MORPHOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY

            This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various levels of linguistic analysis. We'll start with morphology, which deals with morphemes (the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words.

            We'll then discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the meaningless elements that "spell out" the sound of morphemes), and phonetics, which studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking, the resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception.. Then we'll look at syntax, which deals with the way that words are combined into phrases and sentences. Finally, we'll take up two aspects of meaning, namely semantics, which deals with how sentences are connected with things in the world outside of language, and pragmatics, which deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate.

The peculiar nature of morphology

            From a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of the levels of linguistic analysis. Whenever I give this lecture to an introductory class, I'm always reminded of what the particle physicist Isidor Rabi said when he learned about the discovery of the muon: "Who ordered that?" By serendipity, this morning's New York TImes has a review of a new book, "The Hunting of the Quark", that tells the story:

            In the fifth century B.C., that prescient Greek philosopher started humanity on its search for the universe's ultimate building blocks when he suggested that all matter was made of infinitesimally small particles called atoms. In 1897, the British physicist J. J. Thomson complicated the issue when he discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. Later, others recognized the proton and neutron. As atom smashers grew in the next few decades, myriads of ephemeral particles appeared in the debris, a veritable Greek alphabet soup of lambdas, sigmas and pions. ''Who ordered that?'' exclaimed the theorist Isidor I. Rabi when the muon was identified.

            Given the basic design of human spoken language, the levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are arguably unavoidable. They needn't look exactly the way that they do, perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of these levels. But morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and irregular: anything that a language does with morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax; and there is always some other language that does the same thing with syntax.

            For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: thus dogs means "more than one dog". This inflection lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the distinction between one and more-than-one. Of course, we could always say the same thing in a more elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology: more than one dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: one or more dogs.

            Modern Standard Chinese (also known as "Mandarin" or "Putonghua") makes exactly the opposite choice: there is no morphological marking for plurality, so we can be succinctly vague about whether we mean one or more of something, while we need to be more long-winded if we want to be specific. As an example of another kind of morphological packaging, English can make iconify from icon and -ify, meaning "make into an icon." Perhaps it's nice to have a single word for it, but we could always have said "make into an icon."

            And many languages lack any general way to turn a noun X into a verb meaning "to make into (an) X", and so must use the longer-winded mode of expression. Indeed, the process in English is rather erratic: we say vaporize not *vaporify, and emulsify not *emulsionify, and so on.

In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from syntax is its combinatoric irregularity. Words are mostly combined logically and systematically. So when you exchange money for something you can be said to "buy" it or to "purchase" it -- we'd be surprised if (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could only be "purchased," while clothing, automobiles and pencils could only be "bought," and things denoted by words of one syllable could only be "acquired in exchange for money."

            And you can't mix 'n match stems and endings here: *Taiwanian, *Egyptese, and so on just don't work.

            To make it worse, the word for citizen of X and the general adjectival form meaning associated with locality X are usually but not always the same. Exceptions include Pole/Polish, Swede/Swedish, Scot/Scottish, Greenlandic/Greenlander. And there are some oddities about pluralization: we talk about "the French" and "the Chinese" but "the Greeks" and "the Canadians". The plural forms "the Frenches" and "the Chineses" are not even possible, and the singular forms "the Greek" and "the Canadian" mean something entirely different.

What a mess!

            It's worse in some ways than having to memorize a completely different word in every case (like "The Netherlands" and "Dutch"), because there are just enough partial regularities to be confusing.

This brings up George W. Bush. For years, there has been a web feature at Slate magazine devoted to "Bushisms", many if not most of them arising from his individual approach to English morphology. Some of the early and famous examples, from the 1999 presidential campaign, focus on the particular case under discussion here:

            "If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm sure I'll have a statement." �Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New YorkTimes, June 16, 1999

"Keep good relations with the Grecians."�Quoted in the Economist, June 12, 1999

"Kosovians can move back in."�CNN Inside Politics, April 9, 1999

            President Bush, if these quotes are accurate, quite sensibly decided that -ian should be the default ending, after deletion of a final vowel if present. This follows the common model of Brazil::Brazilians and Canada::Canadians, and gives Bush's East Timor::East Timorians, Greece::Grecians and Kosovo::Kosovians, instead of the correct (but unpredictable) forms East Timorese, Greeks and Kosovars. And why not? The President's method is more logical than the way the English language handles it.

