Unit 2 Verbal morphology, Stem and Affixes

Verbal morphology

Verbal morphology  typically involves many more grammatical meanings than noun morphology.

a.   TENSE refers to the relation between the time of the situation described by the verb and the moment of speech.  You’re probably  already familiar with the distinction between PAST, PRESENT, and, FUTURE. Some languages only make a two-way distinction in their morphology, between  past and NONPAST or between future and NONFUTURE. For example, English verbs indicate tense by the presence or absence of  -(e)d.  The presence of -(e)d indicates past tense, its absence indicates nonpast, since this form is used both for present and future situations.

(2)            a. I walk-ed

                 b. I (will) work-Ø

Future time is distinguished from present by a separate auxiliary verb, will,  not by tense morphology on the verb. (the null sign Ø in example (2) indicates the absence of any suffix in a particular position.  Linguists sometimes talk about ZERO MORPHEMES.) In addition to all these possibilities, languages sometimes subdivide past tense into RECENT PAST (e.g., earlier today) and REMOTE PAST (e.g., before today), or even three or four degrees of remoteness from the present moment.

b.   ASPECT refers to the time of a situation in relation to its context. The two major distinctions that languages make are between PERFECTIVE and IMPERFECTIVE aspect. In imperfective aspect, the internal temporal structure of a situation (its beginning, middle, or end) is being presented as important, while in perfective, only the situation as a whole is important. Quite often, imperfective is used for present events (which are not complete and whose internal structure is therefore of interest) while perfective is used for past events (which are usually presented as complete wholes). However imperfect can also be used in past time, in context like this:

(3)                    Imperfective                                                            perfective

            While I was wandering through the maze, I noticed a strange design on one wall.

Since the time of noticing occurs entirely inside the time span of the wandering, the internal structure of the wandering is important. Thus wander would be presented in imperfective and notice in perfective. So, often aspect presents the time of each verb with respect to the other verbs in context, not to a fixed present moment.

       Sometimes, language also distinguishes between two types of imperfective aspect, called HABITUAL and PROGRESSIVE.  Habitual  aspect refers to situations that occur repeatedly or typically, such as ‘He is empties the trash on Tuesdays’. progressive refers to one-time or on-going events, such as ‘He is emptying the trash now’

       You will also encounter something called PERFECT ASPECT. It corresponds in meaning to the English auxiliary verb ‘have’ and is often translated ‘have already’. It is not the same as perfective aspect; in fact, it is really more like a tense than an aspect.

aspect n

a term used to denote the activity, event, or state described by a verb, for example whether the activity is ongoing or completed. Two types of aspect are commonly recognized:

A.   lexical aspect (or inherent lexical aspect) refers to the internal semantics

of verbs, which can be grouped into a number of categories:

1 states, verbs that refer to unchanging conditions (see STATIVE VERB), for example be, have, want

2 activities, verbs referring to processes with no inherent beginning or end point, for example play, walk, breathe

3 accomplishments, which are durative (last for a period of time) but have an inherent end point, for example read a book, write a novel

4 achievements, which are nondurative and have an inherent end point, for example finish, realize, arrive

B.    grammatical aspect, on the other hand, refers to the resources provided by a language (such as verbal auxiliaries, prefixes and suffixes) to encode different perspectives taken by a speaker towards activities, events, and states.

Languages make available different options for realizing aspect grammatically.

English has two grammatical aspects: PROGRESSIVE and PERFECT.

see also TENSE1

c.   MOOD refers to the relationship between the situation reported by the verb and reality. I introduce only two types here: INDICATIVE (used for statement and questions, and concerned with  how things actually are) and IMPERATIVE (used for commands, and concerned with how the speaker would like things to be)

mood n

a set of contrasts which are often shown by the form of the verb and which express the speaker’s or writer’s attitude to what is said or written.

Three moods have often been distinguished:

1 indicative mood: the form of the verb used in DECLARATIVE SENTENCEs or

QUESTIONs. For example:

She sat down.

Are you coming?

2 imperative mood: the form of the verb in IMPERATIVE SENTENCEs. For example:

Be quiet!

Put it on the table!

In English, imperatives do not have tense or perfect aspect (see ASPECT)

but they may be used in the progressive aspect. For example:

Be waiting for me at five.

3 subjunctive mood: the form of the verb often used to express uncertainty, wishes, desires, etc. In contrast to the indicative mood, the subjunctive usually refers to non-factual or hypothetical situations. In English, little use of the subjunctive forms remains. The only remaining forms are:

a.  be (present subjunctive), were (past subjunctive) of be

b. the stem form, e.g. have, come, sing of other verbs (present subjunctive

only)

The use of the subjunctive form is still sometimes found in:

a that clauses after certain verbs. For example:

It is required that she be present.

