Morphology,
in linguistics, is the study of the forms of words, and the ways in which words
are related to other words of the same language. Formal differences among words
serve a variety of purposes, from the creation of new lexical items to the
indication of grammatical structure.
Introduction
If you ask
most non-linguists what the primary thing is that has to be learned if one is
to ‘know’ a language, the answer is likely to be “the words of the language”.
Learning vocabulary is a major focus of language instruction, and while
everyone knows that there is a certain amount of ‘grammar’ that characterizes a
language as well, even this is often treated as a kind of annotation to the set
of words—the ‘uses of the Accusative’, etc. But what is it that is involved in
knowing the words of a language?
Obviously,
a good deal of this is a matter of learning that cat, pronounced [khæt],
is a word of English, a noun that refers to a “feline mammal usually having
thick soft fur and being unable to roar”. The notion that the word is a
combination of sound and meaning—indeed, the unit in which the two are
united—was the basis of the theory of the linguistic sign developed by
Ferdinand deSaussure at the beginning of the 20th century. But if
words like cat were all there were in language, the only thing that
would matter about the form of a word would be the fact that it differs from
the forms of other words (i.e., cat is pronounced differently from mat, cap,
dog, etc.). Clearly there is no more specific connection between the parts
of the sound of cat and the parts of its meaning: the initial [kh],
for example, does not refer to the fur. The connection between sound and
meaning is irreducible here.
But of
course cat and words like it are not the end of the story. Another word
of English is cats, a single word in pronunciation but one that can be
seen to be made up of a part cat and another part –s, with the
meaning of the whole made up of the meaning of cat and the meaning of –s
(‘plural’). Cattish behavior is that which is similar to that of a cat;
and while a catbird is not itself a kind of cat, its name comes from the
fact that it sometimes sounds like one. All of these words are clearly
connected with cat, but on the other hand they are also all words in
their own right.
We might,
of course, simply have memorized cats, cattish and catbird along
with cat, even though the words seem to have some sort of relation to
one another. But suppose we learn about a new animal, a wug, say ‘a
large, hairy bovine mammal known for being aggressive and braying’. We do not
need to learn independently that two of these are wugs, or that wuggish
behaviour is likely to involve attacking one’s fellows, or that a wugbird
(if there were such a thing) might be a bird with a braying call. All of these
things follow from the knowledge we have not just of the specific words of our
language, but of their relations to one another, in form and meaning. The
latter is our knowledge of the morphology of our language.
In some
languages, the use of morphology to pack complex meanings into a single word is
much more elaborate than in English. In West Greenlandic, for example, tusaanngitsuusaartuaannarsiinnaanngivipputit is a single word meaning ‘you simply cannot
pretend not to be hearing all the time’. Other languages do much less of this
sort of thing: Chinese and Vietnamese are often cited in this connection,
though Chinese does have rather exuberant use of compounding (structures like catbird
made up of two exiting items). Despite this variation, however, morphology is
an aspect of the grammar of all languages, and in some it rivals syntax in the
expressive power it permits.
Inflection
Traditionally,
morphology is divided into several types, depending on the role played in
grammar by a given formation. The most basic division is between inflection and
word formation: the latter is easy enough to characterize as ‘morphology that
creates new words’ ( wuggish, wug-like, wugbird), but inflection (e.g., wugs)
is rather harder to define. Often, inflection is defined by example: categories
like number (e.g., ‘plural’), gender (e.g., masculine, feminine and neuter in
Latin), tense (‘past’), aspect (e.g., the difference between the imparfait
and the passé simple in French), case (‘accusative’), person (1st
vs. 2nd vs. 3rd), and perhaps a few others
are inflectional while everything else is word formation. But this approach is
inadequate, because the same category may be inflectional in some languages,
and not in others. In Fula (a West Atlantic language), for example, the
category `diminutive’ is fully integrated into the grammar of agreement in the
language, just as much so as person, number, and gender. Verbs whose subjects
are diminutive indicate this with an agreement marker, as do adjectives
modifying diminutive nouns, etc. In English, in contrast, diminutives appear in
forms like piglet, but these are clearly cases of word formation. On the
other hand, while number is clearly involved in important parts of English
grammar (verbs agree with their subjects in number), other languages, like Kwakw’ala
(or ‘Kwakiutl’) treat the category of plural as something that can optionally
be added to nouns, or to verbs, as an elaboration of meaning that has no
further grammatical consequence.
