Azu’s Notes

Not all languages have inflectional morphology.  Some languages have little or no morphology. Still other languages have relatively complex words with distinct parts, each representing a morpheme.

Traditionally these 3 types of languages have been identified as :
Inflectional
Isolating
Agglutinating

Inflectional Morphology

In such languages:
• each word tends to be a single isolated morpheme
• Lack both derivational and inflectional morphology
Chinese is an oft-cited example of a language with isolating morphology. Chinese uses separate words to express certain content that an inflecting language can do only by inflection
E.g.

English permits both inflectional possessive
the boy’s hat
and what is called an analytical possessive
hat of the boy
Chinese permits only the equivalent of hat of the boy
Isolating Morphology

Chinese also lacks tense markers and does not mark gender, number or case distinctions on pronouns:
E.g.

Wŏ gāng yào gĕi nĭ nà yì bēi chá
I just will give you that one cup tea
“I am about to bring you a cup of tea”
Agglutinating Morphology

In these languages:
• Words can have several prefixes and suffixes
… but characteristically they are …
• distinct and readily segmented into their parts
Greenlandic Eskimo is an example of an agglutinating language
E.g.
qajar-taa-va   asirur-sima-vuq
kayak-new-his break-done-it
“His new kayak has been destroyed”

All languages have rules. These rules together form the grammarof that language. These rules are what enables a person to produce an infinite number of phrases/sentences from a finite number of possibilities, that is understood by both the speaker and the listener. It would be rather difficult to learn any language if each sentence had to be learnt separately!

Syntax is the areas of linguistics that attempts to describe what is grammatical in a particular language in term of rules. It is the study of sentence structure. Syntactic rules detail an underlying structure and a transformational process.

The underlying structure of English for example would have a subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence order

e.g.

Usman hit the ball.

The transformational process would allow an alteration of the word order which could give you something like:

The ball was hit by Usman.

All languages have ways of referring to entities -  people, places, things, ideas, events. These expression used to refer to entities are known as referring expressions. All languages can also make predictions about what is signaled by the referring expressions (i.e. they have ways of making statements, asking questions, issuing directions …) These are generally called the predicate of the sentence.

In syntactic terms a referring expression is called a Noun Phrases - NP; and the predicate is called a Verb Phrases - VP. All languages have NPs and VPs

In syntax all other phrases (that occur within the NPs & VPs) are also termed with reference to the head component:

e.g.

Adjective Phrase (AP)

Adverb Phrase (AdvP)

Preposition Phrase (PP)

There are three main kinds of sentences:

Simple sentences

Conjoined sentences (also known compound sentences)

Complex sentences

Simple sentences contain only one idea

E.g.

Adnan fell.

Simple sentences comprise only one idea, clause and verb group. We say verb group (instead of verb) because a verb group itself can consist of one word (fell, assembled, cooked, won) or more than one word (will buy, had put, should have believed).

 

Conjoined sentences have two (or more) clauses joined together using coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or …)

E.g.

Adnan fell and twisted his ankle.

 

Complex sentences have embedded clauses. i.e. one clause is incorporated into another one

E.g. The clause

Adnan fell

can be incorporated into another clause to produce the sentence -

Zahir said Adnan fell

Unlike in conjoined sentences, complex sentences contain clauses of unequal status. i.e. one clause is subordinated into another and functions as a grammatical part of it. The subordinate clause is called an embedded clause and the clause in which it is embedded is called a matrix clause.

Every subordinate clause is embedded in a matrix clause and serves a grammatical function in it.

Word structure

In morphology, word structure is described in terms of roots and affixes

Simple words consist one morpheme - the root

fun, go, danger

Complex words consist more that one morpheme - the root + affix(es)

funny, goes, endanger

Languages have three principal ways of extending their vocabulary:

invention of entirely new words

borrowing from other languages

formation of new words from already existing words and word parts

Invention of new words

This is very rare

It is much easier for languages to either incorporate new meanings to existing words or borrow from another language than to make new words from scratch

Borrowing from other languages

Most language users have borrowed words from other languages and incorporated them into their own.

Deriving new words

Some ways in which new words are built from existing ones, in English are:

compounding

Shortening

Acronyms

blends

back formation

functional shift or conversion

semantic shift (metaphorical Extension)

Compounding

Compounding is a very common form of creating new words in English. It is the combination of two words to form one.

e.g.

waterbed

Shortening

Shortenings of various sorts are a popular means of multiplying the words of a language.

e.g.

feds  -  federal agents

Acronyms

These are words formed by joining the initial letters of an expression and pronouncing them as a word.

e.g.

