c
  

  
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Morphology.
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but  





 

 
. Please improve this article by introducing more
precise citations where appropriate. V


¦
   


 
   

Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Quantitative linguistics
Phonology  Graphemics
c
    Syntax  Lexis
Semantics  Pragmatics


 
   

Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Historical linguistics
Phonetics  Graphetics
Etymology  Sociolinguistics

 




  

Computational linguistics
 Forensic linguistics
Internet linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Second language acquisition
Evolutionary linguistics

 


History of linguistics
Linguistic prescription
List of linguists

List of unsolved problems

in linguistics


 

vde

In linguistics, 
   is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of

morphemes and other units of meaning in a language like words, affixes, and parts of speech and
intonation/stress, implied context (words in a 
  are the subject matter of 
  ).
Morphological typology represents a way of classifying languages according to the ways by
which morphemes are used in a language ²from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes,
through the agglutinative ("stuck-together") and fusional languages that use bound morphemes
(affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words.

While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear
that in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For
example, English speakers recognize that the words   and   are closely related ²
differentiated only by the
 


"-s," which is only found bound to nouns, and is
never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their
tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that   is to
  as  is to ; similarly,   is to  
 as  is to 
, in one sense. The
rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are
formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way,
morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across
languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those
languages.

A language like Classical Chinese instead uses unbound ("free") morphemes, but depends on
post-phrase affixes, and word order to convey meaning. However, this cannot be said of present-
day Mandarin, in which most words are compounds (around 80%), and most roots are bound.

In the Chinese languages, these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the
language. Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like Chukchi will have
words composed of many morphemes: The word "tԥmeyŋԥlevtpԥȖtԥrkԥn" is composed of eight
morphemes 


, that can be glossed 1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1,
meaning 'I have a fierce headache.' The morphology of such languages allow for each consonant
and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the language key the usage
and understanding of each morpheme.

½


Dhide]

p? 1 History
p? a Fundamental concepts
‘? a.1 Lexemes and word forms
Î? a.1.1 Prosodic word vs. morphological word
‘? a.a Inflection vs. word formation
‘? a.3 Paradigms and morphosyntax
‘? a.4 Allomorphy
‘? a.5 Lexical morphology
p? 3 Models
‘? 3.1 Morpheme-based morphology
‘? 3.a Lexeme-based morphology
‘? 3.3 Word-based morphology
p? 4 Morphological typology
p? 5 References
p? * Further reading

D  


The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pā ini, who
formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text   ! by using a
Constituency Grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological
analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marā al-arwā and A mad b. µalī
Masµūd, date back to at least 1a00 CE.D1]

The term  
   was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.Da]

D 


 
D ¦

!


The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in
morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which   and   are "the same word", is
called a lexeme. The second sense is called  " . We thus say that   and   are
different forms of the same lexeme. #  and  
, on the other hand, are different
lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen
conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.

D 
  
"
   


This section 
#


  $   %#  

" Please
improve this section if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. V$
%&

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide
with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-
PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASEa' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second
noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary
posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.D3] In Kwak'wala, as
in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and
"semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word
English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an
instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one
word in many languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically
(from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other
languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to
semantically, but to the


 lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala,
sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):D4]

kwix id-i-da bԥgwanԥmai-Ȥ-a q'asa-s-isi t'alwagwayu

Morpheme by morpheme translation:

kwix id-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER

bԥgwanԥma-Ȥ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER
 q'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE
t'alwagwayu = club.
"the man clubbed the otter with his club"

(Notation notes:

1.? accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.

a.? determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".
3.? the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or
'with-his-club' Instead, the markers - (PIVOT-'the'), referring to , attaches not to
% ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -' (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring
to 
, attach to % instead of to () ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a
speaker of Kwak'wala does   perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

2



  

 



‘




A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (a007),
examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word"
in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North
American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use
of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the grammatical features of independent words but
the prosodic-phonological lack of freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of
clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.

D &
!
"
!



Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules.
Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate
to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called "
 
, while those of the
second kind are called  "  . The English plural, as illustrated by   and  , is an
inflectional rule; compounds like  
 or 
 provide an example of a word
formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words" (that is, new lexemes), while
inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).

