Word structure in linguistics

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.

History[edit]

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]

Fundamental concepts[edit]

Lexemes and word-forms[edit]

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 word[edit]

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 formation[edit]

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 formation[edit]

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 morphosyntax[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. 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]

Allomorphy[edit]

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 morphology[edit]

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.

Models[edit]

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 morphology[edit]

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 morphology[edit]

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 morphology[edit]

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).

Morphological typology[edit]

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).

Examples[edit]

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]

Directional suffix	Motion verb	Non-motion verb
-da	up	Onset of a state
-di	down	Action has been completed
-la	away from	Change has caused the start of a new state
-doa	towards	Action continued to a certain point in time
-sang	from	Comparative

See also[edit]

• Morphome (linguistics)

Footnotes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

• 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

Conversion

The word
is
an independent unit of language. The word is composed of morphemes of
different types: root
morphemes
and affixational
morphemes.
Morphemes are not independent. Morpheme
can be defined as the smallest indivisible meaningful two-facet
language unit. The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe—
form + eme—
smallest unit.

Root-morpheme
is the semantic nucleus of a word with which no grammatical
properties of the word are connected. It has a very general lexical
meaning common to a set of semantically related words such as
teacher,
teach, teaching, teachable.

Affixational
morphemes
are subdivided into inflections
and derivational
affixes.
Inflections are used to form different word-forms such –s,-‘s,
-s’
in teacher, or –s,
-ed
in play. Derivational affixes are used for building new words, they
are subdivided into prefixes
and suffixes
such as –
ness,
in goodness,
-er
in teacher,
-less
in helpless,
-ment
in movement,
dis-
in discover
un-
in untidy
etc.

The
stem is
that part of the word which remains unchanged throughout its
paradigm. If we take the paradigm ask
asks asked asking,
we can find the stem ask-,
if we take the paradigm singer,
singers, singer’s singers’,
the stem will be singer-.
The stem is different from the root morpheme, because the stem always
belongs to a definite part of speech, we can speech of verb stem in
the example ask-
and we can speak of noun stem in the example singer-.
As for root morpheme in teach,
teacher, teaching, teachable
we have root morpheme teach
used in verb stem teach,
noun stems teacher
and teaching
and adjective stem teachable.
There are three structural types of stems: simple,
derived and
compound.
Simple stem consists of one root-morpheme, derived stem consists of
one stem and a derivational suffix of prefix and compound stem
consists of two stems.

According
to the number of morphemes words can be classified into monomorphic
and polymorphic.
Monomorphic
or
root-words consist of only one root-morpheme e.g. dog, give, make
small etc. All polymorphic
words fall into two groups derived words and compound words. Derived
words
are composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational
morphemes e.g. cooperate,
supernatural,
retrospective,
kingdom,
freedom,
friendship,
worker,
revolution,
movement,
hopeful,
manly,
comical,
afternoon,
overlook,
undertake.
Compound
words contain
at least two root morphemes, or two stems with or without
derivational morphemes e.g. lamp-shade, eye-ball, door-step,
looking-glass, pen-holder, saleswoman, handicraft, Anglo-Saxon,
wedding-ring, aircraft-carrier.

Word-formation

Word-formation
is the process of creating new words from the material available in
the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and
patterns. For instance, the noun
driver
is formed after the pattern v+er,
i.e.
a verb-stem +
the
noun-forming suffix -er.
The meaning of the noun
driver
is related to the meanings of the stem
drive-and
the suffix —er:
‘a driver is one who drives (a carriage, motorcar, railway engine,
etc.). Likewise compounds resulting from two or more stems joined
together to form a new word are also built on quite definite
structural and semantic patterns and formulas, cf., for instance,
adjectives of the snow-white
type built according to the formula n—adj.,
i.e. a noun-stem+an
adjective stem:
coal-black, age-long, care­free,
etc. It can easily be observed that the meaning of the whole compound
is also related to the meanings of the component parts.

