularity, is
still not listed in the 2000
edition of the Amer- ican Heritage Dictionary).
But more often than not,
we
build new words from pre-existing pieces, as with unbreak and uncry. We could easily go
on to create more words on this pattern.
Novel words are all around
us. Jerry Seinfeld has talked
about the shushers, the shushees, and the unshushables
in a movie theater. Morley Safer was dubbed quirkologist – expert on quirky
people – on a special episode of 60 Minutes.
For those who hate buffets, the TV character
Frasier Crane came up with
the term smorgsaphobia.
Finally, the longest novel morphologically complex word we have
been able to find on our own in the daily press is
deinstitutionalization, from the New
York Times.
These are everyday morphological facts, the
kind you run across every day as a literate speaker of English. What these
words – rebop, unbreak, uncry,
hobbit, quirkologist, smorgsaphobia, and deinstitutionalization – have in common is their newness. When we see or hear them, they
leap out at us, for the simple
reason that we have
probably never seen or
heard them before. It
is interesting that novel words
do this to us, because novel sentences do
not. When you hear
a new sentence, you generally don’t realize that this is the first time that you’ve heard it. And you don’t say to yourself, “ What a remarkable sentence,” unless it happens to be one from Proust or Joyce or some other verbal
artist. Many people
have made the observation before that morphology differs from
syntax in this way.
1.3.2 Abstract
morphological facts
Now let’s move to some more abstract morphological facts. These are the kind
of morphological facts that you don’t notice
every day. They are so embedded in your language that you don’t even think about them.
They are more common than the ones we have just looked at, but at the same time deeper and more complex.
If you
speak English and are
concerned about your health, you might
say:
(2)
I eat one melon a day.
Let’s imagine that we are even more
concerned about our health
than you are. We don’t just eat one melon a day, rather:
(3)
We eat two melons a day.
It is a fact about standard
American or British English that we
cannot say:
(4)
*We eat two melon a
day.
However, if we were speaking
Indonesian or Japanese, we would say the
equivalent of two melon (three melon, four melon, etc.)
because these languages don’t use morphological
plurals in sentences like this.
(5)
Indonesian:
Saya makan dua buah semangka
(se) tiap hari
I eat
two fruit melon every
day
‘I eat two melons every day.’
Japanese:
mainichi futatsu-no meron-o tabemasu every.day two- gen
melon-obj eat.imperf
‘I eat two melons every day.’
The morphological grammar of English tells us
that we have
to put an -s on melon whenever we are
talking about more than
one. This fact of English is so transparent
that native speakers don’t notice it.
If we happen to be speakers of a language without obligatory plural marking, however,
we will notice it because we are going to have a lot of trouble with it.
We have now observed something about English
morphology. If a word is plural, it takes the suffix
-s. Living creatures don’t eat only
melons, however:
(6)
The evil giant at the top of the beanstalk eats two melons, three
fish, and four children
a day.
Everyone agrees that fish is plural, but there is no plural marker. Children is also plural,
but it has a very unusual plural suffix, -ren, plus an internal change: we say [TIld-] instead of [Tajld]. In other
words, it’s not always the case that we mark plural words with an s-like thing; there are
other ways in which we can mark plurals.
Native speakers of English know this, and they
do not need
to think about it before
making a plural.
Consider the following:
(7)
Today they claim
that they will
fix the clock tower by Friday, but yesterday they claimed that it would take at least a month.
In this example,
we use two different
forms of the verb claim.
One is present tense, and the
other is
past. Again, this is not true
for all languages. If we were speaking
Vietnamese, for example, we wouldn’t make
any distinction between claim and claimed – we wouldn’t mark the verb at
all. If we were speaking Chinese, we would
not distinguish between claim and
claimed in a sentence
like this, because the adverb zuótian ‘yesterday ’ is sufficient
to indicate past tense:
(8)
jintian tamen shuo tamen xingqi
wä ké yà xiu hÜo
zhonglóu, today they say they Friday can fix well clock.tower ká shì zuótian tamen què shuo zhì shÜo xu yào yíge yuè
but yesterday
they however say at least
need a month
‘Today they claim
that they will
fix the clock tower by Friday, but yesterday they claimed that it would take at least a month.’
If we
were to leave out zuótian
‘yesterday’, we would need to use the
particle le after the verb to
show that the action
took place in
the past. In other words,
whether or not a speaker must indicate past tense in
Chinese depends on context.
