How many morphemes are in the word farmer

Language: Its Structure and Use

Chapter 2: Words and Their

Parts: Lexicon and

Morphology

The study of words and parts of words

The rules for building words from smaller

units of meaning

Language: Its Structure and Use

What Does It Mean to Know

a Word? • The word’s sounds and the sequencing of these

sounds

• The word’s meanings

• The word’s category and how to use it in a

sentence

• How the word can be changed into related words in

the grammatical system

– All of this information is stored in our lexicon

Language: Its Structure and Use

• bagonize

• assvertisement

Language: Its Structure and Use

What do you know when you

know a word?

bagonize

• Lexical category: Word class information in our mental dictionary (lexicon) for each word- Verb

• Pronunciation—[bægәnayz]

• Grammatical word class (-ize = Verb)

• Morphological structure

– [bag + on + ize] ??

– [b + agon + ize] ??

What do you know when you

know a word?

• Meaning- “to wait anxiously for your bag at

the airport carousel”

• Morphological structure = blend

• [bag + agon + ize]

Lexical category/syntactic

category

• Lexical category (noun, verb, adjective , adverb, preposition etc.)

– He bagonized for a long time.

– *The bagonize is gone

– They were wearing assvertisments

– *They assvertisement all the time.

Lexicon—mental dictionary

• Our mental dictionary of all the words we know

• Allows us to do things like pick out the words in

– Thegirllikesflowers

• Just needs to be memorized/learned

• Lexicon stores “information about sounds of the words, their meanings, their related words, and their use in sentences.” (page 33)

Types of words

• Content

• Function

Language: Its Structure and Use

Content class words

• Words with meanings

that we can look up in

the dictionary

• Mostly independent of

the grammatical system

of a language

Content class words:

• Nouns, verbs,

adjectives, adverbs

– Tree, jump, tall,

slowly

Content class words

Nouns verbs Adjectives Adverbs

river feel beautiful hopefully

scissors seem tiny Often, now

fax remember delicious fast

intelligence dances crazy Quickly, softly

Language: Its Structure and Use

Content class words

• New words can be

easily added to

this class—open class

• Often reflect

cultural, social and

historical changes

– Nuke, dork, booty,

jerk, emoticon,

truthiness, yuppy,

gay, bootylicious,

textmessage, blog

• Hashtag, selfie, felfie

• tofurkey

Content/Open class

• Open class words

change forms

• dog, dogs

• happy, unhappy,

unhappily, unhappiness

• engage, engages,

engagement,

engagements, engaging,

engagingly

Function class words

• They are essential to the

structure of English

sentences.

• They express

syntactic/grammatical

relationships between

elements in a sentence.

• They are defined in

terms of their

function

– The man sat by

the door.

– *Man sat door.

– *Boy want water.

Function class categories •Prepositions /postpositions: in, on, at, from, with

–by the door, from the coach, in the box

• Conjunctions ( coordinating and subordinating):

and, but, because, so, nor –John and Mary; she is not here because she is ill.

• Pronouns

they, he, she, we, their, mine, yours

• Determiners: a, an, the, these, this, that, some,

many, less,

-- a book, this house, these peopleLanguage: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

Lexical Categories

(Parts of Speech)

• How to identify lexical categories (parts

of speech):

– Look for patterns in form – dog/dogs, coat/coats, and cup/cups

– Look for patterns in how words are used in

phrases – Nouns can be preceded by the

– Look at the meaning of the word – Nouns refer to people, places, things, ideas

Lexical Categories

• Nouns

– Number: singular or

plural

• Verbs

– Can be preceded by

can or will

– Subcategorization

• Transitive

• Intransitive

• Adjectives

– The endings –er and

–est

– Precede nouns

• Adverbs

– Rely on distribution

to identify adverbs

• They modify verbs,

adjectives, and

adverbs

Language: Its Structure and Use

Lexical Categories

• Pronouns – Substitute for nouns

• Personal

• Interrogative

• Relative

• Indefinite

• Demonstrative

• Prepositions and

Postpositions – Indicate a semantic

relationship between

other entities

• Determiners – Precede nouns and have

no endings

• Definite and indefinite

articles

• Demonstratives

• Possessives

• Interrogatives

• Conjunctions – Coordinating

– Subordinating

Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

Morphemes

• Morpheme: a meaningful element in a word

• Morphemes can have lexical or grammatical meaning

• A morpheme is not the same as a syllable – river and gorilla are multisyllabic but

monomorphemic

– kissed and dogs are monosyllabic but have more than one morpheme

What is a morpheme?