            Despite these derivational anfractuosities, English morphology is simple and regular compared to the morphological systems of many other languages. One question we need to ask ourselves is: why do languages inflict morphology on their users -- and their politicians?

What is a word?

            We've started talking blithely about words and morphemes as if it were obvious that these categories exist and that we know them when we see them. This assumption comes naturally to literate speakers of English, because we've learned through reading and writing where white space goes, which defines word boundaries for us; and we soon see many cases where English words have internal parts with separate meanings or grammatical functions, which must be morphemes.

            In some languages, the application of these terms is even clearer. In languages like Latin, for example, words can usually be "scrambled" into nearly any order in a phrase. As Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar says, "In connected discourse the word most prominent in the speaker's mind comes first, and so on in order of prominence."

            Thus the simple two-word sentence facis amice "you act kindly" also occurs as amice facis with essentially the same meaning, but some difference in emphasis. However, the morphemes that make up each of these two words must occur in a fixed order and without anything inserted between them. The word amice combines the stem /amic-/ "loving, friendly, kind" and the adverbial ending /-e/; we can't change the order of these, or put another word in between them. Likewise the verb stem /fac-/ "do, make, act" and the inflectional ending /-is/ (second person singular present tense active) are fixed in their relationship in the word facis, and can't be reordered or separated.

            Among many others, the modern Slavic languages such as Czech and Russian show a similar contrast between words freely circulating within phrases, and morphemes rigidly arranged within words. In such languages, the basic concepts of word and morpheme are natural and inevitable analytic categories.

            In a language like English, where word order is much less free, we can still find evidence of a similar kind for the distinction between morphemes and words. For example, between two words we can usually insert some other words (without changing the basic meaning and relationship of the originals), while between two morphemes we usually can't.

            Thus in the phrase "she has arrived", we treat she and has as separate words, while the /-ed/ ending of arrived is treated as part of a larger word. In accordance with this, we can introduce other material into the white space between the words: "she apparently has already arrived." But there is no way to put anything at all in between /arrive/ and /-ed/. And there are other forms of the sentence in which the word order is different -- "has she arrived?"; "arrived, has she?" -- but no form in which the morphemes in arrived are re-ordered.

            Tests of this kind don't entirely agree with the conventions of English writing. For example, we can't really stick other words in the middle of compound words like swim team and picture frame, at least not while maintaining the meanings and relationships of the words we started with. In this sense they are not very different from the morphemes in complex words like re+calibrate or consumer+ism, which we write "solid", i.e. without spaces. A recent (and controversial) official spelling reform of German make changes in both directions splitting some compounds orthographically while merging others: old radfahren became new Rad fahren, but old Samstag morgen became new Samstagmorgen..

            As this change emphasizes, the question of whether a morpheme sequence is written "solid" is largely a matter of orthographic convention, and in any case may be variable even in a particular writing system. English speakers feel that many noun-noun compounds are words, even though they clearly contain other words, and may often be written with a space or a hyphen between them: "sparkplug", "shot glass". These are common combinations with a meaning that is not entirely predictable from the meanings of their parts, and therefore they can be found as entries in most English dictionaries. But where should we draw the line? are all noun compounds to be considered words, including those where compounds are compounded? What about (say) government tobacco price support program? In ordinary usage, we'd be more inclined to call this a phrase, though it is technically correct to call it a "compound noun" and thus in some sense a single -- though complex -- word. Of course, in German, the corresponding compound would probably be written solid, making its "wordhood" plainer.

            There are a number of interesting theories out there about why morphology exists, and why it has the properties that it does. If these theories turn out to be correct, then maybe linguistics will be as lucky with the complexities of morphology as physics was with "Greek alphabet soup" of elementary particles discovered in the fifties and sixties, which turned out to be complex composites of quarks and leptons, composed according to the elegant laws of quantum chromodynamics.

Universality of the concepts "word" and "morpheme"

            Do the concepts of word and morpheme then apply in all languages? The answer is "(probably) yes". Certainly the concept of morpheme -- the minimal unit of form and meaning -- arises naturally in the analysis of every language.