Despite
the intuitively clear nature of the category of inflection, other efforts to
define it explicitly do no better. Inflection is generally more productive
than other sorts of morphology, for instance: virtually every German noun has
an accusative, a plural, etc., while only a few English nouns have a diminutive
formation like piglet. But in some languages, categories that we would
certainly like to call inflectional are quite limited: in Basque, for example,
only a few dozen verbs (the number varying from one dialect to another) have
forms that show agreement. In English, on the other hand, the process of
forming nouns in –ing from verbs (as in Fred’s lonely musings about
love) can take virtually any verb as its basis, despite being intuitively a
means of crating new words, not of inflecting old ones. A variety of other
attempts that can be found in the literature also fail, either because of ready
counter-examples, or because they are insufficiently general: inflectional
material is generally found at the word’s periphery, while word formational
markers are closer to the stem (cf. piglets but not *pigslet),
but this property is only useful in words that contain material of both types,
and even then, it does not help us to find the boundary in a word like French im-mort-al-is-er-ait
‘would immortalize’.
In fact,
the intuition underlying the notion of ‘inflection’ seems to be the following:
inflectional categories are those that provide information about grammatical
structure (such as the fact that a noun in the accusative is likely to be a
direct object), or which are referred to by a grammatical rule operating across
words (such as the agreement of verbs with their subjects). The validity of
other correlates with inflectional status, then, follows not from the nature of
the categories themselves, but rather from the existence of grammatical rules
in particular languages that refer to them, and to the freedom with which items
of particular word classes can appear in positions where they can serve as the
targets of such rules.
For any
given word, we can organize a complete set of its inflectional variants into a paradigm
of the word. Thus, a German noun has a particular gender, and a paradigm
consisting of forms for two numbers (singular and plural) and four cases
(nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative). German adjectives have
paradigms that distinguish not only case and number, but also gender (since
they can agree with nouns of any of the three genders), plus another category
that distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ declensions (depending on the
presence of certain demonstrative words within the same phrase).
All of the word forms that make up a single
inflectional paradigm have the same basic meaning. In general, they are all
constructed on the basis of a basic shape, or stem, though in many languages
with complex inflection, the paradigm of a given word may be built from more
than one stem. In French, for example, the verb pouvoir ‘to be able to’
shows different stems in (je) peux ‘I can’ and (je) pourrais
‘I would be able to’.
Certain terminology has become more or less accepted
in describing facts of these sorts. We refer to a particular sound shape (e.g.
[fawnd]) as a specific word form; all of the inflectional forms in a
single paradigm are said to make up a single lexeme (e.g., find).
A specific morphosyntactic form of a particular lexeme (e.g., the past
tense of find) is realized by a corresponding word form [fawnd]). These
terms are all distinct, in their way: thus, the same morphosyntactic form of a
given lexeme may correspond to more than one word form (e.g., the past tense of
dive can be either [daivd] or [dowv]), while the same word form can
realize more than one morphosyntactic form (e.g., [hit] can be either the past tense of hit, the
non-third-person present tense of hit, or the singular of the noun hit).
Word Formation
Inflection,
then, is the morphology that distinguishes the various forms within the
paradigm of a single lexeme. Some languages, like ancient Greek or Georgian,
have a great deal of inflectional morphology, while others (like English) have
much less, and some (like Vietnamese) have hardly any at all. Regardless of
this, however, essentially all languages have ways of constructing new lexemes
from existing ones, or patterns of word formation. These fall into two broad classes:
compounding is the process of combining two or more independently
existing lexemes (perhaps with some additional material as ‘glue’) into a
single new lexeme (as in catbird). Derivation, in contrast, is
the formation of a new lexeme from an existing one by means of material that
does not appear by itself as a word. It is common to refer to such
non-independent content as bound in contrast with independently
occurring or free elements.