• The smallest meaningful unit of language

• It cannot be further analyzed into smaller

meaningful parts

• It has a similar meaning or function

wherever it appears.

– tourists

• tour

• -ist

• -s Language: Its Structure and Use

Identify the morphemes

• Group I: taller, shorter, greener, higher,

lower, sweeter, smarter

• Group II: mover, teacher, sailor, farmer,

caller, operator

• Group III: never, finger, either, river,

candor, other

Language: Its Structure and Use

Identify morphemes

• Consider the following sets of words and

identify the morphemes of each group?

• Nicer nifty friendly sons

• Painter thrifty sadly lens

• Feather lucky silly vans

• Runner softly runs

Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

Morphemes • Free morphemes:

– Can stand alone as words • true, mother, orange

• A box on the table

• Bound morphemes: – Can function only as part of another word

• un-, pre-, -ness, -er

• uncover, undo

• premature, predate, preapprove,

• happiness, restlessness, cheerfulness

• worker, farmer, grower,

Organization of Morphemes--

Types of morphemes

• Morphemes are classified into four types based on their

position within a word. Some morphemes are organized

linearly but some are discontinuous

– Organized linearly

• Affixes: Prefixes and Suffixes

• Infixes

– Organized discontinuously

• Circumfixes

• interweaving

• Morphemes are classified into two types based on

their function in language.

– Derivational

– inflectional

Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

Organization of Morphemes • Suffixes: follow the stem

• girls, commitment, simplify

• Examples from Turkish:

dur “to stop” durak “stopping place”

bat “to sink” batak “swamp”

• Examples from Newar :

na “eat” nakāl “caused to eat”

bo “fly” bokāl “caused to fly”

niŋ “count” niŋkāl “caused to count”

The suffix –kal is a causative marker.

prefixes

• Prefixes: come before the stem • untrue, disappear, repaint

• Examples from Isthmus Zapotec (Mexico)

zigi “chin” kazigi “chins”

zike “shoulder” kazike “shoulders”

diaga “ear” kadiaga “ears”

Language: Its Structure and Use

Ilocano (Rubino 1997)

• amianan ‘north’ tagaamianan ‘northerner’

• Abagatan ‘south’ tagaabagatan

‘southerner’

• ili ‘town’ tagaili ‘from town’

• Amerika ‘America’ tagaamerica

‘American’

• The prefix taga- means ‘from’ indicates origin.

Infixes

• Infixes: inserted in another morpheme

– Tagalog: gulay (‘greenish vegetables’)

ginulay (‘greenish blue’)

Agta (Phillipines)

darág ‘red’ dumarág ‘become red’ (d+um+arag)

furáw ‘white’ fumuráw ‘become white (f+um+uraw)

dakal ‘big’ dumakal ‘grow up’ (d+um+akal)

Language: Its Structure and Use

Infixes?

• Caution:

• Not an infix

– darkens

– lightens

– flattens

– A sequence of suffixes

• dark-en-s

Circumfixes • Morpheme that occurs in two parts, one on each side

of the stem

– Malay-Indonesian: baik (‘kind’) / kebaikan

(‘kindness’)

– Ilocano: ragsak ‘happy’

• pagragsaken ‘make someone happy’

pag-ragsak-en

uray ‘wait’

pagurayen ‘make someone wait’

pag-uray-en Language: Its Structure and Use

Dutch (Hana 2011)

• berg 'mountain' gebergte `mountain range'

*geberg, *bergte

• vogel 'bird' gevogelte `poultry'

*gevogel, *vogelte

• The circumfix ge- -te adds the meaning of

collectivity

Language: Its Structure and Use

Organization of Morphemes • Interweaving morphemes:

• Stem K-T-B

Discontinuous morphemes in

Arabic Root = Q-T-L

Qatil “killer”

qatl “killing

qutila “be killed”

qatal “kill + perfective

yaqtul “kill + imperfective

taqatal “kill one another”

maqtil “assassinated”

ROOT+ SLM

Islam “submission”

salam “peace”

aslam “to submit”

musal “undisputed”

saleema “to be saved, if

referring to a

female”

saleem “to be saved, if

referring to a

male”

Status of morphemes in

different languages • Languages may differ in how they use affixation

• What is a prefix in one language may be a suffix in another

• Isthmus Zapotec plural prefix ka-

• What is an affix in one language may not be expressed with

affixation in another

• English dance (N) and dance (V)

• What is a separate word in one language may be an

affix in another.