Notice what happens
in English when we use some
other verbs be-
sides claim:
(9)
Today they say
. . . but yesterday they said . . . tell us told us know knew
That these verbs
and others do not add
-t, -d, or -@d to make their past
tense is an elementary fact about English morphology. We’ll talk more about verbs like
these later in the chapter. The next observation about English morphology has to do
with pro- nouns. The following is a real exchange between an American mother and her 6-year-old
son:
(10)
Who just threw a pool ball through the basement window? Not me.
In this context, the 6-year-old (who was indeed guilty) would never have responded Not I. But if he were to answer with a sentence, the response would be I didn’t, not Me
didn’t. In that
case, the object
form of the pronoun
would be ungrammatical. Without formally knowing anything at all about subjects and objects, English-speaking 6-year-olds (and children even
younger) master the pronoun system of their language.
Given the following sentence, how many children
does Joan have?
(11)
All of Joan’s children are brilliant and play musical
instruments surpassingly well.
From this statement you cannot know
how many children
Joan has, but one thing is certain: she has
more than two.
If Joan
had only two chil-
dren, we
would normally say both of Joan’s
children, because it is a fact about English that there
is a morphological distinction among universal
quantifiers between the one designating all of two (both) or all of more than two (all
) of a particular type of entity. In some
other languages, marking for dual is even more
pervasive. This is the case in
Ancient Greek, as shown by the following examples:
(12)
ho stratiô:tes lambánei tous híppous the.nom.sg soldier.nom.sg take.3sg the.acc.pl horses.acc.pl
‘The soldier takes the
horses.’
to: stratió:ta lambáneton tous híppous the.nom.du soldier.nom.du
take.du the.acc.pl horses.acc.pl
‘The two soldiers take the horses.’
hoi stratiô:tai
lambánousi tous híppous the.m.pl soldier.pl
take.3pl the.acc.pl horses.acc.pl
‘The soldiers (three or more) take the
horses.’
While English does not
have special affixes to mark the
dual, it keeps track of the distinction through words
like all and both. There are
actually languages in the world like Manam (Papua New Guinea: Gregersen 1976) and Larike (Central
Maluku, Indonesia: Laidig and Laidig 1990)
that distinguish not only singular, dual,
and plural, but trial as
well. The use of singular, dual, trial, and
plural second person subject prefixes in Larike is illustrated below:
(13)
Ai- rala iter- lawa pe?a- o ?2sg.sub-
chop.down 1pl.incl.sub- garden finish- qm
‘Did you (sg.) finish clearing our garden?’
Kalu au- ?anu, irua musti iruai- ?anu
si?u. if 1sg.sub- eat 2du certainly 2du.sub-
eat also
‘If I eat, certainly you both will
eat too.’
Kalu
iridu-ta- ?eu, au- na- wela.if
2tri.sub- neg- go1sg.sub-irr- go.home
‘If you three don’t
want to go, I’m going home.’
Memang iri- hise tapi imi-
ta- ?ari?i- truly 3pl.nonhum- exist but
2pl.sub-neg- see-ri.3pl.nonhum.obj
‘They really do exist, but you (plural)
didn’t see them.’
1.4 Background and Beliefs
In this text is a general introduction to morphology and morphological analysis from
the point of
view of a
morphologist. The purpose
is not to advocate any particular theory or to give the truth (whatever
that is), but rather to get
you, the reader, to
where you can look
for it by yourself. Still, it is
inevitable that some of our
remarks will be colored by our
own beliefs and
background. We would therefore
like to
pre- sent some of
our foundational beliefs about linguistics and linguistic methodology.
First,
we believe that
languages differ from one another.
You might be thinking, “Of course
they do!” But we mean this in a
very special way. Some linguists
are always looking for ways that
languages are similar, and at times, we do that, too. But we believe
that if you focus only on the similarities between languages, you miss
out on all of the exciting ways in which
they differ. What’s more, you may find parallels and similarities where
none really exist.
We try to approach linguistic
analysis with as open a mind as possible, and to do this, it is first necessary to
appreciate the uniqueness and diversity
of the world’s languages.
