morphology

morphology

1. attitudes to language

   • prescriptive
     • opinions on how we should speak
     • someones opinion on what is correct
     • tell us how not to construct a sentence
   • descriptive
     • how utterances are possible or impossible in a given situation
     • facts about language

2. grammaticality

   • well formed
   • ill formed
   • semantically anomalous

3. tacit knowledge

4. analysing words

   • word
     • unit of meaning that occurs freely
     • isolation
     • building block sof a sentence
     • spaces between
   • identifying word classes
     • semantic criteria
       • oun is the word for a person place or thing
     • distributional criteria
       • external
         • position
       • internal
         • morphemes
     • noun
       • negated by no
       • affixes
         • -ness, -ment, -er
     • verb
       • negated by not
       • -ify, -ing, re-, -s, -ed, -en
     • adj
       • er, -est, -ate, -ity, -ish, -some
     • adv
       • -ly, -wise
   • words and morphemes
     • simple words
       • e.g. bird, mosqoto
       • free morphemes
     • complex words
       • e.g. re-develop-ment-s, re-do
       • bound morphemes
     • allomorphs
       • different forms of the same morpheme in different environments e.g. a v an. an orange, a house
   • analysing complex words
     • root
       • irreducible core of a word
         • e.g. in unbelievable, believe would be the root
     • affix
       • morpheme attached to something which modifies its meaning
         • un and able would be the affixes
     • base
       • the form which the affix is added
         • in the word unbelievable, believable would be the base as -un does not attach to nouns in *unbelieve is not a word
   • affixation
     • affix c-selects root or base
     • affixes combine with their complements locally
   • lexicon
     • diff languages have diff sets of morphemes
     • some morphemes are unique to a specific language
     • morphemes are stored in the lexicon- mental dictionary
   • building words
     • speaker stores info about words in their lexicon e.g. the c selection, meaning, pronunciation

5. inflection and derivation

   • inflection
     • case
       • nominative
       • accusative
       • dative
       • genitive
       • locative
       • languages with fixed word order are marked by word order or preposition
       • languages with a free word order are marked by dedicated case suffixes
       • english used to have a free word order, we lost a lot of inflections and that is why we now rely on word order
     • affixes
     • doesnt change the meaning of words
       • e.g. dog v dogs
     • doesnt change the category
     • infection happens after derivation
     • inflectional affixes are more productive
       • can pluralise more things
       • regularity of meaning
       • same function every time
     • fixed number of inflectional morphemes
     • -s, ed. ing, en, er, est
   • derivation
     • compositionality
       • words are formed in stages
     • RHHR
       • head of the word is on the right
         • The head of the word determines the category of the entire word
     • • When attaching morphemes they have to follow the general rules of english e.g. un doesn’t usually attach to nouns so the word formation would not be happiness- un but un- happiness
     • changes meaning
   • other word formation processes
     • conversion
       • no overt morphological change- zero derivation e.g. fish can be a verb and a noun
     • stress shift
       • the point of stress changes
         • insult to insult
     • clipping
       • removes part of a word e.g. ad instead of advert, flu instead of influenza
     • back formation
       • • reduction by incorrect analysis e.g. televise was a word before television was but you would imagine that people would get televise from television. It Is invisible in retrospect
     • blends
       • combining non-morphemic parts of words e.g. brunch, jeggings
     • acronyms and initialisms
       • acronyms such as MOLE and lol and initialisms are things like FYI. The difference is that initialisms are meant to be said by letter
     • compounding
       • types
         • exocentric
           • doesn’t refer- bluebottle
         • endocentric
           • steamboat- describes the type of boat
         • neoclassical
           • take two words from latin or greek and make a new word e.g. tele-phone or geo-metry
       • two or more existing words e.g. newspaper and boyfriend
   • synthetic to analytical
     • the only case remnants in english today are nominitive, accusative, genitive pronoun forms
     • the genitive -'s is used to mark possessors
     • • English changed from being a synthetic language with case inflections with relatively free word order to an analytic language with no case inflections and fixed word order.