As
a subject of study, word-formation is that branch of lexicology,
which studies the patterns on which a language, in this case the
English language, builds new words. It is self-evident that
word-formation can deal only with words which are analyzable both
structurally and semantically. The study of the simple word has no
place in it. Therefore,
writer, displease, atom-free,
etc. are relevant to word-formation, but
to write, to please, atom, free
are not.

Like any
other linguistic phenomenon word-formation may be studied from two
angles—synchronically and diachronically. It is necessary to
distinguish between these two approaches, for synchronically the
linguist investigates the present-day system of the types of
word-formation while diachronically he is concerned with the history
of word-building. To illustrate the difference of approach we shall
consider affixation. Synchronically a derived word
is
structurally and semantically
more complex
than a simple one, while diachronically it
was formed
from some other word.
Those are cases of the process called backformation
(or
back-derivation),
cf. beggar
—to beg; editor —-to edit; chauffeur —to chauff,
and some others. The fact that historically the verbs to
beg, to edit,
etc. were derived from the corresponding agent-nouns is of no
synchronous relevance. For the present-day speaker no such
relationship exists, therefore they are all simple words in Modern
English.

In
conformity with the basic structural types of stems and words
described above the following two types of word-formation may be
distinguished: word-derivation
and
word-composition
(or compounding).
Words created by word-derivation have only one primary stem and one
derivational affix in terms of word-formation analysis. We can speak
of affixation
e.g.
cleanness
(from
clean),
chairmanship
(from
chairman), waterproof ness
(from
waterproof), openhandedness (from
open-handed) (suffixal
derivatives),
to
overestimate
(from
to estimate)
(prefixal derivative) etc.
Some derived words have no affixes, because derivation is achieved
through conversion,
e.g.
to paper
(from
paper), a fall
(from
to fall),
etc. Words created by word-composition
have at least two primary
stems,
e.g. coal-black,
ice-cold, looking-glass, daydream, hotbed, speedometer,(compounds)
etc. Besides, there are words built by a simultaneous application of
composition and derivation (suffixation or conversion)—(derivational
compounds),
e.g.
long-legged, open-minded, a breakdown,
etc.

The
shortening
of
words stands apart from the above two-fold division of
word-formation. It cannot be regarded as part of either
word-derivation or word-composition for the simple reason that
neither the root-morpheme nor the derivational affix can be singled
out from the shortened word (cf.
lab, exam,
V-day,
etc.). Consequently, the shortening of words should be treated
separately as a specific type of word-formation.

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• 

  1 слайд

  WORD-STRUCTURE
  Morphemic Structure of Words
  Lecture 8

• 

  2 слайд

  1. Word-Structure and Morphemes

  Morphe – ‘form’ + -eme. The Greek suffix – eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest unit (phoneme, sememe, lexeme)

  Word-structure is internal organization of words.
  The morpheme is the smallest indivisible two-facet language unit.

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  3 слайд

  MORPHEMES
  Morphemes cannot be segmented into smaller units without losing their constitutive essence (two-facetedness) – association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-pattern.
  Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words but not independently.

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  4 слайд

  SEGMENTATION OF WORDS
  INTO MORPHEMES
  Boiler = boil- + er;
  Driller = drill- + er ;
  recurrence of the morpheme -er in these and other similar words and of the morphemes boil- and drill- in
  to boil, a boil, boiling and
  to drill, a drill, drilling, a drill-press, etc.

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  5 слайд

  SEGMENTATION OF WORDS
  INTO MORPHEMES
  flower-pot = flower- + -pot;
  shoe-lace = shoe- + -lace;
  Like a word a morpheme is a two-facet language unit, an association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-pattern.
  Unlike a word a morpheme is not an autonomous unit and can occur in speech only as a constituent part of the word.
  Lace [l], [ei] ,[s] — without meaning.

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  6 слайд

  Word-cluster
  please pleasing pleasure pleasant
  [pli:z] [pli:z] [pleʒ] [plez]

  All the representations of the given morpheme that manifest alteration are called allomorphs of that morpheme or morpheme variants.
  Thus, [pli:z], [plez] and [рlеʒ] are allomorphs of оnе and the same morpheme.