Nepali khanechu “I will eat” (-chu = future)

Morphemes

• Derivational morphemes:

– Change the lexical category • Noun + -FUL = Adjective

• doubt + -ful = doubtful

– Change the central meaning

• align/realign, fair/unfair

• Inflectional Morphemes:

– Do not change lexical category or central meaning • cat-s, collect-ed, sleep-s, and loud-er

Language: Its Structure and Use

Derivational Morphemes

• Derivational affixes change lexical (syntactic) category change, derives a new word:

solid solidify adjective  verb

govern government verb  noun

sublime sublimity adjective  noun

fame famous noun  adjective

Derivational affixes: no change

in lexical category Adj. -> Adj.

accurate in-accurate

kind un-kind

honest dis-honest

Noun -> Noun

mayor ex-mayor

gang gangster

prank prankster

Verb -> Verb

approve dis-approve

tie un-tie

write re-write

• words with new

meanings are created

Inflectional morphemes

• These morphemes combine with a word to change the grammatical function of the word.

–Plural table + s

–Comparative tall + er

Provides grammatical information (person, number, gender, case, tense)

• Consider the sentence:

John hate-s Mary

• -s marks the 3rd person

singular present form of the

verb

• It relates the verb to the 3rd

singular subject John

• hates = hate + s

English Inflectional

morphemes

Verbs:

talk-s 3rd singular present tense

talk-ed simple past

eat-ing present participle

eat-en past participle

English Inflectional

morphemes • 3rd person, singular –s

– John walks

• Past tense –ed

– John walked

• Present participle –ing

– John is walking

• Past participle –ed/-en

– John has walked

– John has eaten

English Inflectional

morphemes • Nouns

– Dog-s Plural

– Six books

– Dog-’s Possessive

– John ‘s book

English Inflectional

morphemes • Adjectives

– big

– bigg-erComparative

• John is taller

– bigg-est Superlative

• John is the tallest student in the class.

Order of inflectional and

derivational morphemes in words

• nationalizations

• nation is a noun

• nation + -al is an adjective

• national + -ize is a verb

• nationalize + -ation is a noun

• nationalization + -s is the plural inflected form of a noun

Derivational vs. inflectional

affixes

• In English, derivational morphemes can be

either prefixes or suffixes

• Inflectional morphemes are always suffixes

• re- + organize reorganize-s

• simple + -ify simplifi-ed

Organization of morphemes:

Internal Structure of Words

Morphemes are layered within words: Although

the morphemes are organized linearly, they have a hidden hierarchical structure :

• Morphemes are added to a base in a fixed order

which reflects the structure of a word

• Words are constructed hierarchically

• One affix is attached to the root first

• Derivational morphemes attach before inflectional ones

Two important facts

• Two important facts for determining the steps by which words with more than one affix must be formed:

– Affixes attach to certain lexical (grammatical) categories

• -able attaches to verbs but not nouns or adjectives: readable, doable, breakable; *catable, *greenable

• -ish to nouns: girlish, selfish; *readish, *breakish

– Affixes can determine the lexical category of a word

• Words that end in –able are adjectives (washable, stoppable)

• Words that end in –ness are nouns (unhappiness, attractiveness, hopelessness)

Words have layers, like

onions

• Educate (verb)

• Educat-ion (verb > noun)

• {Educat-ion}-al (noun > adj)

• {{Educat-ion}-al}-ly (adj > adverb)

Words have layers, like

onions

[ [ [ Educat – ion] – al] –ly]

Language: Its Structure and Use

Organization of Morphemes • control (verb)

• controllable (adj)

• uncontrollable (adj)

• uncontrollably (adv)

Morpheme Structure

Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary?

• Principal ways of extending a

language’s vocabulary:

– create new words from existing words and

word parts

– “borrow” from another language

– create new words from scratch

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are called

open classes

– New words may be added to these categories easily

• Prepositions, pronouns, and determiners are closed classes

– New words are seldom added in these categories

Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

How Does a Language Increase

Its Vocabulary?

• Affixes: adding morphemes to a word

– blogger, bioterrorism, nanosecond

– create, creation, creator, creates, creating, created

• Compounds: putting two words together to

make a new word

– upfront, dust bunny

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Reduplication: repeating a morpheme or part of a

morpheme

Tagalog: tawag ‘call’ ta-tawag ‘will call’

bisita ‘visit’ bi-bisita ‘will visit’

Motu (a Papua New Guinea language)

mahuta ‘to sleep’ mahutamahuta ‘to sleep constantly’

Indonesian: rumah ‘house’ rumahrumah ‘houses’

lalat ‘fly’ lalatlalat ‘flies’

Maori amper ‘nearly’ amperamper ‘very nearly’

dik ‘thick’ dikdik ‘very thick’

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary?

