1. Overview
1.1 Intro
Morphology emerged as a result of Great Exploration, colonization, and global trade, which brought knowledge of languages in different parts of world to the attention of European linguists.
- One significant event was the discovery of various language families, especially the Indo-European family.
- Another famous classification in the 19th century groups languages on morphology, in particular, the degree of synthesis. This is called the morphological typology.
| type | example | feature |
|---|---|---|
| isolating/analytic | Chinese | little morphology, separate grammatical concepts tend to be conveyed by separate words |
| agglutinating | Turkish | complex morphology, words are easily segmented into separate morphemes with single chunk of meaning |
| inflectional/fusional | Latin | complex morphology, and morphemes are not necessarily easily segmentable |
| polysynthetic | Inuktitut | extremely complex morphology, a single word can encode the meaning of a whole sentence |
The 4 types mentioned above are a continuum. Comrie (1981/1989:51) proposes to capture them on two different scales:
- The index of synthesis: how many morphemes there are per word in a language
- The index of fusion: how many meanings are packed into each morpheme in a language
Terminologies of Inflectional Morphology
- Paradigm: a table of all the different inflectional forms of a (class of) word(s)
- Declension (变格): inflection of non-verb words that varies according to case, gender & number
- Conjugation (变位): inflection of verb stems with regard to the verbs' grammatical categories, such as person, number, tense, mood & voice
- Syncretism: an instance in which two or more cells in a paradigm are filled with the same form. (e.g. The past & perfect forms of "set" are still "set".)
- Suppletion (异干互补): the use of two or more phonetically distinct roots for different forms of the same word. (e.g. good-better-best, go-went-gone)
A Classification of Morphological Processes
- Concatenative: affixation, compounding
- Non-Concatenative: base modification (e.g. goose → geese), stress shift, voicing, tonal change, reduplication, conversion (the meaning changes but the form of the base remains unchanged), introflection (Semitic languages) ...
In the first part of the 20th century, American structural linguistics gradually ascended to a dominant position in morphology. Morphemes became the central object of investigation in morphology, now defined as "the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming words". They identified a set of hierarchically ordered linguistic levels (from low to high: phonology → morphology → syntax → semantics), and postulated the discovery procedures, which prohibits the use of information from a higher level when analyzing a lower level.
Bloomfield (1933: 161) defined a morpheme as a "linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to other forms". He gave a central role to morphemes in linguistics by putting them in the lexicon, previously the storage place of words. Most contemporary linguists adopt his definition.
Terminologies about Morpheme
- free/bound morpheme: can/cannot stand alone as a word
- root: the core of a word, to which all the affixes can be added
- derived form / stem / lexeme: the core of a word, to which inflectional affixes can be added
- inflectional form / word form: stem + inflectional affixes e.g. In "disagreements", "agree" is the root, "dis-agree-ment" is the stem, and "disagreement-s" is the word form.
However, this classic definition of morpheme is problematic:
- forms without meaning, e.g. syntactic-al, habit-u-al, 国-家,
- meaning without form, e.g. cook (v. → n.)
- form-meaning asymmetry, e.g. -ing is both the gerund marker and the progressive aspect marker in English.
These facts suggest that there is no one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning in a morpheme.
1.2 Morphology in Generative Grammar
Generative grammar have different theoretical orientations from their predecessors. Its central concern is to capture the "creative" (instead of "descriptive" in structural linguistics!) aspect of linguistic knowledge, that is, how a speaker able to produce and understand infinite utterances that one may never have heard or produced before.
In the early stage, Chomsky (1957) takes a syntactic approach to word-formation:
- Structures are derived by phrase structure rules that allow a morpheme to serve as the terminal;
- Moreover, terminals are not the final realization of syntactic structure, but are themselves subject to be rewritten via the morphophonemic rules of a language.
e.g. Three steps to form the following sentence:
- Phrase structure rules: John -ed will sing a song.
- Transformational rules (affix hopping): John will+ed sing a song.
- Morphophonemic rules: John would sing a song.
Generative grammarians at that time were using the newly developed transformational rules to explain with various phenomena. Lees (1960) was the first PhD student of generative grammar, and he tried to explain nominalization using transformational rules. However, in the meantime, Chomsky was thinking about how to control the capabilities of syntax, especially transformations, to prevent the generation of wrong sentences.
Chomsky (1865:141) adopts a system in which the base component that generates the deep structure consists of:
- a categorial component: the set of rewriting rules
- a lexicon: "The lexicon is a set of lexical entries, each lexical entry being a pair (D, C), where D is a phonological distinctive feature matrix 'spelling' a certain lexical formative and C is a collection of specified syntactic features (a complex symbol)". It contains not the infinite lexemes, but the idiosyncratic signs, regardless of their category or complexity.
And according to Katz and Postal (1964:79-81), the transformational rules are limited by the "recoverablity condition on deletion", which states that the operation of transformations cannot delete material in such a way that it cannot be reconstructed.
Chomsky (1970) responded to Lees' (1960) work in his "Remarks on Nominalization", arguing that the transformational rules cannot be used to explain every case of nominalization. He distinguishes between two types of nominalization:
| Feature | Gerundive Nominalization | Derived Nominalization |
|---|---|---|
| Syntactic Productivity | All sentences have its corresponding GN. | e.g. * John's easiness to please |
| Semantic Regularity | Correspond to the verbs | e.g. resolve ~ revolution |
| Internal Structure | Same as the verbs. e.g. * John's many refusings of the offer | Same as the nouns. e.g John's many refusals of the offer |
Chomsky drew the conclusion that derived nominalization has the same quality as normal nouns and can only be listed in the lexicon, while gerundive nominalization has a similar quality as verbs and can be generated by the transformational rules.
这篇论文争议很大，几乎没人读得懂，有很多人尝试过诠释它。