LESSON 5-3
Morphological Types of
Languages
& An Introduction to
Morphemic Analysis
As discussed in File 5-4 in
your textbook, we can classify world languages according to the way they put
their morphemes together. Analytic
languages are those where each word usually consists of a single morpheme. That is, instead of inflectional affixes,
for example, invariant function words are used. Mandarin Chinese, as your textbook mentions, is a highly analytic
language. Another one is Vietnamese,
where the concept of ‘driver’, for example, is conveyed by basically putting
the words drive and person together. What is important to note here is that both English and
Vietnamese have a method of indicating the notion “driver”; they just do it in
different ways.
Synthetic languages, in contrast, are those where we find
affixes and free morphemes conjoined in different combinations. Of course, in both of these typologies we
see several layers or gradation. That is, in each broad category we have
subcategories. I will not expect you to
remember the term for each subcategory (e.g., agglutinating, fusional).
However, I will expect you to remember that a morphological typology exists and
that home languages you’ll encounter in your ESL classrooms may be of a
different type than English (which is, of course, a moderately synthetic
“inflectional” language).
Somali is worth mentioning
in this regard: in Somali, unlike English, suffixes –rather than separate
morphemes–are used to show possession, as in:
buugeeda ‘her book’ and buugayaga ‘our book’, where buug
is the stem meaning ‘book’. We’ve seen
earlier in Lesson 5-2, the forms buugan ‘this book’ and buugaa
‘that book.’ So far, then, Somali seems
to be using affixation for both possession and for demonstratives.
Before moving on, I have to
give you yet one more example: Turkish – a highly synthetic language. Let us look at the word iyilestirilemediler
“it wasn’t possible to cure them.”
Actually, here one word constitutes the whole sentence. Here’s the morpheme segmentation (for those
brave souls!): iyi+les+tir+il+eme+di+ler
(good+become+causative+passive+neg+past+plu) Enough said, I’d think. (Send me an e-mail message if you really
want to go deeper.)
As
your textbook notes, there are no purely synthetic or analytic languages, of
course. In general, a language will be primarily of one type while including
some features from others.
Now
that we’ve had a solid introduction to morphology, let us see how we would
solve a morphological exercise.
While
solving a morphological problem, our aim is to come up with a list of the
morphemes (not words; remember a word may contain more than one
morpheme!). That simple. How do we do that? The first thing to do is
morpheme segmentation: separating out the morphemes, just as we just did in
Somali. Then, look to see if you have
any allomorphy.
When
a morpheme has alternate pronunciations (alternate phonetic forms), these are
said to be allomorphs, variations of the same morpheme. We discussed one such case when we were
talking about assimilation in phonology.
Recall that in the words indecent, impossible, and incorrect,
the negative prefix in- has three different pronunciations, depending on
the segment that follows the prefix.
Namely, the prefix is pronounced with an alveolar nasal before an
alveolar (or dental) segment; with a bilabial nasal before labial sounds; and
with a velar nasal before velar sounds.
Thus, these variations (in, im, i+engwa) are allomorphs of the same
negative morpheme.
Let
us consider one more example. English
plural ending –s is pronounced as [s] [z] or [schwa+z] depending on which
segment precedes it. After voiceless
consonants (as in books), it is pronounced as [s]; after voiced segments (as in
boys or fools) with a [z]; and after sibilants (alveolar & palatal
fricatives + affricates, e.g., churches, dishes), it is pronounced with a
[schwa+z]. Thus, [s][z] and [schwa+z]
would be allomorphs of the regular plural morpheme.
Exercise: Morphology (requires
online discussion via Caucus)
Consider
the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme in the following words, and
answer the questions that follow.
Assignment#3 (Due 10/19)
Do 1.1 (Turkish, p. 139) and answer Q a. that
follows. Send your solution only
to Feride.
Hints:
No allomorphy that you need to worry about.
First on a piece of paper, group together the words that all share the
stem morpheme ‘sea’. Do the same for
all of them. You can then separate the suffixes very easily.
This
concludes our introduction to morphology.
Go to Midterm to work on your midterm exam.