Derivation
A typical
derivational relation among lexemes is the formation of adjectives like inflatable
from verbs (inflate). In this case, the meaning of the adjective is
quite systematically related to that of the verb: verb-able means ‘capable of being verb-ed’. It is therefore tempting to
say that English contains an element –able with that meaning, which can simply be added
to verbs to yield adjectives. The facts are a bit more complex that that,
though.
For one
thing, the related adjective may not always be just what we would get by
putting the two pieces together. For instance, navigate yields navigable,
formulate yields formulable, etc. These are instances of truncation,
where a part of the base is removed as an aspect of the word formation process.
Then there are cases such as applicable from apply, where we see the same variation (or allomorphy)
in the shape of the stem as in application. These patterns show us that
the derivational whole may be more than the simple sum of its parts.
When we consider the class of adjectives in –able
(or its spelling variant –ible), we find a number of forms like credible,
eligible, potable, probable,… which seem to have the right meaning for the
class (they all mean roughly ‘capable of being [something]-ed’),
but the language does not happen to contain any verb with right form and
meaning to serve as their base. This suggests that derivational patterns have a
sort of independent existence: they can serve as (at least partial) motivation
for the shape and sense of a given lexeme, even in the absence of the
possibility of deriving that lexeme from some other existing lexeme. In some instance, the force of this analysis
is so strong that it leads to what is called back-formation: thus, the
word editor was originally derived from Latin e:dere ‘to bring
forth’ plus –itor, but it fit so well into the pattern of English agent
nouns in –er (e.g., baker, driver) that a hypothetical underlying
verb edit actually became part of the language.
We may also notice that some –able forms do not
mean precisely what we might predict. Thus, comparable means `roughly
equal’, not just ‘able to be compared’. In the world of wine, drinkable
comes to mean ‘rather good’, not just ‘able to be drunk’, etc. This shows us
that even though these words may originally arise through the invocation of
derivational patterns, the results are in fact full-fledged words of the
language; and as such, they can undergo semantic change independent of the
words form which they were derived. This is the same phenomenon we see when the
word transmission, originally referring to the act or process of
transmitting (e.g., energy from the engine to the wheels of a car) comes to
refer to a somewhat mysterious apparatus which makes strange noises and costs
quite a bit to replace.
Finally, we can note that in some cases it is not at
all evident how to establish a ‘direction’ of derivation. In Maasai, for
example, there are two main noun classes (‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’), and a
derivational pattern consists in taking a noun which is ‘basically’ of one
class, and treating it as a member of the other. Thus, en-kéráí is a feminine noun that refers to any child,
of either gender; while ol-kéráí is a corresponding masculine noun
meaning ‘large male child’. Here it looks plausible to take the feminine form
as the basis for the derivational relationship; but when we consider ol-abáánì
(masculine) ‘doctor’ vs. enk-abáánì ‘small or female doctor, quack’ it
looks as if the direction of derivation goes the other way. In fact, it looks
as if what we have here is a case of a relation between two distinct patterns,
where membership in the feminine class may (but need not) imply femaleness
and/or relatively small size, as opposed to the masculine class which may imply
maleness and/or relatively large size. When a word in either class is used in the
other, the result is to bring out the additional meaning associated with the
class, but there is no inherent directionality to this relationship. The
possibility of back formation discussed above suggests that this interpretation
of derivational relationships as fundamentally symmetrical may be applicable
even to cases where the formal direction of derivation seems obvious.
Compounding
The other
variety of word formation, compounding, seems fairly straightforward, even if
the actual facts can be quite complex at times. Compounds are built of two (or
more) independent words, and have (at least in their original form) a meaning
that involves those of their components. Thus, a catfish is a kind of
fish sharing some property with a cat (in this case, the whiskers). Like
derived forms, compounds are independent lexemes in their own right, and as
such quickly take on specialized meanings that are not transparently derived
from those of their parts. We need to tell a story to explain why a hotdog is called that, why a blackboard can be white or green, etc.
