Morphology

Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.) While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units 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. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit. In a word, the morpheme that carries the core meaning of the word itself is called lexical morpheme or lexeme. 1. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages. Italian is as well. English used to be a fusional language but is tending towards becoming isolating, just like Chinese. This classification refers to inflectional morphology, not derivational morphology, which does not vary so much across languages and is very rarely fusional. 2. TWO MORPHOLOGIES Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog catcher or dishwasher provide an example of a word

formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme). There is a further distinction between two kinds of 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 is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (nonindependent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 3. CLOSED CLASS ITEMS VS. OPEN CLASS ITEMS Words come in two varieties: functional words, and lexical words. The difference has to do with their meaning (purely grammatical vs. lexical and referential), and with what you cam do out of them: you can invent a new lexical word, but you have no power on functional words. Functional words usually evolve from lexical words through a process called grammaticalization. Ex. Will. 4. THERE IS NO LONGEST WORD IN ENGLISH What is the longest word of the English language? Some have mentioned the following: (1) a. antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters) b. floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) c. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters) As it turns out, there is no longest word in English. To see this, consider simply the following two series, each of which can be continued without limit to create a potentially infinite number of new words: (2) a. great-grandmother b. great-great-grandmother c. great-great-great-grandmother ... (3) a. sensation b. sensational c. sensationalize d. sensationalization e. sensationalizational f. sensationalizationalize ……. 5. COMPOUNDING The simplest way to form new words out of old elements is by compounding. Compounding in English normally has the following properties: (i) Compounds have a head, which gives them their main semantic and syntactic properties. Example:

-syntactically, the expression blackboard is a noun, as is its head board -semantically, the expression blackboard refers to things that are kinds of boards, as the noun board. (ii) The head comes last (iii) The stress comes first (iv) The meaning of the whole is not entirely predictable on the basis of the meaning of the parts. In the following examples, the syllable with the main stress is indicated in bold. In each pair, a. is not a compound because (a) it has its main stress on the final element, and (b) the meaning of the whole is entirely predictable from the meaning of the parts (e.g. a black board is simply a board that is black). By contrast, b. is a compound: the main stress is on the first element, and the meaning of the whole is not entirely predictable from the meaning of the parts (a blackboard may not be black, but for instance green, as is the case in many classrooms). (4) a. a black board: a board that is black Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 b. a blackboard: a board for writing on with chalk in front of a class. It may or may not be black. (5) a. a dark room: a room that is dark b. a darkroom: a room from which daylight is excluded so that photographs can be processed. There are sometimes instances of structural ambiguity in morphology. Thus a California history teacher may be someone that teaches California history, or it may be a history teacher from California. The first meaning is obtained by making California history a morphological constituent. The second meaning is obtained by the morphological tree found on the right. (6) California history teacher a. N b. N N N N N teacher California N N N N California history history teacher Types of compounds: how they are written Since English is a mostly analytic language, unlike most other Germanic languages, it creates compounds by concatenating words without case markers. As in other Germanic languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily long. However, this is obscured by the fact that the written representation of long compounds always contains blanks. Short compounds may be written in three different ways, which do not correspond to different pronunciations, however: 1. The ‘solid’ or ‘closed’ forms in which two usually moderately short words appear together as one. Solid compounds most likely consist of short (monosyllabic) units that often have been established in the language for a long time. Examples are housewife, lawsuit, wallpaper, etc. 2. The hyphenated form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen.

Compounds that contain affixes, such as house-build(er) and single-mind(ed)(ness), as well as adjective-adjective compounds and verb-verb compounds, such as blue-green and freeze-dry, are often hyphenated. Compounds that contain articles, such as mother-of-pearl and salt-and-pepper, are also often hyphenated. 3. The ‘open’ or ‘spaced’ form consisting of newer combinations of usually longer words, such as distance learning, player piano, lawn tennis, etc. Usage in the US and in the UK differs and often depends on the individual choice of the writer rather than on a hard-and-fast rule; therefore, open, hyphenated, and closed forms may be encountered for the same compound noun, such as the triplets container ship/containership/ containership and particle board/particle-board/particleboard Types of compounds: how they are interpreted In general, the meaning of a compound is a specialization of the meaning of its head. The modifier limits the meaning of the head. This is most obvious in descriptive compounds, in which the modifier is used in an attributive or appositional manner. A blackboard is a particular kind of board, which is (generally) black, for instance. In determinative compounds, however, the relationship is not attributive. For example, a footstool is Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 not a particular type of stool that is like a foot. Rather, it is a stool for one's foot or feet. (It can be used for sitting on, but that is not its primary purpose.) In a similar manner, the office manager is the manager of an office, an armchair is a chair with arms, and a raincoat is a coat against the rain. These relationships, which are expressed by prepositions in English, would be expressed by grammatical case in other languages. Both of the above types of compounds are called endocentric compounds because the semantic head is contained within the compound itself -- a blackboard is a type of board, for example, and a footstool is a type of stool. However, in another common type of compound, the exocentric compound, the semantic head is not explicitly expressed. A redhead, for example, is not a kind of head, but is a person with red hair. Similarly, a blockhead is also not a head, but a person with a head that is as hard and unreceptive as a block (i.e. stupid). And, outside of veterinary surgery, a lionheart is not a type of heart, but a person with a heart like a lion (in its bravery, courage, fearlessness, etc.). Note in general the way to tell the two apart: 1. Can you paraphrase the meaning of the compound "[X . Y]" to A person/thing that is a Y, or ... that does Y, if Y is a verb (with X having some unspecified connection)? This is an endocentric compound.

