Unit 2 Part 3
Unit 2 Part 3
Unit 2 Part 3
chapter
unpo egranate
m like
pomme
sqʷəbay
Chapter at a Glance
morphological typology
183
184 • chapter 6 Morphological typology and Word Formation
Damn words; they’re just the pots and pans of life, the pails
and scrub brushes.
—edith Wharton, 1932
I
n this chapter, we look at the inlectional morphology of other languages
and show how languages fall into morphological classes, or typologies,
with respect to the patterns of their aixes and word order. although
languages vary quite a bit in the way they express grammatical information,
we ind that some general properties of grammatical structure are at work
in all languages, which provides further evidence for Universal Grammar.
We then turn to how we form words in ways other than affixation,
through a variety of processes that give us such words as blog, NASA, lip-
lopper, schnoodle, and popemobile. Languages have wonderful, built-in ways
of creating new words. We make new words when we have a new concept,
thing, or action that needs a label, when we give a new name to an exist-
ing thing (for political, social, ironic, or comic reasons), or when we just
play with the language. to create words, regardless of why we do so, we
exhibit our unconscious knowledge of the inner workings of our language.
We know how to manipulate morphemes because we all have a great deal
of knowledge of the meaningful units of our various languages.
Morphological Typology
We have already seen some of the ways morphological systems difer across
languages. For example, in english we indicate that something will happen
in the future by a modal verb and the ininitival form of the verb:
I speak. I will speak.
(modal) (infinitive)
Synthetic Languages
Synthetic languages form words by aixing morphemes to a root morpheme.
Word order is less important in these languages because the aixes, rather than
the position of the words in the sentence, indicate grammatical relationships.
Synthetic languages are typically further broken down into two sub-
agglutinative types: agglutinative and fusional. Agglutinative languages can have several
language language morphemes that attach to a root morpheme, and each morpheme has only one
whose words have
several morphemes
meaning that is clearly distinct. Some agglutinative languages are turkish,
that attach to a root Swahili, Salish languages, Nahuatl, and Japanese, among many others. here
morpheme, and are examples of a Lushootseed (Salish) sentence and one from Swahili. Notice
each morpheme has
the many morphemes within the verb and that each has a unique meaning
only one distinct
meaning (illustrated by the hyphens separating the distinct morphemes):
sqw əbayʔ tiʔəʔ sugw əčəb
sqw əbayʔ tiʔəʔ s-u-gw əč- əb
dog determiner noun prefix-punctual-look for-
middle-3rd person object
‘the one he is looking for is the dog.’ (hess, personal communication)
hawàtasóma kitabu
ha-wà-ta-sóma kitabu
negative-3rd person plural-future-read book
‘they will not read the book.’
186 • chapter 6 Morphological typology and Word Formation
the -a on stola indicates both singular and genitive. Similarly, the -am on
stolam means dative and plural.
Morphological typology • 189
Analytic Languages
In an analytic language, grammatical information is conveyed by word order
and particles rather than by inlectional morphemes. In the analytic language—
Vietnamese, for example—the form of the verb is the same regardless of the
subject of the verb, and no tense or other agreement marking is expressed on
the verb. consider the verb ãn, meaning ‘eat’ in the following paradigm:
tôi ãn I eat chúng tôi ãn we eat
anh ãn you eat các anh ãn you (pl.) eat
anh â’y ãn he eats ho ãn they eat
chi â’y ãn she eats
nó ãn it eats
as you can see, the verb ãn always has the same form.
as analytic languages have very few derivational or inlectional aixes,
they often form words by combining free morphemes into compound words:
life
guard
lifeguard
lifeguard chair
lifeguard chair tan (you know, a tan someone might get sitting on a lifeguard chair)
chinese, a largely analytic language, also has a great many compounds.
(although chinese is a tone language, as discussed in chapter 3, the tones
are not indicated on the words shown here.)
dit ban
grand board
‘loor’
lu kou
road mouth
‘intersection’
and this one is a bit more metaphorical:
ming bai
bright white
rPE 6.1 ‘to understand’