323 Morphology

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323 Morphology

• The Structure of Words
• 3. Lexicon and Rules

• 3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
• The lexicon is in theory infinite, but in
  practice it is limited. Human beings know only a
  certain amount of information at any one time and
  it is impossible for a human to know an infinite
  amount of information. This holds in the lexicon,
  as well. Comparing a lexicon to a dictionary (the
  printed lexemes), a dictionary can hold only so
  much information at one time. The list can grow
  and grow, but it is never infinite.
• The potentiality for making up new words by
  means of the rules of word building is
  potentially infinite, but this has never been
  proved. Nevertheless, it possible to create a
  large number of words, larger than what most
  humans could possibly memorize. Thus we must
  distinguish between actual words and potential
  words.
• A neologism is a new word that has been
  created. Neologisms that do not catch on except
  occasionally are called occasionalisms. Note that
  this word was probably created recently and I
  doubt if it has really caught on. If true, then
  the word occasionalism is itself an
  occasionalism.
• Affixes that are readily adjoined to words to
  create new words (bases and stems) are called
  productive.
• E.g. The English suffix -er can be added to
  most verbs that denote an agent oriented action
  doer, fixer, baker, worker, runner, swimmer,
  writer, and so forth. The same suffix can also
  denote an instrument cooker, pickle slicer,
  popcorn maker, double-boiler, but it is doubtful
  that this verb productive, though it may be
  productive if the semantic class is known. Other
  affixes are clearly not productive
• E.g. -ic, ion, -ive, be-, de-, and so
  forth.
• Another problem with unproductivity (sic) is that
  unproductive affixes easily change the meaning of
  the word.
• Go to Course Outline, , Go to Chapter 2, Go to
  Chapter 4,

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3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
E.g. head, be-head give, forgive stand,
understand woman, womanize and so forth.
There are affixes that are very productive,
rather unproductive, somewhat unproductive, very
unproductive. H lists a finer list of
productiveness (p. 42). Another problem are
complex words that are lexical, but underlying
base is not lexical. To illustrate this, consider
disgruntled. It is derived from the base
gruntle, which is not a lexeme with the
associated meaning of disgruntled. I take the
view that forming bases is productive given the
restrictions on the base, but the base is not
always a lexeme. There no way to be absolutely
sure whether a given base will or will not be a
lexeme. As a consequence, all lexemes must be
enterred in the lexicon. If a base is created,
one must check to see if it is a lexeme, or one
may occasionally determine a lexical meaning for
the new base thus creating a new word, as I did
with unproductivity above. H argues that a
word-form lexicon is not desirable. A word-form
lexicon is one in which every declined or
conjugated form of each word is listed in it.
Inflected forms are generally predictable given
the class forms of each lexeme, except the
irregular ones such oxen, children, brethren is,
are, be, was, were (being and been) are regular
(except for the pronunciation of been in the US
and in Canada whether the American pronunciation
has taken over the earlier one which is still
standard in Britain. Even so, there is
evidence that all the word forms of everyday
usage are memorized and listed in the lexicon. I
read a paper at SFU claiming that the lexicon is
divided into two parts the list of lexemes and
the list of word-forms derived from them. Each
set of word forms derived from a lexeme are
linked to that lexeme at little cost to the
grammar. Linking is another research topic of
mine, which I cannot get into here.
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3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
H mentions that a lexicon should be elegant which
means the least number of rules that will produce
all the inflected forms. The lexical part of the
lexicon contains a list of all lexemes that a
speaker has. The word-form part of the lexicon
contains the inflected forms for each inflectable
lexeme (conjunctions, prepositions and other
functions are not inflected in English)
The lexeme PLAY is connected to the word-forms
play, plays, played, and playing by means of a
link. The links are for information transference
from the lexeme to the word-form, which we might
call formation, and from the word-form to the
lexeme the latter is called interpretation. The
most common word-forms are most likely memorized.
The word-form component will differ for each
speaker just each speakers probably knows a
different set of lexemes, everybodys experiences
are unique to that individual. The hypothesis is
that speakers normally draw from the set of word
forms in forming a sentence. To form an unusual
word, he must form the word-form from the lexeme
using the rules of his grammar. The above diagram
is incomplete, but it will suffice for now.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
A morpheme rule is any kind of regularity that is
noticed by speakers and is reflected in their
unconscious linguistic knowledge (H p. 44).
Though there may be several formal descriptions
that can be conjectured, H will discuss two
formalisms the morpheme based model and the
word-based model. 3.2.1 The morpheme based
model In this model morphemes are combined
together to form a new form, expressed by a set
if word-building rules. H compares these to
syntactic rules forming phrases, clauses and
sentences. Consider the following words as
examples E.g. fox -gt foxes, school house -gt
schoolhouse, build -gt rebuild, contrast -gt
contrast-ive-ness, sad -gt saddest. Word-struct
ure (word-formation) rules word-form lt--gt stem
( inflectional suffix) stem lt--gt base
lexical meaning (bad format here) base lt--gt
(deriv. prefix ) root, base (deriv.
suffix) , stem stem inflectional
suffix -es, -est derivational prefix
re- derivation suffix -ive, -ness root
fox, school, house, build, contrast,
sad. Phrase-structure rules (top down and
bottom up) S lt--gt NP VP VP --gt V NP NP
lt--gt Det Adj N N car, house, mouse,
stupidity, delight, V run, sleep, smoke,
rise, depend, forage,
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
D the, this, that Q a, an, one, ø,
some, few, a few, several, A happy, red,
large, petite, long, deep, fuzzy, Some
syntacticians question question whether rules
such as the VP expansion rule is really
necessary. For example, the lexical entry for
DESTROY should include the fact that it requires
a direct object (a complement) E.g. V DESTROY
____ NP. They query whether the rule VP -gt V
(NP) is really necessary. I dont like the
idea that the VP rule is really a rule. It is a
statement of sets E.g. VP is a set that
contains V and NP. This is merely a statement of
sets. We could also write as E.g. VP lt--gt V,
NP. Note In set theory notation, the comma
indicates linear order VP is a set that contains
the ordered set V then NP. This notation is not
normally used in linguistics the plus
denotes order. Note the curly braces can be
omitted once it is understood that VP, V and NP
are each a set. The lexical expansion above is a
statement that in essence says If one member of
the set V is DESTROY, then the second set is NP,
which is the complement of the verb. What
remains in question is how to account for an
optional member. In reality, there are no
optional members. Recall that ø as a phonological
sign is permitted in set theory. An optional
member actually exists it merely has ø as its
sign The S John likes to eat implies he likes
to eat something. The pronoun may take on a zero
form for certain verbs V EAT NP ø.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
The lexical entry for EAT now should be V EAT,
complement, NP, -ø, ø. By -ø I mean it has
a phonetic sign. Not all verb take a zero
complement such as DESTROY. V DESTROY,
complement, NP, -ø. In morphology, the plural
suffix -s would have the grammical (lexical)
indicating that it requires a noun as a host H
/z/, N ___, plural. D Plural, N ___,
/z/. The ordering is not crucial, but it should
be used consistently. The square brackets are
often used to denote a feature. The (or -)
is a binary value E.g. Plural plural,
-Plural - singular. This distinction becomes
important once the theory of binary oppositions
is adopted. 3.2.2 The Word Based Model.