0-Geertbooij-Prelims 1..14

2 Morphological analysis 2.1 The atoms of words 27 Summary 45 2.2 Morphological operations 34 Questions 45 2.3 Morphological typology 41 Further reading 47 2.1 The atoms of words Words can be chopped into smaller pieces. At the phonological level, words can be divided into syllables or segments, and segments into their constituent phonological features. At the morphological level, words may consist of more than one unit as well, which we may call the morphological atoms of a word: pieces that are no further divisible into morphological subparts. Just as there are diVerent kinds of atom in chemistry, there are diVerent kinds of atom in morphology, and it is quite useful for morphological analysis to be acquainted with their classiWcation. A good classiWcation is an important analytic instrument, developed in order to get a better under- standing of the structure and formation of words. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Polish lexeme kot ‘‘cat’’ has a paradigm of case forms; compare this to the case forms of the noun kobieta ‘‘woman’’ in (1). Each cell of the paradigm of Polish nouns is occupied by a grammatical (1) singular plural nominative kot kobiet-a kot-y kobiet-y genitive kot-a kobiet-y kot-o´w kobiet dative kot-u kobieci-e kot-om kobiet-om accusative kot-a kobiet-e˛ kot-y kobiet-y instrumental kot-em kobiet-a˛ kot-ami kobiet-ami locative koci-e kobieci-e kot-ach kobiet-ach vocative koci-e kobiet-o kot-y kobiet-y 28 what is linguistic morphology? word, i.e. a form of a lexeme with a particular property for the grammatical categories number and case. Grammatical words may share the same word form. For instance, both the gen.sg and the acc.sg form of kot have the form kot-a. The phenomenon that two or more grammatical words have the same word form is called syncretism. The distinction between lexeme, grammatical word, and word form shows that the general notion ‘word’ subsumes a number of diVerent notions. In most cases it is clear which interpretation of ‘word’ is intended, but sometimes it will be necessary to use the more speciWc notions. Each of the word forms of kot consists of a stem and an inXectional ending (or desinence). The stem of a word is the word form minus its inXectional aYxes, in this example kot-. It is the stem that forms the basis for word-formation, not the whole word form. This might not be so clear for the Polish noun kot, because the nom.sg word form kot of this word happens to have no overt ending. However, the noun kobieta does have an overt ending. For that reason, one may speak of a zero-ending for the nom.sg. form of kot, and likewise for the gen.pl form of kobieta. The following example from Italian also illustrates the role of the stem. The singular form of macchina ‘‘machine’’ has the inXectional ending -a, and the plural ending is -e: (2) macchin-a ‘‘machine’’ macchin-e ‘‘machines’’ macchin-ista ‘‘machinist’’ It is the stem macchin- that is used as the basis for word-formation, as shown by macchinista. In English, the form of the stem is identical to that of the sg word form, and this is why English morphology is sometimes qualiWed as word-based morphology, in contrast to the stem-based morphology of, for instance, most Romance and Slavic languages. This is a superWcial diVerence: these languages all have lexeme-based morphology, they only diVer in that the stem-forms of lexemes do not always corres- pond to word forms. Stems can be either simplex or complex. If they are simplex they are called roots. Roots may be turned into stems by the addition of a morpheme, as the following examples from Polish (Szymanek 1989: 87) illustrate: (3) a. butelk-a ‘‘bottle’’ b. butelk-owa-c´ ‘‘to bottle’’ Wltr ‘‘Wlter’’ Wltr-owa-c´ ‘‘to Wlter’’ bial-y ‘‘white’’ biel-i-c´ ‘‘to whiten’’ głuch-y ‘‘deaf’’ głuch-na˛-c´ ‘‘to become deaf ’’ morphological analysis 29 The verbs in (3b) are given here in their citation form, the inWnitive. The citation form is the form in which a word is mentioned when we talk about it, and the form in which it is listed in a dictionary. In many languages, the inWnitive is the citation form of a verb. In languages with case, the nom.sg form is the citation form of nouns. Each of these Polish inWnitives consists of a root, followed by a verbalizing morpheme that turns the root into a stem, and is followed by the inWnitival ending -c´. It is the stem-forms that are used when new words are derived from these verbs. Stem-forming suYxes play an important role in many Indo-European languages. Italian verbs, for instance, have a thematic vowel after the root morpheme, and this thematic vowel recurs in words derived from these verbs: (4) larg-o ‘‘wide’’ al-larg-a-re ‘‘to widen’’ profond-o ‘‘deep’’ ap-profond-i-re ‘‘to deepen’’ al-larg-a-ment-o ‘‘widening’’ ap-profond-i-ment-o ‘‘deepening’’ The thematic vowel is