The notion of the word form

Описание презентации по отдельным слайдам:

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  GRAMMATICAL MEANING
  OF THE WORD

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  1. The problem of word definition.
  2. The notion of the word-form.
  3. The notion of «grammatical meaning».
  4. Types of grammatical meaning.
  5. The notion of «grammatical category».
  6. The notion of «opposition».

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  1.The Problem of Word Definition

  The word is considered to be the central (though not the only) linguistic unit of language.
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  The Problem of Word Definition

  In the written language words are clearly identified by spaces between them.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  In the spoken language the problem cannot be solved this way.
  ↓
  If we listen to an unfamiliar language, we find it difficult to divide up the speech into single words.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  Approaches
  to the problem of word definition:
  the word is a semantic unit, a unit of meaning;
  the word is a marked phonological unit;
  the word is an indivisible unit.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  Semantic definition of the word:
  “…a unit of a particular meaning with a particular complex of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment».
  ↓
  The word is a linguistic unit that has a single meaning.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  BUT:

  heavy smoker ≠ heavy and
  smoker
  criminal lawyer;
  the King of England’s hat.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The problem:

  the word is not always a single unit.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  A phonological criterion

  that stuff that’s tough
  a nice cakean ice cake
  grey day Grade A
  ↓

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  It is hard to distinguish the real meaning without a proper context.
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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The word as an indivisible unit

  “The word is a minimum free form“
  (L. Bloomfield)
  ↓
  The word is the smallest unit of speech that can occur in isolation.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  BUT:
  a or the

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  Thus,
  the word is a linguistic unit larger than a morpheme but smaller than a phrase.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  In this case the word can be defined as:

  • An orthographic word (something written with white spaces at both ends but no white space in the middle).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  • A phonological word (something pronounced as a single unit).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  • A lexical item, or lexeme, (a dictionary word).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  • A grammatical word-form (GWF) (or morphosyntactic word) (any one of the several forms which a lexical item may assume for grammatical purposes).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The item ice cream is:
  two orthographic words,
  but
  — a single phonological word (it is pronounced as a unit),
  — a single lexical item (it has its own entry in a dictionary),
  — a single GWF (indeed, it hardly has another form unless you think the plural ice cream is good English).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The singular dog and the plural dogs:
  — a single orthographic word,
  — a single phonological word,
  a single GWF,
  but they both
  — represent the same lexical item (only one entry in the dictionary).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  ???
  take, takes, took, taken, is taking:

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  take, takes, took, taken and is taking:

  — five orthographic words,
  — five phonological words,
  five GWFs (at least),
  but only
  — one lexical item.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  ???
  the contraction hasn’t

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The contraction hasn’t is:

  — a single orthographic word,
  a single phonological word,
  — two lexical items (have and not),
  — two GWFs (has and not).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  ???
  The phrasal verb make up (as in She made up her face)

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  The phrasal verb make up (as in She made up her face):
  — two orthographic words,
  — two phonological words,
  — one lexical item (because of its unpredictable meaning, it must be entered separately in the dictionary).
  — has several GWFs (make up, makes up, made up, making up).

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  ???
  make up
  (She made up a story)

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  make up (She made up a story):
  — a different lexical item from the preceding one (a separate dictionary entry is required),
  but
  — this lexical item exhibits the same orthographic, phonological and grammatical forms as the first.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  So,
  the word is not a clearly definable linguistic unit.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  For the sake of linguistic description, we will proceed from the following statements:
  — the word is a meaningful unit differentiating word-groups at the upper level and integrating morphemes at the lower level;

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  — the word is the main expressive unit of human language, which ensures the thought-forming function of language;

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  the word It is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized;

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  in the structure of language the word belongs to the upper stage of the morphological level;

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  the word is a unit of the sphere of «language» and it exists only through its speech actualization;

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  one of the most characteristic features of the word is its indivisibility.

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  The Problem of Word Definition

  the word is a bilateral entity

  concept
  WORD = ———————
  sound image

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  2. The Notion of the Word -Form

  The term «word-form“ shows that the word is a carrier of grammatical information.
  E.g.: speaks — the present tense third
  person singular
  speak, spoke, is speaking
  ↓
  Here the relational property of grammatical meaning is revealed.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Grammatical meanings of a word-form are very abstract and general.
  They are peculiar of a whole class of words, unite it so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  E.g.:
  the meaning of the plural is rendered by the regular plural suffix –(e)s, phonemic interchange and a few lexeme-bound suffixes.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Due to the generalized character of the plural, we say that different groups of nouns «take» this form with strictly defined variations in the mode of expression.
  The variations can be of more systemic (phonological conditioning) and less systemic (etymological conditioning) nature.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Cf.: faces, branches, matches, judges;
  books, rockets, boats, chiefs, proofs;
  dogs, beads, films, stones, hens;
  lives, wives, thieves, leaves;
  oxen, children, brethren;
  swine, sheep, deer;
  men, women, feet, teeth, geese, mice, lice;
  formulae, antennae;
  data, errata, strata, addenda, memoranda;
  radii, genii, nuclei;
  crises, bases, analyses, axes;
  phenomena, criteria.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  The lexical meaning of the word is irrelevant for the detection of the type of the word-form.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  A word-form may be analytical by structure. In this case it is equivalent to one word as it expresses one unified content of a word, both from the point of view of grammatical and lexical meaning.
  E.g.: has spoken

