INTRODUCTION TO THE STRUCTURE AND VARIETIES OF MODERN SPANISH SP1 2005 University of Cambridge Lecturer: Dr. Ioanna Sitaridou (is269@cam.ac.uk) Morphology I (Lecture 5)
1. THE MINIMAL UNITS OF MEANING:MORPHEMES What is a morpheme? • Morpheme: are units (smaller than the word) that have a meaning or a grammatical function. What is the task of morphology? • Morphology: is the study of how words are structured and how they are put together from smaller parts. • Morphology & linguistic competence: part of a speaker’s linguistics competence is knowing the meaning of the individual morphemes and the ways in which they are allowed to combine. Types of morphemes: • Free morphemes: they can stand alone (usually words). • Bound morphemes: never exist as words themselves (are always attached to some other morpheme). Types of bound morphemes: • Suffix: attaches to the end of a word. • Prefix: attaches to the beginning of a word. • Infix: are inserted within the root morpheme. • Affix: suffixes + prefixes • Derivational: morphemes that change the meaning or part of speech of the word they attach to. • Inflectional: the morphemes that serve a purely grammatical function, creating a different form of the word. Morphologically complex words: • Stem (or root or base) + bound morpheme. How many inflectional morphemes are in English? • Waits • Waited • Waiting • Eaten • Chair’s • Chairs • Faster • Fastest
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Characteristics of derivational morphemes: • Change the part of speech or the meaning: judgment, reactivate… • Not required by the syntax. • Not very productive: brotherhood vs. *friendhood • Typically occur before inflectional suffixes: governments… • May be prefixes or suffixes: prearrange, arrangement… Characteristics of inflectional morphemes: • Do not change the part of speech or the meaning: bigger… • Are required by the syntax. • Are very productive: the plural –s • Occur at the margin of a word after the derivational morpheme: conceptu-al-ization-s • Are suffixes in English. One final distinction: • Function morphemes: provide information about grammatical function. • Content morphemes: independent/identifiable meaning. Morphemes are pairings of sounds with meanings not spellings with meanings: • Cats, Frank’s, walks Interaction of phonology with morphology: • Allomorph: different pronunciations of the same morpheme. • Plural morpheme of Spanish: /s/ is sometimes realized as /s/ and other as /es/ libro+s, pared+es sient-o sen-timos sint-ió Conclusion: • Morphemes are not syllables. • A morpheme may have more than one sound representations in different sound sequences. • Always analyse the phonetic representations not the spellings.
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2. THE HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF WORDS Lexicon: mental dictionary. Internal structure of words: words have a hierarchical structure represented schematically by means of a tree.
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modificA ción
3. WORD FORMATION PROCESS Types of word formation processes: • Affixation: words formed by the combination of bound affixes and free morphemes. (1) Verb Stem [sulat] write [bili] buy [kuha] take, get • Infinitive [sumulat] to write [bumili] to buy [kumuha] to take, to get (Tagalog)
Compounding: compounding is a process that forms new words not from bound affixes but from two or more independent words. The words that are the parts of the compound can be free morphemes, words derived by affixation, or even words formed by compounding themselves:
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a.blackboard b.blackbird c.textbook
d.air conditioner e.looking glass f.watch maker
g.lifeguard chair h.aircraft carrier i.life insurance salesman
Compounds have primary stress on the first syllable, compare (3a) and (3b): (3) a.blackbird b.bláck bírd The meaning of compounds follows from the Right-Headed Rule: a blackbird is a kind of bird, not a kind of black. Compounding is universal: (4) a.French: curedent (toothpick) b.Spanish: tocadiscos (recordplayer) bienestar tornasol altavoz
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c.German: Muttersprache (native language (mother tongue)) Schreibtisch (desk (writing table)) Stehenbleiben (stand still (stay remain)) Wunderkind (child prodigy (miracle child)) Geschwindigkeitsbegrezung (speed limit (speed limit)) • Reduplication: reduplication is a process of forming words either by doubling an entire free morpheme (total reduplication) or part of it (partial reduplication). Indonesian for example uses total reduplication to form the plurals of nouns: Singular [rumah] house [ibu] mother [lalat] fly Plural [rumahrumah] houses [ibuibu] mothers [lalatlalat] flies
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Tagalog uses partial reduplication to indicate the future tense: (7) Verb Stem [bili] buy [kain] eat [pasok]enter • Future Tense [bibili] will buy [kakain] will eat [papasok] will enter
Morpheme internal changes: although the usual pattern of plural formation is to add an inflectional morpheme, some English plurals make an internal modification: a.man b.woman c.foot → → → men women feet
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The usual pattern of past and past participle formation is to add an affix, but some verbs also show an internal change: (9) a.ring b.sing c.swim • → rang → sang → swam → rung → sung → swum
Suppletion: when the same distinction is represented by two different words that don’t have any systematic difference in form. [æm] am [go] go [wÃz] was [w nt] went
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4. WORD COINAGE Neologism: is word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (‘coined’) —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form. • Acronyms: NASA = National Aeronautics and Space Agency UNESCO = United National Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Radar = Radio Detecting And Ranging Laser= Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation Scuba = Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus • Blends: smog smoke + fog motel motor + hotel • Backformation: the verb edit came from editor, enthuse from enthusiasm. The noun ept came from inept. Pea was derived from a singular word, pease, by speakers who thought pease was a plural. • Abbreviations: short forms of some words which are nor used as whole words: prof, piano, gym, ad, math, gas, phone, bus. • Words from Names: Kleenex, fridge, hoover, sandwich, jumbo, gargantuan, denim.
5. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES OF LANGUAGES • Analytic languages: languages that build up the meanings of sentences though the use of isolated morphemes. They do not use affixes, word order is important, e.g. Chinese (and English as well): a. Wo men tan tsin I plural play piano ‘We are playing the piano’ b. Wo men tan tsin I plural play piano ‘We played the piano’ c. Ta da he hit(s) ‘He hits us’
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le past wo I men plural
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Synthetic languages: in synthetic languages, affixes or bound morphemes are attached to other morphemes, so that a word may be made up of several meaningful elements. Hungarian is a synthetic language, word order is less important:
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a. Az the ‘The b. A the ‘The
ember látja a man sees the man see the kutya látja az dog sees the dog sees the man’
kutyát dog-(object) dog’ embert-(object) man
(Hungarian)
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a. A kutyát látja az ember the dog sees the man ‘The man see the dog’ b. Az embert látja a kutya the man sees the dog ‘The dog sees the man’ Agglutinating languages: the morphemes are joined together ‘loosely’. (Swahili)
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(13) ni-na soma (I-present-read) u-na –soma (you-present-read) a-na-soma (he-present-read) •
Fusional (inflectional) languages: words are formed by adding bound morphemes to stems (as in agglutinating languages) but the affixes may not easy to separate from the stem. (Spanish)
(14) hablo (I am speaking) habla (he/she is speaking) hablé (I spoke) •
Polysynthetic languages: highly complex words may be formed by combining several stems and affixes. (Sora)
(15) anin ñam - yo - te n he catch fish non-past do ‘He is fish-catching’
Reading Pountain, C. (2003). Eploring the Spanish Language. London: Arnold. [Chapter 3] Further Reading Matthews, P.H. (1991). Morphology. Cambridge: CUP. Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
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