Where it
is possible to relate the meaning of a compound to those of its parts, it is
often possible to establish a privileged relationship between the semantic
‘type’ of the whole compound and that of one of its pieces. Thus, a dog
house is a kind of house (and certainly not a kind of dog), out-doing is a kind of doing, etc. When such a
relation can be discerned, we refer to the ‘privileged’ member of the compound
as its head, and speak of the compound itself as endo-centric.
By no
means all compounds would appear to be endocentric, however: a pickpocket
is neither a kind of pocket nor a kind of picking, and a sabre-tooth is a kind of tiger, not a kind of tooth.
Traditional grammar provides a variety of names for different types of such exo-centric
compounds, some deriving from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition in which these
were of particular interest. A bahuvrihi
compound is one whose elements describe a characteristic property or
attribute possessed by the referent (e.g., sabre-tooth, flatfoot), a dvandva
compound is built of two (or more) parts, each of which contributes equally to
the sense (e.g., an Arab-Israeli
peace treaty).
In some
languages, the decision as to which compounds are endocentric and which are not
depends on the importance we give to different possible criteria. For instance,
in German, Blauhemd ‘(soldier
wearing a) blue shirt’ is on the face of it a bahuvrihi compound, exocentric
because it does not denote a kind of shirt. On the other hand, the gender of
the compound (neuter, in this case) is determined by that of its rightmost
element (here, hemd `shirt’).
Semantically, blauhemd is exocentric; while grammatically, it could be
regarded as endocentric with its head on the right.
Languages
can vary quite a bit in the kinds of compound patterns they employ. Thus,
English compounds of a verb and its object (like scarecrow) are rather
rare and unproductive, while this constitutes a basic and quite general pattern
in French and other Romance languages. English and German tend to have the
head, when there is one, on the right (dollhouse), while Italian and
other romance languages more often have the head on the left (e.g., caffelatte ‘coffee with milk’). Most English compounds
consist of two elements (though one of these may itself be a compound, as in [[high
school] teacher], leading to structures of great complexity such as
German [[[[Leben]s‑versicherung]s‑gesellschaft]s‑angestellter] ‘life insurance company employee’), but many
dvandva compounds in Chinese consist of three or four components, as in ting-tai-lou-ge ‘(pavilions-terraces-upper stories-raised
alcoves) elaborate architecture’.
Finally,
we should note that although we have defined compounds as built from free
elements or independent lexemes, this leaves us with no good way of describing
structures such as the names of many chemical compounds and drugs (dichlorobenzene,
erythromycin) and words such as Italo-American.
On the one hand, we surely do not want to say that there is a process that
affects a base such as American by prefixing Italo‑. On the other hand, Italo‑, erythro‑,
chloro‑,etc. do not occur on their own, but only in this class of
compounds. Even more striking examples
occur in other languages. For examples, the Mandarin root yi ‘ant’
freely forms compounds such as yiwang
‘queen ant’ (literally ant-king), gongyi ‘worker ant’, baiyi
‘white ant, termite’ But yi is
clearly not a word: the free word for ‘ant’ in Mandarin is mayi. While English erythro etc are always
prefixes, in the Mandarin cases, the roots in question occur in both head and
non-head position, and are therefore like normal compound components in every
respect except that they are not free forms.
It appears that the very definition of compounding need more thought
than was initially evident.
Representation of Morphological Knowledge
To this
point, we have talked of morphological relationships as existing between whole
lexemes (in the case of word formation), or between word forms (in the case of
inflection). Much of the tradition of thought about morphology, however,
regards these matters in a somewhat different light. We saw at the beginning of
this article that the model of the Saussurean sign as the minimal unit where
sound and meaning are connected could not serve as a description of the word,
since it is often the case that (proper) parts of words display their own
connection between sound and meaning. It was this observation, in fact, that
led us to explore the varieties of morphology displayed in natural language.