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Words (as well as morphemes) are directly observable units by nature as they are characterized by a definite material structure of their own.

  They can be registered and enumerated in any language.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  The system of morphological units is a closed system. It means that all its items are on the surface and can be embraced in an inventory of forms.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Every word is a unit of grammar as a part of speech.

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  The Notion of the Word -Form

  Parts of speech are usually considered a lexico-grammatical categories since:
  they show lexical groupings of words;
  these groupings present generalized classes, each with a unified, abstract meaning of its own.

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  3. The Notion of Grammatical Meaning

  Notional words combine two meanings in their semantic structure:
  lexical;
  grammatical.

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  The Notion of Grammatical Meaning
  Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the word
  E.g.: table — a definite piece of furniture with a flat top supported by one or more upright legs,
  speak – to express thoughts aloud, using the voice.

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  The Notion of Grammatical Meaning
  Grammatical (morphological) meaning is not individual.
  ↓
  It is the meaning of the whole class or a subclass
  E.g.: table (grammatical meaning of the class of nouns (thingness / substance) and the grammatical meaning of a subclass – countableness).

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  ?

  What are grammatical meanings of:
  — verbs;
  adjectives;
  adverbs?

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  The Notion of Grammatical Meaning

  There are some classes of words that are devoid of any lexical meaning and possess the grammatical meaning only.

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  The Notion of Grammatical Meaning

  Function words

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  4.Types of Grammatical Meaning

  The grammatical meaning may be:

  explicit;
  implicit.
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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  The implicit grammatical meaning is not expressed formally

  E.g.: table (the meaning of inanimate object)

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically
  E.g.: -s in cats (the grammatical meaning of plurality);
  ‘s in cat’s (the grammatical meaning of possessiveness);
  is …ed in is asked (the grammatical meaning of passiveness)

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  Types of the implicit grammatical meaning:
  general
  dependent

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  general (the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech)
  E.g.: thingness of nouns

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  dependent (the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech)
  E.g.: the verb (transitivity/ intransitivity,
  terminativeness / non-terminativeness,
  stativeness / non-stativeness);
  the noun (countableness / uncountableness,
  animateness / inanimateness)

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning
  The dependent grammatical meaning influences the realization of grammatical categories restricting them to a subclass.
  E.g.: the number category for the subclass of countable nouns;
  the category of case for the subclass of animated nouns;
  the category of voice for transitive verbs, etc.

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  Types of Grammatical Meaning

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  5. The Notion of Grammatical Category

  A grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language.

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Its structure displays two or more forms applied to a definite class of words and used in somewhat different grammatical circumstances.
  ↓↓

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Grammatical categories are made up by the unity of identical grammatical meanings that have the same form and meaning
  E.g. singular : plural

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Due to dialectal unity of language and thought, grammatical categories correlate, on the one hand, with the conceptual categories and, on the other hand, with the objective reality:

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Thus,
  grammatical categories are references of the corresponding objective categories.
  E.g.: the objective category of time →
  the grammatical category of tense,
  the objective category of quantity → the grammatical category of number.

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  Grammatical categories that have references in the objective reality are referential.
  Objective correlate
  ↓
  Lingual correlate

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Grammatical categories that do not correspond to anything in the objective reality and correlate only with conceptual matters are significational. They are few (e.g. the categories of mood and degree).
  Conceptual correlate
  ↓
  Lingual correlate

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Classifications of Gr. Categories

  According to the referent relation:
  immanent;
  — reflective.
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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  Immanent gr. categories are:
  1) innate for a given lexemic class, organically connected with its functional nature
  E.g.: the number category of nouns,
  the substantive-pronominal person
  2) closed within a word-class
  E.g.: the tense category of verbs,
  the comparison of adjectives and adverbs

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  Reflective gr. categories are of a secondary, derivative semantic value
  E.g.: the number category of verbs,
  the verbal person

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category
  2. According to the changeability of the exposed feature
  — unchangeable / derivational (constant feature categories)
  E.g.: the gender category of nouns represented by the system of the 3rd person pronouns
  — changeable / demutative (variable feature categories)
  E.g.: the number category of nouns,
  the degrees of comparison

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  NB:
  1. The notion of grammatical category applies to the plane of content of morphological paradigmatic units;

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  2. It refers to grammatical meaning as a general notion;

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  3. It does not nominate things but expresses relations, that is why it has to be studied in terms of oppositions;

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  4. Grammatical categories of language represent a realization of universal categories produced by human thinking in a set of interrelated forms organized as oppositions;

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  5. Grammatical categories are not uniform, they vary in accordance with the part of speech they belong to and the meaning they express;

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  The Notion of Grammatical Category

  6. The expression of grammatical categories in language is based upon close interrelation between their forms and the meaning they convey.