FIFA

Blends

Blends are words created by combining parts of existing words.

e.g.

motel  - motor + hotel

Backformation

Words that are formed (again) from derivations of existing words to include a different meaning.

e.g.

computer

originally formed by adding -er to (existing) verb compute (calculate using a mathematical function) then, the computer was invented machine that computed (in the mathematical sense), however now compute has been back-formed carrying the meaning ‘to use a computer’

 

Functional Shift

In some languages (e.g. English) words belonging to one lexical category get converted to another lexical category without any overt markings on the words itself.

e.g.

local (noun; adjective)

Semantic Shift

This occurs when existing words take on new meaning by shrinking or extending their domain or usage.

When a word undergoes a functional shift in meaning, they do not replace the old one, but instead extend their range of application.

e.g.

Computer users today use a mouse and bookmark an Internet address.

Semantic Shift

Functional shifts create metaphors, then the metaphorical use of the words often leads to new meanings that come to seem perfectly natural and hence all but lose their metaphorical content.

Technically, a word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value.

Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes.

Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences.

A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.

It is quite hard to define what exactly a ‘word’ is, because

what is classified as words in different language are different

determining word boundaries in speech is very complex (e.g. short words are often run together and long words are often broken up)

If a word is a unit of language that consists of one or more morphemes, then we need to know what a morpheme is.

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning

E.g

rude

un-true

smooth-ly

dis-organize-d

A word can consists of:

one morpheme (simple)

cat

travel

appear

more than one morpheme (complex)

cat-s

travel-ed

dis-appeare-d

There are 6 main types of morphemes:

free

bound

lexical

grammatical

inflectional

derivational

Free morphemes can constitute a word on their own:

Thakuru

will

a

Bound morphemes must appear with one or more morphemes to form a word:

Thakuru’s

help-ed

en-able

Words often consist of a free morpheme with one or more bound morphemes attached to it:

en-danger-ed

In this sort of word, the free morpheme is called the root or stem, and the bound morphemes are affixes

An affix attached to the front of a word is called a prefix

An affix attached to the back of a word is called a suffix

 

lexical morphemes have lexical (semantic) meanings:

help

impressive

race

Grammatical morphemes provide grammatical information:

help-ed

under

en-danger

Lexical morphemes tend to be free morphemes:

Hiyala

jump

afternoon

Grammatical morphemes may be either free or bound:

Hiyala’s

jump-ed

afternoon-s

 

Inflectional & Derivational Morphemes 

Bound grammatical morphemes seem to come in (at least) two types:

Inflectional

derivational

The precise difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes is hard to define

But the most obvious difference is:

derivational morphemes build new words by changing the meaning and/or syntactic category of the word

inflectional morphemes permit a word to agree with other words in its context by providing grammatical information

Lexicon is a word of Greek origin meaning vocabulary. It is a list of words together with additional word-specific information (i.e. a dictionary)

In linguistics the definition of lexicon is slightly more specialized - it includes lexemes used to form words

A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis that:
belongs to a particular syntactic category
has particular meaning.

Lexemes may be:
simple words
phrasal words
compound words
shortened forms

The mental lexicon can therefore defined as individual dictionaries of words and lexemes stored in the mind.

The mental lexicon differs radically from a dictionary in that there are so many words and yet they are found so fast.

Native speakers can recognize a word of their language in 200ms or less and can reject a non-word sound sequence in about half a second!

In a 1940 study Seashore & Erickson (http://pages.slc.edu) estimated that an educated adult knows more than 150,000 words and be able to use 90% of these.

Although an enormous vocabulary is available to any speaker of a language not all of these words have equal status, it is a firmly established statistical fact that some words are used far more frequently than others, and that those words used more frequently are recognized faster. This is called the familiarity effect.

Hartvig Dahl (http://pages.slc.edu) counted the frequency of different words in a transcript of 1,058,888 running words of spoken conversation.

He found that the most frequently spoken word was the first person singular; on the average every sixteenth word was “I”.

The familiarity effect illustrates a clear difference between the mental lexicon and a dictionary - in a dictionary it takes no longer to look up a less commonly used word; but in the mental lexicon familiar words are more rapidly accessed.

The familiarity effect is measured using a lexical decision task:

Lexical decision tasks consistently shows faster response times for high-frequency, high-familiarity words.

One speculation about the reason for this effect is that frequently used words are easier and quicker to find because they are stored in many different places in the brain.

Another less intuitive finding that fits with this speculative theory is the finding that words that have more than one sense (homographs - e.g. content, object) are recognized slightly faster) than equally familiar words like neighbour that have only one sense (non-homograph)

This implies that homographs are multiply represented for the variety of meanings.