What is Morphology?

Mark Aronoff, Kirsten Fudeman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444351767
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

What is Morphology? is a concise and critical introduction to the central ideas of morphology, which has been revised and expanded to include additional material on morphological productivity and the mental lexicon, experimental and computational methods, and new teaching material.

• Introduces the fundamental aspects of morphology to students with minimal background in linguistics
• Includes additional material on morphological productivity and the mental lexicon, and experimental and computational methods
• Features new and revised exercises as well as suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter
• Equips students with the skills to analyze a wide breadth of classic morphological issues through engaging examples
• Uses cross-linguistic data throughout to illustrate concepts, specifically referencing Kujamaat Joola, a Senegalese language
• Includes a new answer key, available for instructors online at http://www.wiley.com/go/aronoff

1

Thinking about Morphology and Morphological Analysis

• 1.1 What is Morphology?
• 1.2 Morphemes
• 1.3 Morphology in Action
• 1.3.1 Novel words and word play
• 1.3.2 Abstract morphological facts
• 1.4 Background and Beliefs
• 1.5 Introduction to Morphological Analysis
• 1.5.1 Two basic approaches: analysis and synthesis
• 1.5.2 Analytic principles
• 1.5.3 Sample problems with solutions
• 1.6 Summary
• Introduction to Kujamaat Jóola
• Further Reading

mor·phol·o·gy: a study of the structure or form of something

Merriam-Webster Unabridged

1.1 What is Morphology?

The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who coined it early in the nineteenth century in a biological context. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’, and morphology is the study of form or forms. In biology morphology refers to the study of the form and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms. 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.

1.2 Morphemes

A major way in which morphologists investigate words, their internal structure, and how they are formed is through the identification and study of morphemes, often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function. This definition is not meant to include all morphemes, but it is the usual one and a good starting point. A morpheme may consist of a word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of looked, that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. Another way in which morphemes have been defined is as a pairing between sound and meaning. We have purposely chosen not to use this definition. Some morphemes have no concrete form or no continuous form, as we will see, and some do not have meanings in the conventional sense of the term.

You may also run across the term morph. The term ‘morph’ is sometimes used to refer specifically to the phonological realization of a morpheme. For example, the English past tense morpheme that we spell -ed has various morphs. It is realized as [t] after the voiceless [p] of jump (cf. jumped), as [d] after the voiced [l] of repel (cf. repelled), and as [ed] after the voiceless [t] of root or the voiced [d] of wed (cf. rooted and wedded). We can also call these morphs allomorphs or variants. The appearance of one morph over another in this case is determined by voicing and the place of articulation of the final consonant of the verb stem.

Now consider the word reconsideration. We can break it into three morphemes: re-, consider, and -ation. Consider is called the stem. A stem is a base unit to which another morphological piece is attached. The stem can be simple, made up of only one part, or complex, itself made up of more than one piece. Here it is best to consider consider a simple stem. Although it consists historically of more than one part, most present-day speakers would treat it as an unanalyzable form. We could also call consider the root. A root is like a stem in constituting the core of the word to which other pieces attach, but the term refers only to morphologically simple units. For example, disagree is the stem of disagreement, because it is the base to which -ment attaches, but agree is the root. Taking disagree now, agree is both the stem to which dis- attaches and the root of the entire word.

Returning now to reconsideration, re- and -ation are both affixes, which means that they are attached to the stem. Affixes like re- that go before the stem are prefixes, and those like -ation that go after are suffixes.

Some readers may wonder why we have not broken -ation down further into two pieces, -ate and -ion, which function independently elsewhere. In this particular word they do not do so (cf. *reconsiderate), and hence we treat -ation as a single morpheme.

It is important to take seriously the idea that the grammatical function of a morpheme, which may include its meaning, must be constant. Consider the English words lovely and quickly. They both end with the suffix -ly. But is it the same in both words? No – when we add -ly to the adjective quick, we create an adverb that is often synonymous with “rapidly”: The students quickly assimilated the concept. When we add -ly to the noun love, we create an adjective: What a lovely day! What on the surface appears to be a single morpheme turns out to be two. One attaches to adjectives and creates adverbs; the other attaches to nouns and creates adjectives.

There are two other sorts of affixes that you will encounter, infixes and circumfixes. Both are classic challenges to the notion of morpheme. Infixes are segmental strings that do not attach to the front or back of a word, but rather somewhere in the middle. The Tagalog infix -um- is illustrated below (McCarthy and Prince 1993: 101–5; French 1988). It creates an agent from a verb stem and appears before the first vowel of the word:

(1)

Root	-um-
/sulat/	/s-um-ulat/	‘one who wrote’
/gradwet/	/gr-um-adwet/	‘one who graduated’

The existence of infixes challenges the traditional notion of a morpheme as an indivisible unit. We want to call the stem sulat ‘write’ a morpheme, and yet the infix -um- breaks it up. This seems to be a property of -umrather than sulat. Our definition of morphemes as the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function survives this challenge.

Circumfixes are affixes that come in two parts. One attaches to the front of the word and the other to the back. Circumfixes are controversial because it is possible to analyze them as consisting of a prefix and a suffix that apply to a stem simultaneously. One example is Indonesian ke … -an. It applies to the stem besar ‘big’ to form a noun ke-besar-an meaning ‘bigness, greatness’ (MacDonald 1976: 63; Beard 1998: 62). Like infixes, the existence of circumfixes challenges the traditional notion of morpheme (but not the definition used here) because they involve discontinuity.

We will not go any more deeply here into classical problems with morphemes, but the reader who would like to know more might consult Anderson (1992: 51–6).

1.3 Morphology in Action

We would like to explore the idea of morphology more deeply by examining some data. These are examples of morphology in action – morphological facts of everyday life.

1.3.1 Novel words and word play

If you had been walking down the street in Ithaca, New York, several years ago, you might have looked up and seen a sign for the music store “Rebop,” a name that owes its inspiration to the jazz term rebop.¹ Rebop was originally one of the many nonsense expressions that jazz musicians threw into their vocal improvisations, starting in the early 1920s. In the 1940s, rebop became interchangeable with bebop, a term of similar origin, as the term for the rhythmically and harmonically eccentric music played by young black musicians. By the 1950s the name of this musical style was quite firmly established as simply bop.² Today, the original use of rebop is known only to cognoscenti, so that most people who pass by the store will be likely to interpret the word as composed of the word bop and the prefix re-, which means approximately ‘again’. This prefix can attach only to verbs, so we must interpret bop as a verb here. Rebop must therefore mean ‘bop again’, if it means anything at all. And this music store, appropriately, specialized in selling used CDs. There’s something going on here with English morphology. Rebop is not a perfectly well-formed English word. The verb bop means something like ‘bounce’, but the prefix re- normally attaches only to a verb who...