Morphology

There are some building blocks of language that are smaller than words—morphemes.

Morphology is the study of how words are built out of these small bits.

Free morphemes are words by themselves.

Bound morphemes have to be attached to something else—a root, base or stem.

The attachment can be as a prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, umlaut, or suppletion.

Inflectional affixes hook words into sentence structure.

Inflectional affixes provide evidence of the variety of structural requirements in the world’s languages.

Derivational affixes provide a mechanism for creating new words.

Derivational affixes provide evidence about a language’s lexical history.

Compounding provides a means of creating new words through word combination.

Many morphemes have different forms or allomorphs.

Morphology provides further evidence for hierarchical organization in language.

Languages differ dramatically in morphological structure.

Analytic languages have no morphology.

Synthetic languages have lots of morphology.

Polysynthetic languages are almost entirely morphology.

The big question: can a single model account for all of these morphological features?

This week’s lecture notes

Exercises (Chapter 4): 11, 22, 24 (trees), 30 (Turkish), 32 (Quiché), and 40 (Zoque)

Due: March 6th