323 Morphology

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323 Morphology

• The Structure of Words
• 3. Lexicon and Rules
• (This page last updated 26 SE 06)

• 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-, a-,
  re- and so forth.
• Another problem with unproductivity (sic) is that
  unproductive affixes easily change the meaning of
  the word.

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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 more 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 speaker 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 fox-es, school house -gt
schoolhouse, build -gt re-build, con-trast -gt
con-trast-ive-ness, sad -gt sadd-est. Word-stru
cture (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, happy, sad, down,
never, do, be, and so forth. Phrase-structure
rules (top down and bottom up) S lt--gt NP
VP VP --gt V NP NP lt--gt Det Adj N or
better NP lt--gt Det Adj N (an intermediate
phrase). N car, house, mouse, stupidity,
delight, forever, down, V run, sleep,
smoke, rise, depend, forage, Note The symbol
lt--gt means that a form on the left side of the
arrow is mapped into the structure on the right
and the form on the right side is mapped into the
left side.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
D the, this, these, that, those 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. Rather,
it is a statement of sets E.g. VP is a set that
contains V and NP V and NP are members of the
set VP. This is merely a statement of sets. I
will go one step further and write it as E.g.
VP lt--gt ltV, NPgt. Note In set theory notation,
the comma enclosed in angled brackets 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 as shown above. 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 must
have a phonetic sign. Not all verb take a zero
complement such as DESTROY. V DESTROY,
complement, NP, -ø. The logic for the ø
complement rests in set theory and the
3-component theory. The complement fills the
function role, and its form is ø, and its sign
has to be ø. If it has no form how can it have a
sign? Each component constitutes a set, usually
called the complement of the verb, or an argument
of the verb E.g. COOK, -ø, ø, -ø,ø. A
morphological form has no form, but it has a
sign E.g. Pl (of certain nouns), ø,
voiced final obstruent E.g. calf, calves
/kæf, /kævz/. The fact that EAT takes theme
argument prompts this analysis. In morphology,
the plural suffix -s would have the grammatical
feature 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.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
3.2.2 The Word Based Model. Here, the
fundamental significance of the word is
significant. Rather than breaking words down, a
word-schema is formulated. For example, the
following English verb-forms can expressed in
the following a) hits, sits, types, knows,
feels, acts, procrastinates, regurgitates, and so
forth b) /Xz/, V, third person singular of
V Where X is the Lexeme of each verb in a), V
and /z/ third person singular of Vs. /X/ is a
phonemic string such as /plej/. the word-schema
a) that there is a list of word forms that end in
/z/, and that they are verbs (V), and that /a/ is
the third person singular of V. There is a
closely related schema E. g /X/, V,
x Now.the two schemas can be represented in
the following mapping correspondence E. g.
/Xz/, V, third person singular of X lt--gt /X/,
V, x.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
This model eliminates the need for morphemes,
bases, or roots. Words are related by mapping one
scheme to another. E.g. play/played /X/, V,
x lt--gt Xd, V, past tense of xd there
is a string /X/, it is a verb (go, write, play,
cough, ), and a function x this
corresponds with the string /Xd/, the same verb,
and the past tense of xd xd is the function
x of /X/, and d which has the function past
tense. E.g. /plej/,V, engage in games
corresponds with /plej/. V. engage in games
past tense. PLAY ltgt PLAYD. PLAY stands for the
first bracketed sequence in the above line and
PLAYD stands the second sequence. Now is this
perfectly clear? Methinks not. These rule schemas
dont cut the mustard as afar as I am concerned.
Dr. A. told me that these are explanatory, but
just descriptive. If they cannot lead to an
explanatory goal, why bother. At least we should
try to become familiar with them, just in case I
turn out to be on the wrong track. Let us go
along with set theory, followed by many logicians
and mathematicians and possibly others in other
fields. First, the following hits, sits, types,
knows, feels, acts, procrastinates, regurgitates
form a set in their own right, just as the
uninflected form (infinitive form) is a set and
the proposed Lexemes of them form a set E.g.
HIT, SIT, TYPE, KNOW, FEEL, ACT, PROCRASTINATE,
REGURGITATE. The third person singular is a set
with one member /z/. Recall that each lexeme and
grammeme has three properties E.g. HIT, V
stem, /hit/ 3 P. Sg. (3PS), suffix, /z/. The
form hits is a set that contains two subsets
(members) E.g. HIT, 3PS lt--gt
/hit//z/. This tells us that HIT, 3PS can be
mapped to /hit//z/ /hitz/. Note the
phoneme symbol / is a set marker for phonemic
sets using both / is totally redundant. I did
so here to emphasize this point. Using one or the
other is fine just that / give us more
information.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
First Ill do writing as two morphemes
The feature Suffix, Noun house accounts for
the adjunction of the suffix to the noun stem
writing (writ-ing). This operation takes place in
the syntax in the version of 322 that I taught
until 2003. In the word-based model we obtain
Lets look at an example of word derivation.
E.g. workagent lt--gt worker. (more or
less) /X/V, x ( an agent) lt--gt /X/V, N,
one who xs. But is it really desirable to do
so? H seems to think so, but I am being a bit
reserved for reasons that I will talk about in
the next chapter (I hope).
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rul es
H generalizes the word-based by replacing write
with X E.g. one who Xs In the morpheme
based model, one can do similarly X,
V-wordform, /x/, where /x/ is the sign of X.
There does not appear to be a big difference
with the exception that the word-based grammar
uses repetition. H uses X which really means
the set of words of a given class. The section
following on morpheme subtraction seems to
support the notion of a morpheme rather than a
string of phonemes. Set theory predicts