But many have felt that the proper place for the sign relation is not the word,
but rather a constituent part of words: the morpheme. On that picture,
morphology is the study of these units, the morphemes: how they may vary in
shape (the allomorphy they exhibit) and how they can be combined (morphotactics).
Morphemes and Words
The notion
that words can be regarded as (exhaustively) composed of smaller sign-like units,
or morphemes, is extremely appealing It leads to a simple an uniform theory of
morphology, one based on elementary units that can be regarded as making up a
sort of lexicon at a finer level of granularity than that of words.
Nonetheless, it seems that this picture of word structure as based on a uniform
relation of morpheme concatenation is literally too good to be true.
If
morphemes are to serve the purpose for which they were intended, they ought to
have some rather specific properties. It ought to be possible, for any given
word, to divide its meaning into some small number of sub-parts, to divide its
form into a corresponding number of continuous sub-strings of phonetic
material, and then to establish a correspondence between the parts of meaning
and the parts of form. Of course, it is possible to do exactly that in a great
many cases (e.g., inflatable): hence the intuitive appeal of this
notion. But in many other instances, such a division of the form is much more
laboured or even impossible.
One fairly
minor problem is posed by parts of the form that are not continuous. When we
analyze words containing circumfixes (e.g., ke—an in Indonesian kebisaan
‘capability’, from bias `be able’) or infixes (e.g. –al‑ in
Sundanese ngadalahar ‘to
eat several’, from ngadahar ‘to
eat’) one or the other of the component morphemes is not a continuous string of
material.
Other
cases are more serious. For instance, we may find no component of meaning to
correspond to a given piece of form (an ‘empty morph’ such as the th in
English lengthen `make long(er)’)
or no component of form that relates to some clear aspect of a word’s meaning
(e.g., English hit ‘past tense of hit’). Sometimes two or more
components of meaning are indissolubly linked in a single element of form, as
in French au ([o]) `to the (masc.)’ or the ending –o: of Latin amo:
which represents all of ‘first person singular present indicative’, a
collection of categories that are indicated separately in other forms. When we
look beyond the simple cases, it appears that the relation between form and
meaning in the general case is not one-to-one at the level of the morpheme, but
rather many-to-many.
In fact,
it seems that even though both the forms and the meanings of words can be
divided into components, the relation is still best regarded as holding at the
level of the entire word, rather than localized exclusively in the morpheme. We
have also seen support for this notion in the fact that entire words,
presumably composed of multiple morphemes, develop idiosyncratic aspects of
meaning that cannot be attributed to any of their component morphemes
individually (e.g., appreciable and considerable come to mean not
‘capable of being appreciated/considered’, but ‘substantial, relatively
large’). On this basis, many linguists have come to believe that morphological
relations are based on the word rather than the morpheme. Actually, we need to
take into account the fact that in highly inflected languages like Latin or
Sanskrit, no existing surface word form may supply just the level of detail we
need, since all such words have specific inflectional material added. For such
a case, we need to say that it is stems (full words minus any
inflectional affixation) that serve as the basis of morphological
generalizations, in the sense of representing the phonological component of a
lexeme.
Items and Processes
A further
difficulty for the notion that morphemes are the basis of all morphology comes
from the fact that in many cases, some of the information carried by the form
of a word is represented in a way that does not lend itself to segmentation.
One large group of examples of this sort is supplied by instances in which it
is the replacement of one part of the form by another, rather than the addition
of a new piece, that carries meaning. Such relations of apophony include umlaut (goose/geese,
mouse/mice), ablaut (sing/sang/sung), and such
miscellaneous relations as those found in food/feed, sell/sale,
sing/song, breath/breathe, and many others. Terms
for these relations often refer to their historical origins and do not reflect
any particularly natural category in the modern language (e.g., umlaut
as opposed to ablaut in modern English).
Sometimes
some information is carried in a word’s form not by the addition of some
material (a morpheme), but rather by the deletion of something that we might
expect. In the Uto-Aztecan language Tohono O’odham (‘Papago’) for example, the
perfective form of a verb can in most instances be found by dropping the last
consonant of the imperfective form (whatever that may be): thus, gatwid
‘shooting’ yields perfective gatwi ‘shot’; hikck ‘cutting’
yields hikc ‘cut’, etc.