not a part of the root, as it does not occur in the roots larg- and profond-. On the other hand, it cannot be seen as part of the inWnitival suYx, because we do not want to miss the generalization that all inWnitives end in -re. Hence, the vowels preceding the ending -re must be assigned a morphological status of their own. Consequently, the noun allargamento contains Wve morphemes: a preWx al-, a root larg, a thematic vowel -a-, the derivational morpheme -ment, and the inXectional ending -o. So this word has Wve morphological atoms, which cannot be decomposed further into smaller morphological constituents. Each of these Wve atoms has a diVerent name because they have diVerent functions in the make-up of this word. The general term for bound morphemes that are added to roots and stems is aYx. If an aYx appears before the root/stem, it is a preWx, if it appears after the root/stem, it is a suYx.Soal- and ap- are preWxes, whereas -a, -ment, and -o are suYxes. Two other types of aYxation are illustrated in (5): (5) inWx (within a root): Khmu (Laos) s-m-ka:t ‘‘roughen’’ < ska:t ‘‘rough’’; Alabama (Stump 2001: 131) ho-chi-fna ‘‘smell, 2sg’’ < hofna ‘‘to smell’’, chiWp- as-ka ‘‘poke, 2pl’’ < chiWpka ‘‘to poke’’; circumWx (combination of preWx and suYx): Dutch ge-Wets-t ‘‘cycled, past participle’’ < Wets ‘‘to cycle’’; German Ge-sing-e ‘‘singing’’ < sing ‘‘to sing’’ 30 what is linguistic morphology? InWxation and circumWxation are much rarer than preWxation and suYxation. AYxes are bound morphemes, but not all bound morphemes are aYxes. There are many roots from Greek and Latin that are used in so called neo-classical compounds but do not occur as words by themselves. These compounds are called ‘neo-classical’ because they consist of constituents from the classical languages Greek and Latin that were combined into compounds long after these languages ceased to be ‘living languages’. In such compounds either one or both constituents are not lexemes: (6) micro-: micro-scope, micro-phone, micro-gram, micro-wave tele-: tele-phone, tele-vision, tele-communication -graph: di-graph, sono-graph, photo-graph, tele-graph -scope: micro-scope, tele-scope, cine-scope, spectro-scope Neo-classical roots such as scope and graph can also be used nowadays as words, but in that case they have a more speciWc meaning than in these compounds. Such non-lexical roots are called combining forms since they only occur in combination with other morphemes. These bound roots cannot be considered aYxes since that would imply that words such as necrology would consist of aYxes only. This goes against the idea that each word has at least one stem. Thus, we might adapt our deWnition of what compounds are, and deWne them as combinations of lexemes and/or non-aYxal roots. The bound morphemes in neo-classical compounds have an identiWable meaning, but there are also morphemes that have no clear meaning. In the word cranberry the part berry is identiWable, and this makes us interpret the word cranberry as denoting a particular kind of berry. Yet, cran- has no particular meaning. Similarly, the Dutch compound stiefvader ‘‘stepfather’’ denotes a particular kind of father, and hence can be parsed into stief and vader. However, the morpheme stief does not occur as a word. This phenomenon of cranberry morphemes is widespread, and is to be expected since complex words can lexicalize and thus survive, even though one of their constituent morphemes has disappeared from the lexicon. The following examples from Dutch illustrate the same phenomenon for derived words with suYxes that are still used for coining new words (the constituent before the suYx does not occur as a lexeme): (7) arge-loos ‘‘naive’’, beslommer-ing ‘‘chore’’, dier-baar ‘‘dear, precious’’, le-lijk ‘‘ugly’’, moei-zaam ‘‘diYcult’’, sprook-je ‘‘fairy tale’’, veil-ig ‘‘safe’’ morphological analysis 31 These recognizable suYxes determine the syntactic category of the word of which they form a constituent. For example, -baar is a suYx that creates adjectives, and hence dierbaar is predictably an adjective. This implies that when we have to decompose words into morphemes, not all morphemes have an identiWable lexical or grammatical meaning. Cranberry morphemes like English cran- and Dutch dier- thus form a problem for an exclusively meaning-based deWnition of the notion morpheme. This also applies to another kind of non-aYxal bound root, the recurrent constituents of words borrowed from Latin such as the following English verbs: (8) conceive, deceive, perceive, receive adduce, deduce, induce, produce, reduce admit, permit, remit, transmit It makes sense to consider these words complex, because of recurrent elements such as ad-, con-, de-, in-, per-, pro-, re-, and trans- which are preWxes, and bound roots like -ceive,-duce, and -mit.

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