morphemes, word-based grammar does not. H
mentions that bases are not necessary. Another
difference is that in word-based grammar, the
entire word-based form corresponds to another
word-based form. In morpheme based grammar, the
mapping is from function to sign and vice versa.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
In the morpheme based model we need to be more
specific of rule writing. The concatenation rules
of Morphology will join sign of the lexeme and
the sign of the grammeme. The feature Suffix
tells us that the grammeme is a suffix to be
adjoined to the right end of a lexeme, and the
feature V-host tells us that the host, the
lexeme to which it must be adjoined, must be a
verb. Similarly, N-host tells us that the host
is a noun. Although Chomsky uses A for modifiers,
we must be careful to exclude degree words and
phrases from A A adjective, adverb.
Therefore, WRITE and Progressive (Prog) lt--gt
/rajt-i? /. The rules for obtaining a verb and
one of its inflectional suffixes is determined in
the syntax, especially where syntax and
morphology overlap. I taught this approach in
syntax (L322) for several years. Where as some
linguists believe there is no formal division
between syntax and morphology (the distinction is
one of convenience rather than formal), there are
others who believe that the words syntax and
morphology should not be used in the same
sentence. (I suspect that H is leaning in the
direction of the latter.) The schemas are not a
theoretical device, but a descriptive device.
Recall the 3 goals of a theory. The main point of
word-based grammars are the schemas. That is
where a true comparison will occur. The schemas
have no explanatory value. Recall that our third
goal is to find the best explanatory system that
will account for the facts of the corpus. H will
have more to say on this later. Therefore, we
should not make any conclusions at this time, but
we should try to understand both approaches.
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3.3 The form of Morphological Rules
3.3.1 Pattern Loss Pattern loss is one (or more)
inflectional categories. For example, H mentions
Ancient Greek and its evolution into New
Testament Greek. The nominative case forms for
Ancient Greek adelphós brother adelphós
(singular), adelphó (dual), adelphoí
(plural) By the time of NT Greek, the dual had
disappeared completely without a trace leaving
two grammatical categories Sg. and Pl. 3.3.2
Coalescence (Merger) Coalescence is a diachronic
change where two syntactically separate
word-forms (related grammatically) coalesce or
merge into one complex word-form. In Old Russian,
the reflexive of a verb was formed with a
reflexive functional word. By Modern Russian the
reflexive had been phonologically reduced so that
it could not bear independent stress. The form
had become inseparably conjoined to the end of
any-word form of a particular verb. Not all
verbs form the reflexive in this way. E.g. OR
myt? sebja to wash oneself. MR mytsja to
wash oneself. In MR some verbs still take the
modern form of the reflexive to form the
reflexive. The reflexive suffix has other
functions and can change the meaning of the stem.
This form seems to be more of weak clitic that
must adjoined on to a verb. This is somewhat
similar to Hs hypothesis that walk did
(roughly) -gt walked. In pre-English, the past
t. suffix became adjoined to the verb
stem. 3.3.3 Analogical Change Analogical change
is a when an inflectional pattern is modified to
be another pattern. There are verbs in English
which were regular (weak) at one time but became
irregular (strong) following the pattern of
another verb class. E.g. the past tense of
dive is dived in standard English.
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3.3 The form of Morphological Rules
Over time the substandard form dove came into
existence due to the pattern of strive - strove.
Arrive follows the same pattern. The interesting
item here is that the analogical change applies
to the past tense, but not the non-progressive
participle (in my dialect, at least based on
for some verbs based strive, strove,
striven E.g. dive, dove, dived (diven)
arrive, arrove, arrived (arriven), But for
other verbs, the non-progressive participle as
well based on sting, stung, stung E.g. dig,
dug, dug drag, drug, drug (this one really gets
the purists going). 3.3.4 Reanalysis Reanalysis
is when a morpheme a root loses its function
and becomes part of another morpheme. H cites
the Ancient Greek example of kithára. kithára
guitar kithar-îzo to play the guitar
-izo is adjoined to the stem, to use
X kithar-is-tés A guitar player (who does
something with X, X a noun) -tés one who
uses X. later kithar-istés A guitar
player (who does something with X, X a noun).
Through reanalysis, the two suffixes -es- and
-tés became merged as -istés single suffix
one who does something with X, it is directly
added to noun stems. Secretion is defined
(roughly) as the process when a string of
phonemes is reanalyzed so that the string
becomes a morpheme with such-and-such a function.
H cites the example of alcoholic (alcohol-ic)
which influences new words X to first form a
blend workaholic. A new morpheme arose aholic,
when work- is subtracted from workaholic
leaving aholic behind as a suffix, when can
then be added to some nouns with the meaning of
one who indulges in X to a relatively high
degree.
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The form of Morphological Rules
3.3.5 Other Changes Phonological changes cease
to be regular and predictable E.g. At one time
the Old-English word for foot was fot and
feet was föti. The umlauted vowel gradually
became /e/, and at some point in time, the
plural marker for Old English, /I/ was
gradually lost leaving /fot/ (Sg.) and /fet/.
After the Great Vowel Shift (16th to 18th C),
/e/ -gt /I/, and inexplicably, /o/ in foot
delaxed to /?/. After the loss of word-final
(plural marker) /I/, the conditioning factor
was lost. The alternation is now
morphological. Semantic shift of the morpheme
is another change At one time in the earlier
stages of Russian, the suffix /l/ referred to a
participle, but it is unclear what the original
function of the participle was. The participle
combined with an auxiliary verb which
corresponds with the auxiliary be in English. In
time the auxiliary was lost in this construction
as was the original way of forming the past
tense. The l-participle took on the meaning of
the past tense.

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