• 

  7 слайд

  The root-morphemes
  in the word-clusters
  Duke [dju:k], ducal [‘dju:kl],
  duchess [‘d˄tʃiƨ], duchy [‘d˄tʃi]
  or
  Poor [puə] , poverty [‘povəti] —
  are the allomorphs of one morpheme

• 

  8 слайд

  2.1. Semantic Classification of Morphemes
  Root-morphemes (radicals) — the lexical nucleus of words, which has an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morpheme of the language:
  Helpless, handy, rewrite, hopeful, disorder
  Help- hand- -write hope- -order
  The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster:
  work- in to work, worker, working or
  theor- in theory, theorist, theoretical, etc.

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  Non-root morphemes
  Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes (inflections) and affixational morphemes (affixes). Inflections carry only grammatical meaning.
  Lexicology is concerned only with affixational morphemes.
  A prefix: understand – mis-understand, correct – in-correct).
  A suffix: (-en, -y, -less in heart-en heart-y, heart-less).

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  2.2. Structural Classification of Morphemes
  A free morpheme — one that coincides with the stem or a word-form. Many root-morphemes are free morphemes, for example, use − of the noun useless is a free morpheme because it coincides with one of the forms of the noun use.
  A bound morpheme — a morpheme that must be attached to another element. It occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are bound morphemes for they always make part of a word, for example:-ness, -ship in the words kind-ness, friend-ship; un-, dis- in the words un-tidy, dis-like.

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  All unique roots and pseudo-roots are-bound morphemes.
  Such are the root-morphemes theor- in theory, theoretical, etc.,
  barbar-in barbarism, barbarian, etc.,
  -ceive in conceive, perceive, etc.

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  Semi-bound (semi-free) morphemes -morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme: the morpheme well and half can occur as free morphemes: sing well, half a month.
  They can also occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-eaten, half-done.

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  The relationship between the two classifications of morphemes

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  Word-structure
  on the morphemic level:
  1st Group — Combining forms are morphemes borrowed namely from Greek or Latin in which they exist as free forms. They are considered to be bound roots: tele-phone consists of two bound roots.
  Phonoscope = ‘sound’ + ‘seeing’;
  Microscope = ‘smallness’ + ‘seeing’;
  Telegraph = ‘far’ + ‘writing’;

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  The 2nd Group embraces morphemes occupying a kind of intermediate position, morphemes that are changing their class membership.
  Root morpheme man – in postman, fisherman, gentleman, etc. in comparison with man-made, man-servant.
  -man = -er; in cabman, chairman, tradesman
  Not a male adult But agent!
  * She is an Englishman
  *All women are tradesmen.

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  3. TYPES OF MEANING IN MORPHEMES
  In morphemes can be singled out different types of meaning depending on the semantic class they belong to.
  Root-morphemes have lexical, differential and distributional types of meaning.
  Affixational morphemes have lexical, part of-speech, differential and distributional types of meaning.
  Both root-morphemes and affixational morphemes are devoid of grammatical meaning.

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  3.1. LEXICAL MEANING
  Root-morphemes have an individual lexical meaning shared by no other morphemes in the language: light, deaf, deep, etc.
  Affixational morphemes have a more generalizing character of lexical meaning: the suffix –en carries the meaning “the change of a quality”, e.g. to lighten – to become lighter, to deafen – to make somebody deaf.

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  Morphemes may be also analyzed into denotational and connotational components:

  The connotational component of meaning may be found in affixational morphemes: -ette (kitchenette); -ie (dearie, girlie); -ling (duckling) bear a heavy emotive charge.

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  The affixational morphemes with the same denotational meaning sometimes differ only in connotation: the morphemes –ly, –like, -ish in the words womanly, womanlike, womanish have the same denotational meaning of similarity but differ in the connotational component (женственный – женский – бабий).

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  Stylistic reference may be found in morphemes of different types: the affixational morphemes –
  -ine (chlorine), -oid (rhomboid)
  are bookish.