            The concept of word is trickier. There are at least two troublesome issues: making the distinction between words and phrases, and the status of certain grammatical formatives known as clitics.

Words vs. phrases

            Since words can be made up of several morphemes, and may include several other words, it is easy to find cases where a particular sequence of elements might arguably be considered either a word or a phrase. We've already looked at the case of compounds in English.

            In some languages, this boundary is even harder to draw. In the case of Chinese, the eminent linguist Y.R. Chao (1968: 136) says, 'Not every language has a kind of unit which behaves in most (not to speak all) respects as does the unit called "word" . . . It is therefore a matter of fiat and not a question of fact whether to apply the word "word" to a type of subunit in the Chinese sentence.' On the other hand, other linguists have argued that the distinction between words and phrases is both definable and useful in Chinese grammar. The Chinese writing system has no tradition of using spaces or other delimiters to mark word boundaries; and in fact the whole issue of how (and whether) to define "words" in Chinese does not seem to have arisen until 1907, although the Chinese grammatical tradition goes back a couple of millennia.

Status of clitics

            In most languages, there is a set of elements whose status as separate words seems ambiguous. Examples in English include the 'd (reduced form of "would"), the infinitival to, and the article a, in I'd like to buy a dog. These forms certainly can't "stand alone as a complete utterance", as some definitions of word would have it. The sound pattern of these "little words" is also usually extremely reduced, in a way that makes them act like part of the words adjacent to them. There isn't any difference in pronunciation between the noun phrase a tack and the verb attack. However, these forms are like separate words in some other ways, especially in terms of how they combine with other words.

            Members of this class of "little words" are known as clitics. Their peculiar properties can be explained by assuming that they are independent elements at the syntactic level of analysis, but not at the phonological level. In other words, they both are and are not words. Some languages write clitics as separate words, while others write them together with their adjacent "host" words. English writes most clitics separate, but uses the special "apostrophe" separator for some clitics, such as the reduced forms of is, have and would ('s 've 'd), and possessive 's.

            The possessive 's in English is an instructive example, because we can contrast its behavior with that of the plural s. These two morphemes are pronounced in exactly the same variable way, dependent on the sounds that precede them:

Noun	Noun + s (plural)	Noun + s (possessive)	Pronunciation (both)
thrush	thrushes	thrush's	iz
toy	toys	toy's	z
block	blocks	block's	s

And neither the plural nor the possessive can be used by itself. So from this point of view, the possessive acts like a part of the noun, just as the plural does. However, the plural and possessive behave very differently in some other ways:

1. If we add a following modifier to a noun, the possessive follows the modifier, but the plural sticks with the head noun:

	Morpheme stays with head noun	Morpheme follows modifier
Plural	The toys I bought yesterday were on sale.	*The toy I bought yesterdays were on sale.
Possessive	*The toy's I bought yesterday price was special.	The toy I bought yesterday's price was special.

2. In other words, the plural continues like part of the noun, but the possessive acts like a separate word, which follows the whole phrase containing the noun (even though it is merged in terms of sound with the last word of that noun phrase).
3. There are lots of nouns with irregular plurals, but none with irregular possessives:

Plural (irregular in these cases)	Possessive (always regular)
oxen	ox's
spectra	spectrum's
mice	mouse's

            Actually, English does have few irregular possessives: his, her, my, your, their. But these exceptions prove the rule: these pronominal possessives act like inflections, so that the possessor is always the referent of the pronoun itself, not of some larger phrase that it happens to be at the end of.

            So the possessive 's in English is like a word in some ways, and like an inflectional morpheme in some others. This kind of mixed status is commonly found with words that express grammatical functions. It is one of the ways that morphology develops historically. As a historical matter, a clitic is likely to start out as a fully separate word, and then "weaken" so as to merge phonologically with its hosts. In many cases, inflectional affixes may have been clitics at an earlier historical stage, and then lost their syntactic independence.

            [A book that used to be the course text for LING001 lists the English possessive 's as an inflectional affix, and last year's version of these lecture notes followed the text in this regard. This is an easy mistake to make: in most languages with possessive morphemes, they behave like inflections, and it's natural to think of 's as analogous to (say) the Latin genitive case. Nevertheless, it's clear that English possessive 's is a clitic and not an inflectional affix.]