Examples
like these (and several other sorts which considerations of space prevent us
from going into here) suggest that the relations between words that constitute
a language’s morphology are best construed as a collection of processes
relating one class of words to another, rather than as a collection of
constituent morphemic items that can be concatenated with one another to
yield complex words. Of course, the simplest and most straightforward instance
of such a process is one that adds material to the form (a prefix at the
beginning, a suffix at the end, or an infix within the basic stem), but this is
only one of the formal relations we find in the morphologies of natural
languages. Others include changes, permutations, deletions, and the like.
Linguists set on treating all morphological relations as involving the addition
of morphemes have proposed analyses of many of these apparent processes in such
terms, but it is possible to ask whether the extensions required in the notion
of what constitutes an `affix’ do not in the end empty it of its original
theoretical significance.
Conclusions
We have
seen above that the forms of words can carry complex and highly structured
information. Words do not serve simply as minimal signs, arbitrary chunks of
sound that bear meaning simply by virtue of being distinct from one another.
Some aspects of a word’s form may indicate the relation of its underlying
lexeme to others (markers of derivational morphology or of compound structure),
while others indicate properties of the grammatical structure within which it
is found (markers of inflectional properties). All of these relations seem to
be best construed as knowledge about the relations between words
however: relations between whole lexemes, even when these can be regarded as
containing markers of their relations to still other lexemes; and relations
between word forms that realize paradigmatic alternatives built on a single
lexeme’s basic stem(s) in the case of inflection. These relations connect substantively defined
classes in a way that is only partially directional in its essential nature,
and the formal connections among these classes are signalled in ways that are
best represented as processes relating one shape to another.
Glossary
Allomorphy:
The study of the various formal shapes that can be taken by individual
meaningful elements (‘morphemes’), and the patterns of such variation that
characterize the grammar of a particular language.
Apophony:
A meaningful relation between two words which is signalled not (only) by the
addition of an affix, but also by a change in the quality of a vowel or
consonant, a change which is correlated with the meaning difference in question
rather than with the phonological shape of the form. For example, English man
and men stand in an apophonic relation, since it is precisely the
difference between the vowels of the two words that signals the difference
between singular and plural.
Bahuvrihi
(compound): Sanskrit term of a compound such as English tenderfoot which
refers not to a kind of foot, but to an individual ‘having or
characterized by tender feet’. The word bahuvrihi is itself a compound
of this type: it means literally ‘much-rice’, and refers to someone `(having)
much rice’.
Morpheme:
A hypothetical unit in the analysis of words, corresponding closely to the
linguistic sign. To the extent it is possible to divide the form of every word
exhaustively into a sequence of discrete chunks, to divide its meaning in a
similar fashion, and establish a one-to-one correspondence between the
components of form and those of meaning, each such combination constitutes a
morpheme.
Morphotactics:
The study of the patterns according to which minimal meaningful elements
(‘morphemes’) can be combined to form larger units, particularly words.
(Linguistic)
Sign: The basic unit in terms of which meaning is represented by form in
language. The sign is ‘minimal’ in the
sense that no sub-part of its form can be correlated with some particular
sub-part of its meaning. The notion is central to the linguistic theory of
Ferdinand deSaussure
Readings
Anderson, SR
(1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aronoff, M
(1976). Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bybee, JL (1985).
Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Carstairs-McCarthy,
A. Current morphology. London: Routledge.
Halle, M, & A. Marantz. (1993).
Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In K Hale and SJ Keyser
[eds.], The view from building 20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
111-176.Marchand, H. (1969). The categories and types of present-day English
word-formation. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Matthews, PH
(1991). Morphology (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pinker, S. (1999)
Words and rules. New York: Basic Books.
Spencer, A.
(1991). Morphological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Spencer, A.,
& AM Zwicky [eds.]. The handbook of morphology. Cambridge: Blackwell.