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  3.2. DIFFERENTIAL MEANING
  Differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes. In words consisting of two or more morphemes, one of the constituent morphemes always has differential meaning: in the word forehead the morpheme – head serves to distinguish the word from other words containing the morpheme fore-: forefoot, forepart, foreground.

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  3.2. DISTRIBUTIONAL MEANING
  Distributional meaning is the meaning of the order and arrangement of morphemes making up the word.
  It is found in all words containing more than one morpheme: the word teacher is composed of two morphemes teach- and –er both of which possess the denotational meaning ‘to help students to learn something’ and ‘the doer of the action’.
  A different arrangement of the same morphemes *erteach would make the word meaningless.

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  3.4. PART-OF-SPEECH MEANING
  Part-of-speech meaning is the indicative of the part of speech to which a derivational word belongs: the affixational morpheme – ness (darkness) is used to form nouns, while the affixational morpheme –less (careless) forms adjectives.
  Sometimes the part-of-speech meaning of morphemes predominates: the morpheme –ice in the word justice serves principally to transfer the part-of-speech meaning of the morpheme just- into another class and namely that of the noun.

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  4. MORPHEMIC TYPES OF WORDS
  According to the number of morphemes words are classified into monomorphic (root-words) and polymorphic words.
  Monomorphic or root-words consist of only one root-morpheme: small, dog, make, put, doll, pen, ect.

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  Polymorphic words according to the number of root-morphemes are classified into:
  Monoradical words (having one-root morpheme) fall into three subtypes:
  radical-suffixal words, i.e. words consisting of one root-morpheme and two or more suffixal morphemes, for example, respectable, respectability;
  radical-prefixal words, i.e. words consisting of one root-morpheme and a prefixal morpheme, for example, overcome, unbutton;
  prefixo-radical-suffixal words, i.e. words which consist of one root, prefixal and suffixal morphemes (e.g. unforgettable, misinterpretation).

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  Polyradical words (having words consisting of two or more roots) fall into two subtypes:
  polyradical words which consist of two or more roots with no affixational morpheme, for example, pen-friend, copybook;
  polyradical words which contain at least two roots and one or more affixational morpheme, for instance, safety-pin, light-mindedness, pen-holder.

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  5. TYPES OF WORD-SEGMENTABILITY
  Word-segmentability is the division of words into morphemes.
  Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished:
  complete,
  conditional,
  defective.

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  5.1. COMPLETE SEGMENTABILITY
  Complete segmentability
  is characteristic of words, the morphemic structure of which is transparent enough, as their individual morphemes clearly stand out within the word and can be easily isolated.

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  The morphemes making up words of complete segmentability are called morpheme proper or full morphemes

  The transparent morphemic structure of the segmentable words careless, stressful is conditioned by the fact that their constituent morpheme recur with the same meaning in other words: thoughtful, powerful.

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  5.2. CONDITIONAL SEGMENTSBILITY
  Conditional segmentability characterizes words whose segmentation into the constituent morphemes is doubtful for semantic reasons.
  In the words retain, detain or deceive the sound-cluster – [ri-], [di-] seem to be singled out easily due to their recurrence in a number of words (cf. rewrite, reorganize, decode, deorganize).

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  Neither [ri-], [di-] nor [-tain], [si:v] possess any lexical or part-of-speech meaning of their own.

  They have differential and distributional meanings: the [ri-] distinguishes retain from detain and the [-tein] distinguishes retain from receive, whereas their order and arrangement point to the status of the re-, de- as different from that of the –tain and –ceive within the structure of the words.

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  The morphemes making up words of conditional segmentability do not rise to the status of full morphemes for semantic reason and that is why are called pseudo-morphemes or
  quasi-morphemes.

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  5.3. DEFECTIVE SEGMENTABILITY
  Defective segmentability is the property of words whose component morphemes seldom or never recur in other words.
  One of the component morphemes of these words is a unique morpheme, which is isolated and understood as meaningful because the constituent morphemes display a more or less clear denotational meaning.
  In streamlet, ringlet, leaflet the morpheme –let has diminutive meaning.