Our
second foundational belief is that
languages, which we can write with a small
l, are different from Language, with
a capital L. There are thousands
of individual languages in the world. But we may also speak of language in general to
mean the general phenomenon of Language that encompasses all individual
languages. This Language is related to
Noam Chomsky’s notion of Universal Grammar, which posits
that languages are all alike in basic
ways. There is an
important distinction between these
two uses of the word language and
each is equally import- ant to linguistics. Individual languages
have features that are not charac-
teristic of Language in general. For
example, one feature of
English is that its regular way of forming plural nouns is to add /z/. We would never claim, however, that this is universally true, or that
it is a property of Language. To tie
this belief in
with the preceding one, we
strongly believe that morphological theory and morphological analysis must be grounded in morphological description. If
we want
to appreciate what morphology really is, it’s best to have some idea of
what the morphology of individual
languages is like. At the same time, we must
have a reason- ably well-thought-out general theory of the morphology of
Language, so that we can compare
our descriptions of individual languages
within a wider context. In short,
linguists need to pay
equal attention to both small-l
language and capital-L Language.
Our
next belief is that
morphology is a distinct
component of lan- guages or grammars. If you are
not already familiar with some
of the controversy surrounding
morphology, this needs an
explanation. The fact that
some languages, such as
Vietnamese, do not have
morpholo- gically complex words has led some people to conclude that
morphology should not be a separate branch of linguistics. The reasoning is
that lin- guistics is generally understood
to deal with properties of all languages
– more precisely, Language with a capital
L. If there are languages that don’t have
morphology, then morphology is
not a property of all lan- guages,
and morphological phenomena should be
treated in syntax or phonology.
We disagree. It has been shown elsewhere (e.g., Aronoff 1994) that
there are aspects of morphology that cannot
be attributed to syntax or phonology, or anything else.
One piece of evidence that morphology is
separate from syntax, phono- logy, and
other branches of linguistics is
that words in some languages are
grouped into largely arbitrary classes that
determine their forms in different environments. Latin nouns fall into five
distinct classes, called declensions,
which have little or nothing to do with
syntax or phonology, and certainly cannot be explained by either.
They are purely morpho- logical in their
significance. The uniquely morphological nature of these classes is truly
brought home by the fact that
Latin nouns also fall into syntactic agreement classes (usually
called genders) and the two systems cross-cut
one another: two nouns may belong to
the same gender but to different declensions and vice
versa. We’ll examine cases like these
in later chapters, but their mere
existence in many
languages shows that morphology must be
given some independent status in linguistics. Of course, morphology, probably more than any other component
of lan- guage, interacts with all the rest, but it still has properties of its own.
We also believe
that morphologies are systems. This is a very old
observation. Because of it, it is impossible
to talk about isolated facts in a language – everything holds together. This belief together
with the second one, above, are the reasons why we’ll be looking carefully at the morphology of
a particular language, Kujamaat Jóola, throughout
this book. Considering the morphology of
Kujamaat Jóola in close to
its entirety will give us a valuable perspective
that we would never gain if
we only focused on isolated facts from several languages.
So far, we have given you our beliefs about the nature of language and morphology. We also
have some that pertain to methodology. The first is that we should take an attitude
of skeptical realism. Albert Einstein
said that a physicist must be both a realist and a nominalist,
a realist in the sense that you
must believe that what
you ultimately find will be
real, but a nominalist in the sense
that you must
never believe that you’ve
found what you’re looking for. Martin Joos made a
similar statement about linguistics. On the one hand, you should always
believe that what you are looking for is God’s truth, but on
the other, you should consider all that you have found so far as hocus-pocus. We believe strongly in the value of having a linguistic theory, but we believe equally strongly that you should never trust it
completely.
Our other methodological
belief can be summed up as a motto: Any- thing goes. This methodological
belief is associated with the Against
Method of Paul Feyerabend, a twentieth-century
philosopher who felt that if we insisted
on a single rule of
scientific methodology, one that would not inhibit
progress, it would be “Anything goes.” We take
a no-holds-barred approach to linguistics. We’ll use any tool
or method that will tell
us how language works. This attitude
stems in part from our skepticism about particular theories. People who are wedded to indi- vidual theories tend to believe
in using tools that
are rooted in that theory. Our tools are not theory-based in that way. If
a tool does the job, we are happy
to use it, whether it is a traditional linguistic tool
(e.g., native speaker consultants, dictionaries, written grammars),
an experi- mental tool (e.g., imaging technology),
or a statistical tool.
source: morphology and morphological analysis,page1-11,Mark aronoff and Kirsten fudman