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Academic Year :2014/2015
Department :English Language and Literature
Filire
:Master Culture and Linguistics
Semester
: 1, MODULE 3
Course
: MORPHOLOGY
MOR
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Faculty Of Letters
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MORPHOLOGY
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An Introduction
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utterance , proposition, and
sentence
1. You are intelligent.
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
a complete thought;
Physical,
can be heard,
recorded,
fed into a computer, etc.,
. Utterance:
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utterance , proposition, and
sentence
Different utterances = different
propositions;
A proposition :
that aspect of the meaning of a
sentence which allows us to say,
"Yes, that's true" or 'No, that's
false".
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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utterance , proposition, and
sentence
A sentence :
an abstraction over utterances which have the
same form;
Part of our shared knowledge of language;
allows us to construct sentences, which we can then
utter
are internal, mental entities, which have an abstract
form.
imagine (1) uttered by more than three people: its
the same sentence;
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Prof. AFKINICH
Morphology: Introduction
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utterance , proposition, and
sentence
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
2) Tu es intelligent (French)
3) nta mttawar (MA)
(2) and (3) below form the same
proposition with (1)
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utterance , proposition, and
Asentence
proposition:
a state of affairs that holds in the world,
and
The correspondence of the world with
that state of affairs allows us to attribute
truth or falsity to the proposition.
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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Dictionary Definition
Morphology: a study of the structure
or form of something Merriam-Webster
Unabridged
mor phol o gy (mrflj-mNK) n. pl. mor.phol.o.gies. Abbr. morph.,
morphol.1.Biology 2. Linguistics. The
study of the structure and form of words
in language or a language, including
inflection, derivation, and the formation
of compounds. American Heritage
Dictionary
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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MORPHOLOGY
Bloomfield's definition of morphology from the
opening sentences of his classic chapter on
Morphology: "By the morphology of a
language we mean the constructions in which
bound forms appear among the constituents.
By definition, the resultant forms are either
bound forms or words, but never phrases.
Accordingly, we may say that morphology
includes the constructions of words and parts
of words, while syntax includes the
construction of phrases" (1933: 207).
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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Morphology is the study of morphemes
and their arrangements in forming words.
Morphemes are the minimal meaningful
units which may constitute words or parts
of words, (Nida (1949:1))
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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MORPHOLOGY
Morphology is the study of word
formation, including the ways new words
are coined in the languages of the world, and
the way forms of words are varied depending
on how theyre used in sentences. (Lieber
(2009:2))
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.(Aronoff (2011:2))
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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Morphology
As a science interested in the study of part of
language, morphoogy flourished in the 19 th century.
It was a science that was mainly interested in the
study of the change(s) occuring in the form of words
By the mid 20th century, it was widely believed that
everything morphology has been uncovered,
Discoveries of that time were not of the kind that
would make cross-linguistic generalizations about
the morphology of languages,
It was simply observed that languages diffred in a
kind of random way.
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Morphology: Introduction
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Morphology
The interest shifted to syntax (a new filed of
study, then). It was thought to be the field that
would be bringing new isigyts into the nature of
language and knowledge of language,
Towards the end of the last century, advances in
syntax established the fact that there are still
questions to be answered in Morphology,
This has led to a resurgence of morphology,
Since the end of 1970s, the study of morphology
has flourished in ways that could not be
imagined at the beginning of 20 th century.
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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Morphology
This flourishing is claimed (Bauer (2003: 5)) to
be partly due to the following 5 reasons:
1. Consideration of new data from a range of
languages,
2. A consideration of the patterning of morphological
data across languages,
3. Innovations in the treatment of syntax and
phonology(which have held implications for
morphology)
4. A renewed interest in how the brain processes
words,
5. The detailed study of morphological systems
themselves
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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Exercise
Consider these sentences:
How many
different
meanings of
grammar are
there in these
sentences and
what is the
precise meaning
of grammar in
each sentence?
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
1. I bought a grammar of
Arabic.
2. The grammar of Arabic
allows the Object-Verbsubject ordering
3. He tried to learn Arabic but
the Grammar was too hard
for him.