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  In the word hamlet деревушка the morpheme -let has the meaning of diminutiveness. This morpheme occurs in the words ringlet, leaflet, streamlet.
  The sound-cluster [hæm-] does not recur in any other English word.
  The morpheme ham- carries a differential and distributional meaning as it distinguishes hamlet from streamlet, ringlet.

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  comparison with words
  Locket медальон, lionet, cellaret погребец, etc. leads one to the isolation of the morpheme -et having a diminutive meaning, the more so that the morphemes lock-, lion-, cellar-, etc. recur in other words: (cf. lock, locky; lion, lioness; cellar, cellarage).

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  The isolation of the morpheme -et leaves in the word pocket the sound-cluster [роk] that does not occur in any other word of Modern English.
  The morpheme [роk] clearly carries a differential and distributional meaning as it distinguishes pocket from the words mentioned above and thus must be qualified as a unique morpheme.

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  The morphemic analysis of words like
  cranberry, gooseberry, strawberry shows that they also possess defective morphemic segmentability: the morphemes cran-, goose-, straw- are unique morphemes.

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  on the level of morphemic analysis
  the linguist has to operate with two types of elementary units, namely full morphemes and pseudo-(quasi-)morphemes.
  A considerable percentage of words of conditional and defective segmentability signals a relatively complex character of the morphological system of the language, reveals the existence of various heterogeneous layers in its vocabulary.

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  7. PROCEDURE OF MORPHEMIC ANALYSIS
  The procedure of segmenting words into the constituent morphemes is known as the method of Immediate and Ultimate Constituents (any of two meaningful parts forming a larger linguistic unit. L. Bloomfield).
  It is based on a binary principle, i.e. each stage of the procedure involves two components the word immediately breaks into.

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  At each stage these two components are referred to as the Immediate constituents (ICs). Each IC at the next stage of analysis is broken into smaller meaningful elements.
  The analysis is completed when constituents are incapable of further division, i.e. morphemes.
  These morphemes are referred to as the Ultimate Constituents (UCs).

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  The noun friendliness is first segmented into the ICs:
  friendly- (recurring in the adjectives friendly and friendly-looking).
  –ness (found in a countless number of nouns): happiness, darkness.
  The IC –ness is at the same time an UC of the noun, as it cannot be broken into any smaller elements possessing both sound-form and meaning.
  The IC friendly- is next broken into the ICs
  friend- (recurring in friendship, unfriendly) and
  –ly (recurring in wifely, brotherly).
  The ICs friend- and –ly are both UCs of the word under analysis.

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  The procedure of segmenting a word into its Ultimate Constituent morphemes

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  8. PRINCIPLES OF WORD-SEGMENTATION
  According to the affix principle the segmentation of the word into its constituent morphemes is based on the identification of an affixational morpheme within a set of words, for example, the identification of the morphemes –less leads to the segmentation of words like thoughtless, careless, merciless into the suffixational morpheme –less and the root-morphemes thought-, care-, merci- within a word-cluster.

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  According to the root principle the identification of the root-morpheme agree- in the words agreeable, agreement, disagree makes it possible to split these words into the root agree- and the affixational morphemes -able, -ment, dis-.

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  Summary and Conclusions:
  There are two levels of approach to the study of word-structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation analysis.
  The basic unit of the morphemic level is the morpheme defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language unit.

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  Summary and Conclusions:
  Three types of morphemic segmentability of words are distinguished in linguistic literature: complete, conditional and defective. Words of conditional and defective segmentability are made up of full morphemes and pseudo (quasi) morphemes. The latter do not rise to the status of full morphemes either for semantic reasons or because of their unique distribution.

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  Summary and Conclusions:
  Semantically morphemes fall into root-morphemes and affixational morphemes (prefixes and suffixes); structurally into free, bound and semi-free (semi-bound) morphemes.
  The structural types of words at the morphemic level are described in terms of the number and type of their ICs as monomorphic and polymorphic words.