There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and compounding.
Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into
a single  
 form;  
 is therefore a compound, because both   and 
 are
complete word forms in their own right before the compounding process has been applied, and
are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent)
forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix 

 a new lexeme. One example
of derivation is clear in this case: the word 



 is derived from the word 



 by
prefixing it with the derivational prefix , while 



 itself is derived from the verb



.
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are many
examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The
next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.

Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words, whereas
with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to subject of the
sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use µgo¶ with subject I/we/you/they and
plural nouns, whereas for third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns we use
µgoes¶. So this µ-es¶ is an inflectional marker and is used to match with its subject. A further
difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word¶s
grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the word never changes its
grammatical category.

D 
 

 


¦
      

c
    

Isolating
Synthetic

Polysynthetic
Fusional

Agglutinative

c
 
  

Alignment

Accusative
Ergative

Split ergative
Philippine

Active±stative
Tripartite

Inverse marking

 

*
 

$
'



VO languages
 Subject Verb Object

Verb Subject Object

Verb Object Subject

OV languages
Subject Object Verb

Object Subject Verb

Object Verb Subject

Time Manner Place

Place Manner Time

This box: view  talk  edit

A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme.
The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns.
Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by
classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number,
gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables,
using the categories of person (first, second, third), number (singular vs. plural), gender
(masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective, objective, and possessive). See English
personal pronouns for the details.

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen
arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language.
For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English,
because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in
an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the
syntactic rules of English care about the difference between   and  , because the choice
between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however,
no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between   and  
, or




 and 



. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and
they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of
lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules,
whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of
syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part
of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called
morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word formation
or compounding.

D  


In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms:
  is to   as  is to , and as  is to 
. In this case, the analogy applies both to
the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word means "one of X", while
the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form  affixed to the
second word, signaling the key distinction between singular and plural entities.

One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one correspondence
between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, we have
word form pairs like + 
,  
+


, and 

+

, where the difference between the

singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern, or is not
signaled at all. Even cases considered "regular", with the final , are not so simple; the  in  
is not pronounced the same way as the  in , and in a plural like 
, an "extra" vowel
appears before the . These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of
a "word", are called allomorphy.

Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and
morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting
in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the
plural of  by simply appending an  to the end of the word would result in the form
*Dd s], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In order to "rescue" the word, a
vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and Dd z] results. Similar
rules apply to the pronunciation of the  in   and : it depends on the quality (voiced vs.
unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.

D ¦ 
  

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which,
morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself
primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.

D c 

There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the distinctions
above in different ways. These are,

p? Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.

p? Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
p? Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach.

Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very
strong, it is not absolute.

D c
(
  

In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A

morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like




, we say that the morphemes are , 


, 
, and ; 


 is the root and
the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.D5] In a word like  , we say that  
is the root, and that  is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest (and most naïve) form, this
way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each
other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated
approaches seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative,
analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories
and similar approaches.

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms (cf. Beard 1995 for an overview and
references):

1.? Baudoin¶s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the same
status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.
a.? Bloomfield¶s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they are
dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
3.? Bloomfield¶s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes and
roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one Hockettian.
(cf. Bloomfield 1933 and Charles F. Hockett 1947). For Bloomfield, the  


was the
minimal form with meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are 




, not " 


. For him, there is a  



, with the   
 ,
,

 etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in
unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme
" and "the morpheme 
" in the same sentence, although these are different things.

D ¦(
  

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a

word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of
applying rules that 
 a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule
takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule
takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding
rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

D $
(
  

Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes

paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or
to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold
between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many
such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are
usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-
based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical
categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no
problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-
and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all
too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for
plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches
treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be
categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new
ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used historically can give rise
to a new word, such as 
 replacing

 (where 
 follows the normal pattern of
adjectival superlatives) and   replacing 
(where   fits the regular pattern of plural
formation).

D c
      

Main article: Morphological typology

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to
their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little to no
morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily separable
morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because their inflectional morphemes
are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of
information. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an
agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional
languages.

Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is
not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these types, and some fit in
more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of language may be adapted when
considering languages.

The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less
match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very
naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm
approaches usually address fusional languages.

The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology.
There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be classified as
synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing
notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic
phrases (analytic).

D !


1.? ß Arabic Morphology and Phonology
a.? ß $-
.

 
/ " 0
/ 12 
  
1 ("for the science
of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", 23 
 45
3
7/1/7, 35)
 3.? ß Formerly known as Kwakiutl, Kwak'wala belongs to the Northern branch of the
Wakashan language family. "Kwakiutl" is still used to refer to the tribe itself, along with
other terms.
4.? ß Example taken from Foley 1998, using a modified transcription. This phenomenon of
Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in van Valin and La Polla 1997.
5.? ß The existence of words like 


 and

 in English does not mean that the
English word 


 is analyzed into a derivational prefix 
 and a root

. While all
those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, this was so only 
., not in English. English borrowed the words from French and Latin, but not the
morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine 
 and the verb



'to
hang' into the derivative 




.

D 





(Abbreviations: CUP = Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; UP = University Press)

p? Anderson, Stephen R. (199a). 2 
 2 
  . Cambridge: CUP.

p? Aronoff, Mark. (1993). "Morphology by Itself". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
p? Aronoff, Mark. (a009). "Morphology: an interview with Mark Aronoff". ReVEL, v. 7, n.
1a, ISSN 1*78-8931.
p? Beard, Robert. (1995). .


2 


6
2 
  . Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-a471-5.
p? Bauer, Laurie. (a003). 5  
   (and ed.). Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-87840-343-4.
p? Bauer, Laurie. (a004).   " 
  . Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP.
p? Bubenik, Vit. (1999).    
 " 
  . LINCON coursebooks
in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-8958*-570-a.
p? Bybee, J. L. (1985). 2 
  7  "
8
 %


2
$ .
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
p? Dixon, R. M. W. and Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (Eds). (a007). / 7  

 4 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
p? Foley, William A. (1998). "Symmetrical Voice Systems and Precategoriality in
Philippine Languages". Workshop: Voice and Grammatical Functions in Austronesian.
University of Sydney.
p? Haspelmath, Martin. (a00a). 
 
  . London: Arnold (co-published
by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-7*0a5-7 (hb); ISBN 03407*0a*5 (pbk).
p? Katamba, Francis. (1993). 2 
  . Modern linguistics series. New York: St.
Martin's Press. ISBN 0-31a-10101-5 (hb). ISBN 0-31a-1035*-5 (pbk).
p? Korsakov, A. K. (Andreĭ Konstantinovich). (19*9) The use of tenses in English.
Korsakov, A. K. Structure of Modern English pt. 1. oai:gial.edu:a*7** at
http://www.language-archives.org/item/oai:gial.edu:a*7**

p? Matthews, Peter. (1991). 2 
   (and ed.). CUP. ISBN 0-5a1-41043-* (hb). ISBN
0-5a1-4aa5*-* (pbk).
p? Mel'čuk, Igor A. (1993±a000). ½ 
 
  
33
, vol. 1-5. Montreal:
Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
 p? Mel'čuk, Igor A. (a00*). 

 "

 " 
  . Berlin: Mouton.
p? Scalise, Sergio. (1983). Ô


2 
  , Dordrecht, Foris.
p? Singh, Rajendra and Stanley Starosta (eds). (a003). ^
  


2 
  . SAGE Publications. ISBN 0-7*19-9594-3 (hb).
p? Spencer, Andrew. (1991). 2 
  
7    




. No. a in Blackwell textbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
ISBN 0-*31-1*143-0 (hb); ISBN 0-*31-1*144-9 (pb)
p? Spencer, Andrew and Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). *
%  " 
  .
Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-*31-18544-5.
p? Stump, Gregory T. (a001). 5"
  
  7
 "

. No.
93 in Cambridge studies in linguistics. CUP. ISBN 0-5a1-78047-0 (hb).
p? van Valin, Robert D., and LaPolla, Randy. (1997). 7
,2
 
$ . CUP
p? Zuckermann, Ghil'ad. (a009). Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms
and Patterns, —  ".
½ , Varia a: 40-*7.

D 
?