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  6. The Notion of Opposition

  The concept of opposition is that it distinguishes something.

  ↓
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  The Notion of Opposition
  One thing can be distinguished from another only if it can be contrasted with something else or opposed to it.

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  The Notion of Opposition

  Any grammatical category must be represented by at least two grammatical forms
  E.g. the grammatical category of number: singular and plural forms.

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  The Notion of Opposition
  Thus,
  the relation between two grammatical forms that differ in meaning and external signs is called opposition.

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  The Notion of Opposition
  The most widely known opposition is the binary «privative» opposition.

  In it one member of the contrastive pair is characterized by the presence of a certain feature which the other member lacks

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  The Notion of Opposition
  E.g. table::tables
  ↓ ↓
  “unmarked” “marked”
  (weak) member (strong) member
  ↓ ↓
  non-plural plural
  ↓ ↓
  more general and abstract more particular and
  concrete
  (used in a wider range of contexts)

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  The Notion of Opposition
  FYI:
  Some scholars, however, hold the opinion that oppositions can be
  gradual (different degree of a feature)
  E.g.: big — bigger — biggest
  equipollent (different positive features)
  E.g.: am — is — are.

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  The Notion of Opposition

  NB:
  A grammatical category is definable only on the basis of oppositions.

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  The Notion of Opposition

  Means of realization of grammatical categories:
  synthetic (near — nearer);
  analytical (beautiful — more beautiful).

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In linguistics, morphology (^[1]) is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.^[2][3] It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word’s pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words,^[4] and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language’s vocabulary.^[5]

While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme «-s», only found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their innate knowledge of English’s rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes («free» morphemes) and it relies on word order to convey meaning. (Most words in modern Standard Chinese [«Mandarin»], however, are compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using, 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.

Phonological and orthographic modifications between a base word and its origin may be partial to literacy skills. Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand and that the absence of modification between a base word and its origin makes morphologically complex words easier to understand. Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word.^[6]

Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes. For example, the Chukchi word «təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən», meaning «I have a fierce headache», is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed. The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while the grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme.

The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology.

The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.^[7] Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas’ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.^[8]

The linguistic term «morphology» was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.^[a][9]

Lexemes and word-formsEdit

The term «word» has no well-defined meaning.^[10] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals.^[11] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate. Eat and eats are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme eat. Eat and Eater, on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts.

Prosodic word vs. morphological wordEdit

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-PHRASE₂‘ (as in «apples and oranges») is to suffix ‘-que’ to the second noun phrase: «apples oranges-and». An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak’wala language.^[b] 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», in which ‘with’ identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and ‘his’ denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak’wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak’wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):^[c]

(Notation notes:

1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as «the», «this», and «that».
3. the concept of «pivot» is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to a speaker of Kwak’wala, the sentence does not contain the «words» ‘him-the-otter’ or ‘with-his-club’ Instead, the markers —i-da (PIVOT-‘the’), referring to «man», attaches not to the noun bəgwanəma («man») but to the verb; the markers —χ-a (ACCUSATIVE-‘the’), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q’asa (‘otter’), etc. In other words, a speaker of Kwak’wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

A central publication on this topic is the volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), 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.^[12]

Inflection vs. word formationEdit

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, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are inflectional rules, but those of the second kind are rules of word formation.^[13] The generation of the English plural dogs from dog is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like dog catcher or dishwasher are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form «new» words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the «same» word (lexeme).

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

Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter’s form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, ‘go’ is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes ‘goes’ to be used. The ‘-es’ is therefore an inflectional marker that 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, but in the process of inflection, the word never changes its grammatical category.

Types of word formationEdit

There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: derivation and compounding. The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. Dog catcher, therefore, is a compound, as both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word independent, for example, is derived from the word dependent by using the prefix in-, and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of the new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for North Atlantic Treaty Organization), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept.^[14]

Paradigms and morphosyntaxEdit

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. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case, organizes such. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables by using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive).

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has grammatical agreement rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs because the choice between both forms determines the form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation.

