Notes: Aronoff & Fudeman, 2005 - What is morphology?

morphology linguistics

Note: The first few chapters are skimmed since this book is intended for reader with no linguistic background.

Ch.3 Words and Lexemes

Noun class systems can be powerful inflectional and derivational mechanisms. (p.63 cf. Kujamaat Jóola)

Genders & noun classes: “some may have been assigned semantically to gender/noun class” [earlier…] but some are semantically arbitrary.

3.4 linguitic exaptation, leveling, and analogy

[…] Morphemes that lose their semantic content or morphosyntactic function as a result of language change.

1. exaptation: when the morpheme is reanalyzed by the speaker to have a new meaning/role
   • psycholinguistically core for speakers to master complex linguistic systems
   • paleo → palesco: the inchoative aspect
2. leveling: sounds that do not signify important difference in meaning are often eliminated
   • the tendency for languages to prefere regular paradigms over irregular ones leads to leveling
   • e.g. rhotacism:
     colos → coloses (Old Latin: Genitive) → coloris
     ⇒ colos → color (cf. honor)
3. analogy: A is to B as C is to D
   • the pattern that underlies the analogy process is often a productive rule

3.5 Secret Languages and its morphology

e.g. Pig Latin (igpay atinlay)

3.6 Summary

• vowel harmony: agreement among vowels in a word w.r.t. a given feature
  • e.g. “all vowels in a word must be tense/lax”

Ch.4 Derivation and the Lexicon (mostly gloss)

Motivation

A sign is motivated if, by inspecting the sign, one can get clues as to what it means (cf. Saussurean Sign).

Compositionality

something is logically compositional if it is defined entirely in terms of its parts;
(similar to motivation, but a term from logic).

nouce form/hapax legomenon

word (phrase) made up temporarily to refer to a particular reference, but not permanently stored in the lexicon.

endocentric/exocentric compounds

endocentric compounds have a head (e.g. fish in goldfish), whereas exocentric compounds’ meaning cannot be inferred from the head (e.g. lazybones, when the meaning is metaphoric)

zero-derivation

when a word is derivationally changed its part of speech, but there is no modification on the word itself
e.g. Will you chocolate my milk?
zero-derived verbs often have a wide range of meanings, potentially spanning over {location, duration, agent, goal, instrument} (Ch.5)

Ch. 5 Derivation and Semantics

The Polysemy problem

that the meanings of individual lexemes are highly diverse.

Ch. 6 Inflection

Through inflection, lexemes are able to express morphosyntactic information (syntactic information that is expressed morphologically). (p.151)

term	example
Syntactic category	tense, aspect, number, case
morphosyntactic features/properties	past, imperfective, plural, genitive

6.1 What is inflection?

1. Expomence: realization of morphosyntactic features via inflection
   • e.g., in “sailed”, /d/ is the exponent of the past participle
   1. simple exponence: one exponent maps onto one morphosyntactic feature (see example above)
   2. cumulative exponence: multiple features are reflected in one exponent (e.g. /o/ in cantō, I sing; also see many Indo-European verbs)
   3. extended exponence: a single morphological feature is realized simultaneously on more than one form
2. Inherence
   • inherent inflection: if a word can only be used in certain morphosyntactic feature (e.g. poeta always feminine, scissors always plural
   • otherwise, inflection is assigned
3. Concord and Government
   • concord: one element in a sentence takes on the morphosyntactic features of another element. e.g., n.-adj. agreement or inflection of person in Latin verbs (subject-verb agreement)
   • agreement: = concord
   • government: government (e.g. frui takes Abl., but since verbs do not have case, the Abl. object does not “agree” with the verb, but is governed by it. cf. propositions, such as “ab +Abl.”
4. Inflectional categories
   • person - inclusive (e.g. 咱们) or exclusive (e.g. 我们 when used as opposed to 咱们)
   • tense - imperfective and perfective: denoting action in progress or completed action

6.3 Inventory of inflectional morphology types

apophony (internal change)

vowel changes within a root (e.g. foot → feet)

umlaut

specifically refers to the assimilation of the vowel with the following vowel in the singular-plural case.
cf. goose-geese, the word-final vowel has since-then disappeared, but the assimilation remained as a plural marker.

suppletion

when morphological changes are not predictable and totally different;
e.g. am/are/is/were inflection system.
a.k.a. “irregular”?

syncretism

a single inflected form corresponds to more than one set of morphosyntactic features.
e.g., English “you” both Nom. and Acc.
Stump, 2001: syncretism raises questions relevant to morphological theory

6.5 Typology

Classification of language based on the comparative study of types

analytic ⇒ synthetic

1. isolating (Vietnamese, no derivational or inflectional morphology)
2. inflective (subtype of which, agglutinating cf. Turkish)
3. fusional (Latin)
4. polysynthetic (North American languages, e.g. Nootka

Ch. 7 Morphology & Syntax

Chinese lexemes have only one form, abstracting away from phonologically determined alternations (mostly changes in tone (???)). While Chinese has a few clitics or particles, including one that expresses past tense, these are generally not considered to be affixes.

from this Chinese example, and cf. Russian → “morphological inflection is realized overtly, where syntactic inflection may or may not be.”

7.3 Inflection & Universal Grammar

• In one sense, inflectional categories are universal;
• On another note, gender is highly problematic from a universalist point of view.

7.4 Grammatical Function Change

Grammatical function change

Alternations in the grammatical encoding of referential expressions
e.g.

Grammatical Function	Eng.	Lat.	Jap.
active (主动)	God does not love man.	Deus populum non amat.	神は人を愛しない。
passive (被动)	Man is not loved by God.	Populus a Deo non amatur.	人が神に愛されない。
causative (使动)	The evil nature of man makes God not love man.	Facit mala natura populi Deum populum non amare.	人の悪い本性が神に人を愛させない。

Ch. 8 Morphological Productivity

“a morphological pattern is productive” ⇌ there is a higher probability of a potential word in this pattern to be accepted in this language, compared with some other pattern(s)

Some Chomskian terms:

competence

knowledge of a language, possessed by its speaker/hearer

performance

how the language is actually used in concrete situations

Then, it is necessary to demonstrate that productivity is constrained

1. phonologically
2. morphologically
3. syntactically (e.g. re- can only be attached to verbs, not nouns)
4. semantically (some concepts are simply uncommon/unlikely)
5. blocking: if one form already exists for a certain derivation/inflection of a word, use of the new, productive form will be blocked by this existant form.
   • e.g. child → children, not childs

With that said, unproductive (since they are constrained) forms can be more salient in the context. Therefore, sometimes unproductive forms are used for emphasis, or for new words (e.g. coining technical terms).

Cognitively: (Jaeger et al., 1996)
PET scan shows that

Subjects spoke aloud the past tense forms of regular verbs significantly faster than irregular verbs;
When subjects were asked to give the past tense of irregular verb forms, their brains showed larger areas of brain activity;
Tasks involving regular/irregular verbs activate different areas of subjects’ brains.

Thoughts

What is the place of gender and duals (number)? Are they vestigial forms in language that emerged earlier due to certain historical reason, but later deprecated? Why are these forms hardly, or ever, re-evolved later in any languages? Is the cost too high? If the cost was once low enough that such rules were created, then what has changed?