LING 650 Class Note Ch.2 by Jiyeon Song & Keunhyung Park 1
Chapter 2 Basic Concepts
(2.1) read read-s read-er read-able read-abil-ity wash wash-es wash-er wash-able write write-s writ-er writ-able
kind kind-ness un-kind happy happi-ness un-happy un-happi-ness friendly friendly-ness un-friendly un-friend-ly un-friend-li-ness
The words in above (2.1) are easily segmented into meaningful parts which are called morphemes.
Morphemes: the smallest meaningful constituents of a linguistic expression (the ultimate elements of morphological analysis: morphological atoms) Free Morpheme Bound Morpheme Content (derivational) dog un- Morpheme to (e.g. to John) -able of (e.g. a house of John) Grammatical (inflectional) to (e.g. want to eat) -s Morpheme of (e.g. donation of money) -ed
Monomorphemic: containing one morpheme
Word: the most basic concept of morphology; whatever corresponds to a contiguous sequence of letters separated by a blank space; a word-form or a lexeme, or less commonly, a word token
live, lives, lived and living LIVE word token dictionary word word-form lexeme concrete sense abstract sense a sequence of sounds [lɪv] not a sequence of sounds
Lexeme: a word in an abstract sense; an abstract concept representing the core meaning shared by a set of closely-related word-forms (e.g. lives, live, lived) that form a paradigm
Lexemes are abstract entities that have no phonological form of their own. The sequence of sounds LIVE [liv] is not the lexeme itself.
Word-form: a word in a concrete sense; a sequence of sounds that express the combination of a LING 650 Class Note Ch.2 by Jiyeon Song & Keunhyung Park 2 lexeme and a set of grammatical meanings; a word-form can be isolated from surrounding elements in speech because it is either prosodically independent (=a free form) or a clitic and not an affix.
Lives is a word-form: live (a lexme) + -s (3SG.PRS) Paradigm: the structured set of word-forms of a lexeme (Often subsets that belong together (e.g. all past-tense forms of a verb) are also referred to as paradigms.)
(2.2) The paradigm of FILOS singular plural nominative fílos fíli accusative fílo fílus genitive fílu fílon
However, it is sometimes not clearly how many word-forms belong to a lexeme.
(2.3) The paradigm of insula ‘island’ singular plural nominative insula Insulae accusative insulam insulās genitive insulae insulārum dative insulae insulīs ablative insulā insulīs
Q. How many word-forms? 10 or 7? A. The paradigm of insula has ten word-forms because then different sets of grammatical functions are expressed.
Word-family: a set of morphologically related lexemes
(2.4) Two English Word families a. READ, READABLE, UNREADABLE, READER, READABILITY, REREAD b. LOGIC, LOGICIAN, LOGICAL, ILLOGICAL, ILLOGICALITY
(2.5) Kinds of morphological relationship Inflection (=inflectional morphology): the relationship between word-forms of a lexeme Derivation (= derivational morphology): the relationship between lexemes of a word family
LING 650 Class Note Ch.2 by Jiyeon Song & Keunhyung Park 3
Figure 2.1 Subdivisions of morphology
2.2 Affixes, bases and roots
Word-forms in an inflectional paradigm = base (root) + affix (suffix, prefix, infix, or circumfix) Bases or stems can be complex themselves. ex) active = act + -ive activity = active + -ity
Affix: morpheme that must attach to a base and cannot occur by itself. Usually a short morpheme with an abstract meaning
Derivational rule Prefix: prefixes change meaning. (e.g. un + tieble) Suffix: suffixes change meaning and part of speech. (e.g. tie + able)
Base: the part of the word that an affix is attached to (A base is also sometimes called a stem, especially if an inflectional (as opposed to derivational) affix attaches to it.)
Table 2.1 Types of affixes LING 650 Class Note Ch.2 by Jiyeon Song & Keunhyung Park 4
Root: a base that cannot be analyzed further – i.e. a base that consists of a single morpheme
Bound stem: a base that is not by itself a word-form and which therefore occurs only in combination with another morpheme
2.3 Morphemes and allomorphs
Morphemes may have different phonological shapes under different circumstances. For example, English plural morpheme –s is pronounced [s] as in cats [kæts], [z] as in dogs [dɒgz], or [-əz] as in faces [feisəz].
Allomorph: (= morpheme alternant): two roots or morphological patterns are allomorphs (of the same abstract morpheme) if they express the same meaning and occur in complementary distribution.
Alternation: the differences in pronunciation between two (or more) phonological allomorphs
Morphophonological rules were historically phonetically motivated, but affect morphology
(2.11) a. Korean accusative suffix (marker of direct object): two allomorphs -ul ton ‘money’ ton-ul ‘money-ACC’ consonant+-ul chayk ‘book’ chayk-ul ‘book-ACC’ -lul tali ‘leg’ tali-lul ‘leg-ACC’ vowel+-lul sakwa ‘apple’ sakwa-lul ‘apple-ACC’
Suppletion: a kind of allomorphy in which two allomorphs of the same morpheme are not similar in pronunciation (subtypes: strong suppletion, weak suppletion) LING 650 Class Note Ch.2 by Jiyeon Song & Keunhyung Park 5
Table 2.2 Types of allomorphy: summary
Conditioning: the environments in which different allomorphs of the same morpheme occur (Section 2.3) (subtypes: phonological conditioning, morphological conditioning, lexical conditioning)
Table 2.3 Types of conditioning: summary