4. The grammar of a language
includes its phonology, its
morphology, and its syntax.
5. I always loved grammar
lessons at school.
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WORDS
One way to answer the question:
1. What does language consist of?
2. The fire is burning.
Is to say : words.
In a sentence such as (2):
We say that we have 4 words. But then if
anyone asks us: How do we know? The
answer is quite difficult
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Morphology: Introduction
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WORDS
Here are three criteria that we might have thought
of:
1. words are those things which occur between spaces,
(1)works only for written languages. It doesn't work for
spoken ones;
Even in English: a Black bird. 3? or 2? Ice cream ?
2. Meaning, one word is one concept. Black bird (a kind
of bird)
Problem: what does it mean to say one concept?
3. It is about pronunciation we cannot just really interrupt
the word black bird. we pronounce it together as one
word. That's what we call prosody, the way in which we
pronounce words and sentences together.
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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WORDS
It seems that we have got three criteria
which are quite unreliable,
linguists are still quarreling about what is
the right definition of a word,
Conclusion: words are hard to define
and at the same time we know a word
whenever we see one or hear one
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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WORDS
At this point, we might also talk about the different
distinction that can obtain whne we look into the
details of words. Consider:
1. As a teacher I would do as teachers would expect a
teacher to do when teaching.
How many words? 16? Orthographic words, (space,
meaning, prosody)
12? Word forms, realizations of
lexemes
10? Lexemes, abstract dictionary
words. Most of the time signalled by use of small
capitals to rite them.
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Grammatical words:
1. Yesterday, I walked home.
2. I have walked home.
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words
. We clearly KNOW that the two walked above are
not the same.
. In (1), it is WALK+ past;
. In (2), it is WALK+ past participle
. Grammatical words are defined in terms of their
place in the paradigm and named by descriptions
(such as above) which speel out that place
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
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WORDS
We have now 3 kinds of words
i. Word forms including orthographic
words,
ii. Lexemes,
iii. Grammatical words
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Morphology: Introduction
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WORDS
MORPH:
A unit which is a segment of a word-form:
Potentially free morphs: right above
Obligatorily bound morphs
E.g. birthright = birth.right
Completely = complete. ly
It is typically the case in English that all
free morphs realise LEXEMES
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Morphology: Introduction
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Any morph which can realise a lexeme and which is
not any further analysable (except in the form of
phonemes) is called a root
Obligatory bound morphs which do not realise a
lexeme and which are attached to roots to produce
word forms are called affixes,
Affixes can be added directly to a root or
they can be added to a root and some
already attached affixe(s),
A base is anything to which we attach an affix
whether it is a root or something bigger than a root
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Morphology: Introduction
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WORD
When an affix is attached before a base it
is called a prefix,
after the base, it is called a suffix,
If it is attached in the middle of the base,
it is an infix,
Suffixes are more common in English
than prefixes are,
There are no infixes in English
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Morphology: Introduction
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WORDS
Affixes can be of two kinds:
Inflectional, or
Derivational
An inflectional affix is one which forms a new
word form of a lexeme from a base,
A derivational affix is one which forms a new
lexeme from a base.
Recreates = re+create = a new lexeme, and
recreate +s = a new word form
In English, prefixes are always derivational and
suffixes are either derivational or inflectional
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WORDS
Criteria to say if an affix is derivational or
inflectional:
1. If it changes the part of speech of the base,
it is derivational,
2. Inflectional affixes have always a regular
meaning, that of derivational ones is
irregular,
3. If you can add an inflection to one member
of a class, you can add it to all members of
that class (3rd person vs tion :
nationalis(e).ation *com(e).ation,
*produc(e).tion
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Morphology: Introduction
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word
Morphs which realise a particular
morphemes and which are conditioned
(phonologically, lexically, or
grammatically) are called the
allomorphs of that morpheme,
Every allomorph is a morph,
A morph which realizes more than one
morpheme (person, gender, number) is
called a porte-manteau morpheme
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Words
learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a
matter of putting words together, not of taking
sentences apart (The example of a child),
Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel,
when words are strung together meaningfully.
there are quite a few circumstances in which we
use single words,
words on their own, outside sentences, can be
sorted and classified in various ways,
A dictionary lists them according to their
spelling in alphabetical order.