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  References
  Зыкова И.В. Практический курс английской лексикологии. М.: Академия, 2006. – С. 52-56.
  Гинзбург Р.З. Лексикология английского языка. М.: Высшая школа, 1979. – С. 89-106.
  Антрушина Г.Б., Афанасьева О.В., Морозова Н.Н. Лексикология английского языка. М.: Дрофа, 2006. – С. – 78-128.

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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

The content on this page originated on Wikipedia and is yet to be significantly improved. Contributors are invited to replace and add material to make this an original article.

This article is about the linguistic field of morphology. For other uses of the term morphology, please see morphology (disambiguation).

In linguistics, morphology is the study of word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopædia is to encyclopædias; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case 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 such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

History

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. The Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis.

The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort «Morphologie» («for the science of word formation, I choose the term ‘morphology'», Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35). It derives from the Greek words μορφή («form») and λόγος («explanation, account»).

Fundamental concepts

Lexemes and word forms

The term «word» is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example of dog vs. dogs, there is one sense in which these two are the same «word» (they are both nouns that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and another sense in which they are different words (they can’t generally be used in the same sentences without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs is and are in The dog is happy and The dogs are happy).

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 dog and dogs are «the same word,» is called lexeme. The second sense is called word-form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, 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.

Inflection vs. word-formation

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word-formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or dishwasher 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 compound form; dog-catcher is therefore a compound, because both dog and catcher are complete word-forms in their own right before the compounding process was applied, and are subsequently treated as one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from dépendant, the French present participle of dépendre which means «to hang down» (and is also a cognate of the English verb depend).

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.

Paradigms and morphosyntax

A 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, number, gender and case.

The inflectional categories used to group word-forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be grammatical categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are grammatical 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 dog and dogs, 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 dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. 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 not so. 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.

Allomorphy and morphophonology

In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word-forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as 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», while the second «two or more of X», and the difference is always the plural form -s 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 ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, 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 -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an «extra» vowel appears before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative changes to the form of a word, are called allomorphy.

There are several kinds of allomorphy. One is pure allomorphy, where the allomorphs are just arbitrary. Other, more extreme cases of allomorphy are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule cannot be explained as being related on a phonological basis: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form.

On the other hand, other kinds of allomorphy are due to the interaction between morphology and phonology. 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 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. In order to «rescue» the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. This is an example of vowel epenthesis in English. 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.

The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the category of sandhi.

Lexical morphology

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.

Models of morphology

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

• 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.

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

Morpheme-based morphology

In morpheme-based morphology, word-forms are analyzed as sequences of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.^[1] In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word-forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.

The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology, and many five-minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means the dominant approach.

Applying a strictly morpheme-based model quickly leads to complications when one tries to analyze many forms of allomorphy. For example, the word dogs is easily broken into the root dog and the plural morpheme -s. The same analysis is straightforward for oxen, assuming the stem ox and a suppletive plural morpheme -en. How then would the same analysis «split up» the word geese into a root and a plural morpheme? In the same manner, how to split sheep?

Theorists wishing to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve the idea in cases like these by saying that geese is goose followed by a null morpheme (a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem is a morphophonological rule. Also, morpheme-based analyses commonly posit null morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun dogs is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme -s, then one might analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.

Lexeme-based morphology

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 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; 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.

The Item-and-Process approach bypasses the difficulties inherent in the Item-and-Arrangement approaches. Faced with a plural like geese, one is not required to assume a null morpheme: while the plural of dog is formed by affixing -s, the plural of goose is formed simply by altering the vowel in the stem.

Word-based morphology

Word-based morphology is a (usually) 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 than 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). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena such as this.

Morphological typology

For more information, see: 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 fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are said to be «fused» together. 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. However, examined against the light of the three general models of morphology described above, it is also clear that the classification is very much biased towards a morpheme-based conception of morphology. It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages. It describes the latter as having separate morphemes «fused» together (which often does correspond to the history of the language, but not to its synchronic reality).

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 also 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).

Footnotes

See also

• Cranberry word
• Noun
• Verb
• Syntax
• Phonology
• Grammar
• Linguistics

Bibliography

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