Compounding:

– Olive oil  oil made from olives

– Baby oil 

– Dog house 

– Cathouse 

– Dog food

– Redneck

– Club foot

– Bigfoot

– Policeman walkman

Compounds vs. phrases

Stress placement: primary stress on the first

word • hi ghchair high chai r

• ma keup make u p

• re dneck red ne ck

• bla ckboard black bo ard

• gree nhouse green hou se

Compounding in Chinese

• dit ban

grand board

‘floor’

• lu kou

road mouth

‘intersection’

• Fei-ji (fly-machine) ‘airplane’

• He-ma (river-horse) ‘hippopotamus’

Compounding in German

• German

– Muttersprache (mother+tongue) ‘native

language’

– Schreibtisch (writing +table) ‘desk’

– Auslanderbehordeburostunden

• Aus länder behörde büro stunden

• Out country (pl.) officials office hours

• “hours of the immigration office”

Language: Its Structure and Use

How Does a Language Increase

Its Vocabulary?

• Shortenings: feds, info, doc

– Acronyms: the initial letters of the words are

pronounced as a new word: NASA, NATO, MADD,

WOU, NIMBY

– Initialisms: the initial letters of the words are

pronounced as a series of letters: DNA, GPA,

UCLA, TGIF

– Blends: combining the first sounds of one word

with the final sounds of another: motel, infomercial

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Blends

– infomercial information + commercial

– edutainment education + entertainment

– blurt blow + spurt

– carjacking car + hijacking

– blog web + log

– WiFi wireless fidelity

– televangelist television + evangelist

– jazzercise jazz + exercise

– biopic Biographical + picture

– guesstimate guess + estimate

– hazmat hazardous +material

– webinar web +seminar

– chortle chuckle + snort

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Backformation:

– New words are created due to incorrect

morphological analysis. A word is formed from

another word by taking off what looks like a typical

affix in the language.

– Editor (1649)  edit (1791)

– Television (1907)  televise (1927)

– Donation  donate

– Swindler  swindle

Language: Its Structure and Use

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary?

• Conversion or functional shift: words

can be moved from one category to

another without any changes in form

– Book (N)  to book

– Water (N)  to water

– Butter (N)  to butter

– Permit (V)  a permit

– Empty (a)  to empty the trash

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Borrowing: taking words from other

languages

– Usually nouns

– Borrowed words conform to the pronunciation and

grammar of the borrowing language

– paparazzi, judo, glitch, wok

Language: Its Structure and Use

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • French: recipe, route, gopher, dime, chowder, menu,

boulevard

• Italian: solo, piano, balcony, captain, casino

• Spanish: fiesta, taco, rodeo, mosquito

• Native American Indian languages: igloo, chipmunk, totem

• German: kindergarten, sauerkraut, angst, Alzheimer, delicatessen, fest (celebration—film fest, beer fest)

• Turkish: baklava, bulgur, kiosk, pilaf

• Arabic: bazaar, artichoke, harem, hashish, ghoul

• Hindi: pundit, guru, yoga, dharma

How Does a Language

Increase Its Vocabulary? • Inventing: making words up from scratch; not

derived from existing words

– granola

– googol

– bling

– dude

– zap

– Nerd

– quark Language: Its Structure and Use

Language: Its Structure and Use

Morphological Systems • Isolating morphology (e.g., Chinese)

2. nî deng wo, wo jiu gen nî qu.

2SG wait 1SG 1SG then with 2SG go

‘If you wait for me, I will go with you.’

– Words are single morpheme

– No derivational and inflectional morphology

– Grammatical information is expressed by word order

Isolating morphology

Hmong (Laos):

Tus neeg caum nqai tau xuas

the person chase game attain grasp

phom tua tus noog los gun kill the bird past

‘The hunter killed the bird with a gun’

Morphological systems

• Agglutinating morphology

• Words can have several prefixes and suffixes that can be

segmented into parts

– A single word may have several bound morphemes

– Words can be easily broken into distinct morphemes

– Each morpheme has only one distinct meaning

– Turkish, Swahili, Nahuatl and Japanese, among others

Turkish

• evjiklerimizde

• ‘in our little houses’

•ev-jik-ler-imiz-de

• house-little-plural-possessive-in

• ‘in our little houses’

Agglutinating morphology

Language: Its Structure and Use

Morphological systems Inflectional morphology (e.g., Russian)

–Grammatical functions expressed in

morphology

–Large inventory of inflectional morphemes

–Morphology organized into paradigms

–more than one meaning fused into a single

affix

–Case systems, gender, and agreement

Declensions and

Conjugations

• The set of forms showing the inflectional

variants of a word is called a paradigm.