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Words and dictionaries
A dictionary entry is an association of a word,
alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means
plus information about grammar and pronunciation,
A word is a building-block of a sentence with a
meaning that is unpredictable
How many words? Mary goes to Edinburgh next week,
and she intends going to Washington next month.
14? to and next repeated: 12?
The 2 to and the 2 next are Tokens of the same
type
Words as listed in dictionaries entries are types
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Morphology: Introduction
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Words and meaning
some words are characterised by the fact that their
sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly directly.
A meaning, such as smoothness or wetness or both
in the set of words
slip, slop, slurp, slide, slither, sleek, slick, slaver, slug.
However, the associations between most words and
their meanings are purely conventional,
We also have words that are composed of
independently identifiable parts, where the meaning
of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of
the whole word.
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Morphology: Introduction
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Words and meaning
The vast majority of words are words
whose meanings, if not strictly
predictable, are at any rate motivated in
the sense that they can be reliably
guessed by someone who encounters
them for the first time in an appropriate
context.
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Word
Walk walks walks walked walking
Walk: the citation form
We have to make a distinction between
the notion word in an abstract sense
(lexeme) and
the notion word in the sense of
concrete word as used in a sentence
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Word
The concrete words walk, walks, walked,
and walking can be qualified as word
forms of the lexeme walk.
Small capitals are used to denote
lexemes when necessary to avoid
confusion between these two notions
word.
The rules for computing the different
forms of lexemes are called rules of
inflection
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Morphology
The words walk, walks, walked, and walking show
a relationship in form and meaning of a
systematic nature, since similar patterns occur for
thousands of other verbs of English.
The subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with
such patterns is called morphology.
The existence of such patterns also implies that
word may have an internal constituent structure.
For instance, walking can be divided into the
constituents walk and -ing.
Therefore, morphology deals with the internal
constituent structure of words as well.
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WORD
words as units of meaning versus units of
sentence structure
words as pronounceable entities (word forms)
versus more abstract entities (sets of word
forms)
inflectionally related word forms (forms of the
same word) versus derivationally related
words (different words with a shared base)
the distinction between compound words and
phrases
the relationship between the internal structure
of a word and its meaning
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Morphology: Introduction
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Dictionary makers assume that these
forms of the lexeme WALK are formed
according to rules, and therefore need
not be specified individually in the
dictionary.
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LEXEME
lexeme is :
a (potential or actual) member of a major
lexical category, having both form and
meaning but being neither, and
existing outside of any particular syntactic
context. In actual use, though, any instance
of a lexeme appears in a sentence, a
grammatical and pragmatic context.
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1. Which of the following words may not deserve to
be regarded as lexical items, and so may not need
to be listed in a dictionary of modern English? Why?
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Morphology: Introduction
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a. break breaking breakable breakage
read reading readable
punish punishing punishable punishment
b. conceive conceivable conception
receive receptive receivable reception
perceive perceptive perceivable perception
c. gregarious gregariousness gregariously
happy happiness happily
high highness highly
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4. Which of the following phrases (in italics) may deserve to be regarded
as lexical items? Why? (you may like to consult a native speaker about
what these sentences mean.)
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Morphology: Introduction
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a. They put the cat among the hamsters.
b. They put the cat among the pigeons.
c. They put out the cat before going to bed.
d. They put out the light before going to bed.
e. They really put themselves out for us.
f. They looked really put out.
g. Roger is a man who keeps his promises.
h. Richard is a man of his word.
i. A man in the road witnessed the accident.
j. The man in the street is not interested in economic policy.
k. Rupert is a man about town.
l. I met a man with an umbrella.
m. May the best man win.
n. The best man unfortunately lost the rings on the way to the wedding.
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Morphology: Introduction
Prof. AFKINICH
Morphology-wise, this is a very
resourceful website:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/
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