Morphology Week 2

Morphology Week 2

1. Morphemes

   • Criteria for a morpheme
     • "the smallest recognisable part of a word that carries its own distinctive meaning component."
     • Astructuralistmethod(unitsareidentifiedbecausetheycanbereplacebyotherunits,giverisetogrammaticalcontrastsandrecurrentlyinsimilarcontexts)
     • isolabilitiy
       • identitfiable and separate from rest of word
     • contrastiveness
       • able to be replaced
     • recurrency
       • Example from Spanish: -mo and -ta, fail the criteria of recurrency, do not occur in contexts which are not preceded by a -is, -istmo and -ista are the smallest recognisable units in these words, under these criteria.
       • How reasonable is recurrency?
         • Example from English: -ic is basically restricted to contexts where it is preceded by -ist, to the extent that it demands an -ist where -ist may not otherwise appear on its own. Does this mean -istic is the smallest unit of meaning here? But -ist also appears on its own
       • cannot be restricted to one word
     • meaning
       • Problems
         • Cranberry morphemes e.g. cran in cranberry
         • Agreement morphemes
           • Example from Italian: ragazze biond-e, the -e signifies feminine plural, but blonde itself cannot be feminine plural, therefore that morpheme does not carry any meaning but the noun with which it agrees can be fem. and plu. in meaning
           • morphemes carrying a meaning that relates to a different element from the one it shows up on
             • For this to work we have to reassess what we mean by meaning
           • Imposing meaning onto another element that would not have existed in the absence of the agreement morpheme or "unagreement"
             • Example from Spanish: Que desgraciad-as somos las mujer-es las mujeres seems to be a normal 3rd person NP but the agreeing verb somos is 1st person meaning that the sentence has to be interpreted as "we women"
             • Example from Inari Sami: Alma-h kualast-ava onne man-pl.nom fish-3du today The two men are fishing today the NP carries a plural marker, however the verb specifies a dual form meaning that the NP must now be interpeted as "two men" rather than "men" or "the men"
       • must be associated with a specific meaning

2. The Word

   • Morphological word
     • A word that does not behave like a syntactic phrase
       • Example: difference in position of head in complex words compared to the position of the head in syntactic phrases
       • Delayed resolution
   • Phonological word
   • Word as a syntactic atom
     • Bracketing Paradoxes
       • Example: [[atomic science] ist] as opposed to [atomic [science ist]] since it is not the scientist who is atomic. This however means that -ist scopes over the whole phrase atomic science . This defies the idea that a morpheme cannot scope over a whole syntactic phrase
     • Syntax is only sensitive to whole words, not their internal structure, and parts of words cannot see into syntax
   • Orthographic word
     • Implies that languages without writing systems or speakers unaware of the writing do not have words
   • Units listed in the lexicon

3. Debate on existence of morphemes

   • A-morpheous morphology (S. Anderson)
   • the extent of many problems are dependent to what extent one requires there to be a one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and phonological forms
     • Cumulative exponence
       • more than one morpheme corresponds to one phonological affix
     • Extended exponence
       • where two affixes correspond to a single morpheme (allomorphy?)
     • Conversion
       • where a morpheme does not correspond to a phonological affix at all
         • Example: a table (noun) - to table (verb) to run(verb) - a run (noun)
         • Effectively zero morphemes
           • Problem?
             • How do children acquire zero morphemes as they do no have a phonological representation?

4. Other units

   • Constructional morphology
   • Template morphology