2. Can you paraphrase the meaning if the compound "[X . Y]" to A person/thing that is with Y, with X having some unspecified connection? This is an exocentric compound. Exocentric compounds occur more often in adjectives than nouns. These types account for most compound nouns, but there are other, rarer types as well. Coordinative, copulative or dvandva compounds combine elements with a similar meaning, and the compound meaning may be a generalization instead of a specialization. BosniaHerzegovina, for example, is the combined area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but a fighter-bomber is an aircraft that is both a fighter and a bomber. Iterative or amredita compounds repeat a single element, to express repetition or as an emphasis. Day-by-day and go-go-go are examples of this type of compound, which has more than one head. In the case of verb+noun compounds, the noun may be either the subject or the object of the verb. In playboy, for example, the noun is the subject of the verb (the boy plays), whereas it is the object in callgirl (someone calls the girl). Types of compounds: nouns, adjectives, verbs Compound Nouns • Boyfriend, hatchback • Cut-throat, breakfast • Sunshine, birth control • Software, fast food • In-crowd, overkill • Drop-out, put-on • Noun + Noun • Verb + Noun • Noun + Verb • Adjective + Noun • Particle + Noun • Verb + Particle Compound Verbs Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 • Carbon-copy, sky-dive • Fine-tune • Overbook • Bad-mouth • Noun + Verb • Adjective + Verb • Particle + Verb • Adjective + Noun Compound Adjectives • Capital-intensive • Deaf-mute • Coffee-table • Roll-neck • White-collar • Before-tax • Go-go • Noun + Adjective • Adjective + Adjective • Noun + Noun • Verb + Noun

• Adjective + Noun • Particle + Noun • Verb-verb Phrasal verbs English syntax distinguishes between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs. Consider the following: I held up my hand. I held up a bank. I held my hand up. *I held a bank up. The first three sentences are possible in English; the last one is unlikely. When to hold up means to raise, it is a prepositional verb; the preposition up can be detached from the verb and has its own individual meaning "from lower to a higher position". As a prepositional verb, it has a literal meaning. However, when to hold up means to rob, it is a phrasal verb. A phrasal verb is used in an idiomatic, figurative or even metaphorical context. The preposition is inextricably linked to the verb; the meaning of each word cannot be determined independently but is in fact part of the idiom. The Oxford English Grammar distinguishes seven types of prepositional or phrasal verbs in English: 1. intransitive phrasal verbs (e.g. give in) 2. transitive phrasal verbs (e.g. find out [discover]) 3. monotransitive prepositional verbs (e.g. look after [care for]) 4. doubly transitive prepositional verbs (e.g. blame [something] on [someone]) 5. copular prepositional verbs. (e.g. serve as) 6. monotransitive phrasal-prepositional verbs (e.g. look up to [respect]) 7. doubly transitive phrasal-prepositional verbs (e.g. put [something] down to [someone] Caterina Donati, Advanced English a.a. 2008/2009 lesson 6 [attribute to]) Blendings Definition: Similar to compounds, but parts of the words are deleted. • Examples: Motor + hotel Motel Breakfast + lunch Brunch (1896) Wireless + Fidelity Wi-fi Sheep + goat Shoat Tanganyika + Zanzibar Tanzania (1964) Spanish + English Spanglish Oxford + Cambridge Oxbridge Eletric + execute electrocute Black + exploitation Blaxploitation (film genre) Bill + Hillary Billary (referring to the two Clintons) Tom + Katie Tomkat (referring to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes) Many blends have been created in recent years as names for new forms of exercise regimes, many of them trade names: Aquarobics, Callanetics (the first name of Callan Pinckney blended with athletics), Jazzercise (jazz + exercise), aquacise, dancercise, sexercise, and slimnastics. Among sports we have terms like parascending (parachute + ascending) and surfari, and nonce adjectives such as sportsational or swimsational which blend words with the last element of

sensational. The media, advertising and show business have been responsible for an especially large crop: advertorial (an advertisement written as though it were an editorial); docutainment (a documentary written as entertainment, with variable felicity concerning actual events), which is also known as a dramadoc, from dramatised documentary, though this is a clipped compound, not a blend); an infomercial is a television commercial in the form of an information announcement; infotainment is a blend, in reality as well as etymology, of information and entertainment; a magalogue is a cross between a magazine and a catalogue; a televangelist is a television evangelist. From the entertainment field we have animatronics (a blend of animated and electronics), camcorder (camera + recorder), rockumentary (a rock documentary) and, for a while in Britain, squarial (a square aerial, used to receive satellite television signals). Politics and the economy have a fair representation in the list. We have Clintonomics, Reaganomics, and Rogernomics which all combine the name of a political figure with the word economics. In similar vein are stagflation, a near-disastrous combination of stagnation and inflation, and slumpflation (slump + inflation). The US has punning blends like Californicate. Science and technology has been responsible for large numbers of new blends. Some wellestablished ones are transistor (transfer + resistor), Chunnel (Channel + tunnel), smog (smoke + fog); nucleonics (nucleon + electronics), and transputer (transistor + computer). However, there is a set of new scientific words which fall somewhere in the same territory as blends but which also could also be said to look like extended abbreviations or acronyms. An excellent example is amphetamine, which comes from its full chemical name of alpha methyl phenyl ethyl amine. Such creative mangling of names is now common when making up the vast number of trade and generic names needed for new drugs: zidovudine, the generic name of the AIDS drug AZT, is formed from azidodeoxythymidine with the letters vu inserted for no obvious reason; ranitidine, used to treat stomach ulcers and better known by its trade name Zantac, is furan + nitro + – itidine.