The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact, is called «morphosyntax»;^[15][16] the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated.^[17] The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation.^[15] Within morphosyntax fall the study of agreement and government.^[15]

AllomorphyEdit

Above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats and dish is to dishes. 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», and the second «two or more of X», and the difference is always the plural form -s (or -es) affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities.

One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep whose 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 regarded as regular, such as -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in plurals such as dishes, a vowel is added before the -s. Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a «word», constitute allomorphy.^[18]

Phonological rules constrain the sounds that 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 dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. To «rescue» the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃɪz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.

Lexical morphologyEdit

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

There are three principal approaches to morphology and each tries to capture the distinctions above in different ways:

• Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an item-and-arrangement approach.
• Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an item-and-process approach.
• Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a word-and-paradigm approach.

While the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list are very strong, they are not absolute.

Morpheme-based morphologyEdit

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 such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.^[d] In words such as dogs, dog is the root and the -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest and most naïve form, this way of analyzing word forms, called «item-and-arrangement», treats words as if they were made of morphemes put after each other («concatenated») like beads on a string. More recent and sophisticated approaches, such as distributed morphology, seek to maintain the idea of the morpheme while accommodating non-concatenated, analogical, and other processes that have proven problematic for item-and-arrangement theories and similar approaches.

Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms:^[19]

• Baudouin’s «single morpheme» hypothesis: Roots and affixes have the same status as morphemes.
• Bloomfield’s «sign base» morpheme hypothesis: As morphemes, they are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.
• Bloomfield’s «lexical morpheme» hypothesis: morphemes, affixes and roots alike are stored in the lexicon.

Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian^[20] and one Hockettian.^[21] For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with meaning, but did not have meaning itself.^{[clarification needed]} For Hockett, morphemes are «meaning elements», not «form elements». For him, there is a morpheme plural using allomorphs such as -s, -en and -ren. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, the two views are mixed in unsystematic ways so a writer may refer to «the morpheme plural» and «the morpheme -s» in the same sentence.

Lexeme-based morphologyEdit

Lexeme-based morphology usually takes what is called 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 alter 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;^[22] 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.

Word-based morphologyEdit

Word-based morphology is (usually) a word-and-paradigm approach. The 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. Word-and-paradigm approaches are also well-suited to capturing purely morphological phenomena, such as morphomes. Examples to show the effectiveness of word-based approaches 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 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. The 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 older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages according to their morphology. Some languages are isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative whose words tend to have many easily separable morphemes; others yet are inflectional or fusional because their inflectional morphemes are «fused» together. That leads to one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information. A standard example of an isolating language is Chinese. An agglutinative language is Turkish. Latin and Greek are prototypical inflectional or fusional languages.

It is clear that this classification is not at all clearcut, and many languages (Latin and Greek among them) 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 adopted.

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. The item-and-process and word-and-paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.

As there is very little fusion involved in word formation, classical typology mostly applies to inflectional morphology. Depending on the preferred way of expressing non-inflectional notions, languages may be classified as synthetic (using word formation) or analytic (using syntactic phrases).

Pingelapese is a Micronesian language spoken on the Pingelap atoll and on two of the eastern Caroline Islands, called the high island of Pohnpei. Similar to other languages, words in Pingelapese can take different forms to add to or even change its meaning. Verbal suffixes are morphemes added at the end of a word to change its form. Prefixes are those that are added at the front. For example, the Pingelapese suffix –kin means ‘with’ or ‘at.’ It is added at the end of a verb.

ius = to use → ius-kin = to use with

mwahu = to be good → mwahu-kin = to be good at

sa- is an example of a verbal prefix. It is added to the beginning of a word and means ‘not.’

pwung = to be correct → sa-pwung = to be incorrect

There are also directional suffixes that when added to the root word give the listener a better idea of where the subject is headed. The verb alu means to walk. A directional suffix can be used to give more detail.

-da = ‘up’ → aluh-da = to walk up

-di = ‘down’ → aluh-di = to walk down

-eng = ‘away from speaker and listener’ → aluh-eng = to walk away

Directional suffixes are not limited to motion verbs. When added to non-motion verbs, their meanings are a figurative one. The following table gives some examples of directional suffixes and their possible meanings.^[23]

• Morphome (linguistics)

• Lecture 7 Morphology in Linguistics 001 by Mark Liberman, ling.upenn.edu
• Intro to Linguistics – Morphology by Jirka Hana, ufal.mff.cuni.cz
• Morphology by Stephen R. Anderson, part of Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, cowgill.ling.yale.edu
• Introduction to Linguistic Theory — Morphology: The Words of Language by Adam Szczegielniak, scholar.harvard.edu
• LIGN120: Introduction to Morphology by Farrell Ackerman and Henry Beecher, grammar.ucsd.edu
• Morphological analysis by P.J.Hancox, cs.bham.ac.uk