Morphology Cont

1
Lecture 8

• Morphology (Cont)

2
Problem in morphological Description

• What is the inflectional morpheme which makes
  sheep the plural of sheep, or men the plural of
  man? (The irregularity issue)
• What is the inflectional morpheme which makes
  went the past tense of go?
• What are the stems of legal and oral?
• ( Sometimes there is no derivational
  relationship between an adjective and noun).

3
Problem in morphological Description

• A full description of a language morphology will
  have to take account of both historical
  influences and the effect of borrowed elements.
• Allomorphs different forms of morphemes that
  indicate a certain morph in a certain language.
• Morphs the actual forms used to realize
  morphemes.

4
Other Languages

• The basic categories listed earlier can be used
  to explore and describe the morphological
  features of other languages.
• The first example below is from English and the
  second is from Aztec
• Stem Derivational Inflectional
• Dark -en ((make)
  -ed (past) darkened
• Mic (die) -tia (cause to)
  -s (future) mictias (will
  kill)

5
Other Languages

• Reduplication is a process used by several
  languages as a means of inflectional marking.
• Examples
• The following data is from Ilocano, a language of
  the Philippines
• Ulo (head) ululo (heads)
• Dalan (road) daldalan (roads)
• Mula (plant) mulmula (plants)