• Paradigms for nouns are called

declensions.

• Paradigms for verbs are called

conjugations.

Latin: an inflectional

language moneō ‘I am advising’

monēs ‘you(sg) are advising’

monet ‘(s)he is advising’

monēmus ‘we are advising’

monētis ‘you(pl) are advising’

monent ‘they are advising’ [-o] ‘1st, sg. pres. tense’

[-s] ‘2nd, sg. pres. tense’

[-t] ‘3rd, sg. pres. tense’

[-mus] ‘1st pl. pres. tense’

[-tis] ‘2nd pl. pres. tense’

[-nt] ‘3rd, pl. pres. tense’

Verb paradigms (Spanish)

Present Tense comer ‘eat’

Singular Plural

1 com-o com-emos

2 com-es com-éis

3 com-e com-en

Morphological Systems

Language: Its Structure and Use

Case marking

Case: Indicates a noun’s role in a clause

John gave Mary his sister’s old bicycle.

Case marking Case: Indicates a noun’s role in a clause

John –subject/agent bicycle -direct object (DO) his -possessive sister’s -possessive Mary -indirect object (IO)

John gave Mary his sister’s old bicycle. Subj IO Poss Poss DO

Case Marking in Japanese

• Each noun in the Japanese sentence appears

with a marker at the end indicating what

role the noun plays in the sentence. Each of

these markers is called a case

• John-ga Mary-ni hon-o yatta

John-Sub Mary-IO book-DO gave

“John gave Mary a book.”

Case Marking in Nepali

ramle harilai kitab

diyo

ram-SUBJ hari-IO book

gave

-le Subject marker (Nominative case)

-lai Object marker (dative case)

“Ram gave a book to Hari.”

Nepali Possessive –ko

jonle merilai usko didiko purano

saikal diyo

John mary his sister old bicycle gave

“John gave Mark his sister’s old bicycle’

Case marking in German Case marking on the determiner that precedes a noun

• der marks the subjects

• den marks the direct objects

• dem marks the indirect objects

– Der Mann gibt den Knochen dem Hund

(subj.) (dir. Obj.) (ind. Obj)

The man gave the bone the dog

“The man gave the bone to the dog.”

– Den Knochen gibt der Mann dem Hund

(dir. Obj.) (subj.) (ind. Obj)

The bone gave the man the dog

“The man gave the bone to the dog.”

Russian stol ‘table’

sing. plural

Subject stol stol-y The table is wooden.

Direct object stol stol-y She saw the table.

Possessive stol-a stol-ov The table’s legs

Indirect object stol-u stol-am She gave the table

new paint

the –a in stola indicates both singular and possessive.

Allomorphy

• Allomorphs: alternate pronunciations of a

morpheme

– Past tense suffix

• picked, played, twisted

– Plural suffix

• cats, dogs, horses

– Irregulars

• Past tense of teach, go; plural of deer, man, ox, child

Language: Its Structure and Use

Computers and Culturomics

Language: Its Structure and Use

Google Ngram: Sneaked and Snuck since 1900

How to solve morphology

problems? Mende (Sierra Leone)

• What is the morpheme meaning ‘the’?

• If [sale] means ‘proverb’, what is the

form for ‘the proverb’?

• If [kpindii] means ‘the night’, what does

[kpindi] mean?

word # of

morpheme

s

root Word

category

Word

category

kindnesses 3 kind A N

amazement 2 amaze V N

dishonest 2 honest A A

lovelier 3 love N A

trees 2 tree N N

rereads 3 read V V

impersonal 3 person N A

Practice: word formation

1. To ship  conversion

2. Demo  clipping

3. Happier  inflection

4. Donate  back formation

5. Leader  derivation

6. advertorial blend

7. Skullet blend

8. Sleepwalk compound

9. Bollywood 

Identify the type of word formation:

1. National Aviation and Space

Agency 

2. information, entertainment

3. modulator, demodulator 

4. love, seat 

5. International, police 

6. A comb 

7. delicatessen

NASA

Infotainment 

Modem 

Loveseat 

Interpol 

To comb 

Boycott 

acronym

blends

blends

compounding

blends

conversion

clipping

eponym