I demand that he come at once.

b past subjunctive of be in if clauses. For example:

If I were you, I’d go there.

c in some fixed expressions. For example:

So be it.

d.   agreement. The most common type of AGREEMENT is morphology on the verb that indicates something about the subject. For  example, in English present tense verbs with third person singular subjects  carry an –s suffix. If the subject is some other person or number, the suffix is absent.

(4)   a. she/he/it  ride-s fifteen miles a day.

        b. I/we/you/they ride-Ø fifteen miles a day.

We say that English verbs ‘agree with their subjects in person and number’.

Stem and affixes

Morphology has to do with the various ways that morphemes are combined to form words.

      Stems usually have richer semantics than affixes. That is, stems usually have lexical  meaning, while affixes often (not always) have grammatical meaning. Thus, stems can usually be glossed by a translation equivalent, while affixes often require technical linguistic terms.

       Stems are usually members of OPEN CLASSES, while affixes are almost always members of CLOSED CLASSES. ‘Open’ and ‘closed’ refer partly to the number of members in a class, but more to the possibility of adding new members to the class.

      Finally, affixes are always BOUND, while stems may be either bound or FREE. When we say that morpheme is free, we mean that it can occur by itself as a word. A morpheme that is bound cannot be a word by itself but must always be attached to some other morphemes.

       In summary the distinction between stems and affixes is a distinction between the central and peripheral parts of a word. The normal characteristics of stems and affixes are summarized  in the following chart:

            STEMS                                                  AFFIXES

            Usually lexical meaning                  usually grammatical meaning

            Usually from open classes              almost always from closed classes

            Either bound or free                                    always bound

open class n

also open set

a group of words (a WORD CLASS), which contains an unlimited number of items.

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open-class words. New words

can be added to these classes, e.g. laser, e-commerce, chatroom.

The word classes conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns consist of

relatively few words, and new words are not usually added to them.

These are called closed classes, or closed sets.

Unit 3 Inflectional Morphology

Basic questions to ask about morphology

      When we study the morphology of  a language, that is, the structure of its words, there are two basic questions that we always need to be asking ourselves. Think of these questions especially when analyzing an affix.

a.   What is its meaning?

b.   How is that meaning expressed?

Question (a) has to do with semantics. It includes other questions, such as:

            (1)   What meanings are being expressed?

            (2)   Are these meanings lexical or grammatical?

Questions (b) has to do with phonology and grammar. it includes other questions, such as:

(1)  What is the phonological material (e.g., the string of segments) that represents this meaning.

(2)   Where is this material located with respect to the stem (prefixed, suffixed, etc.)?

(3)   is it always the same on every stem, or does it vary depending on context?

(4)   What category of words is affected by this morphological process (nouns, verbs, etc.)?

INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY

Inflectional versus derivational

Two basic questions in morphology:

(1)       a.   What is its meaning?

b.   How is that meaning expressed?

DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY  takes one word and changes into another, creating new lexical entries. In the clearest cases, it creates a word of another syntactic category. For example, the suffix –ness changes adjectives into abstract nouns, as in fat-ness, dry-ness, and sad-ness. The suffix –(e)r changes verbs into nouns, as in teach-er, act-or, play-er, far-mer, etc. the suffix –ify changes nouns or adjectives into verbs, as in class-ify, pur-ify, beaut-ify, etc.

(2)   -(e)s         third person singular present (on verbs)

        -(e)d       past (on verbs)

      the essential difference between inflection and derivation is whether the addition of an affix creates a new word or just another form of the same word. There are three other important differences between inflection and derivation. One concerns PRODUCTIVITY: inflectional morphology is very productive, while derivational morphology usually is not. English past tense marking is inflectional and so it is very productive—when new words are coined, their past tense is automatically available in the grammar. For example, English speaker added –(e)d to the new verb digitize to form digitized without blinking an eye.

      Derivational affixes, on the other hand, often cannot be used with such generally. Indeed, they often cannot be used even on words that have been in the language for centuries. Consider the following examples of derivational affixes; some work and others fail. The ones that fail do so not because of any general rule, but simply because the resulting words don’t happen to exist.

(3)             Good                         Bad

            Same-ness                 *different-ness

            Weak-ness                *strong-ness

            Mad-ness                  *sane-ness

One simply has to memorize which derived words contain –ness and which do not. This memory load is hardly ever necessary with inflection.

       Of course, some derivational affixes are more productive than others. The suffix –er is relatively productive; word ‘players’ know that practically any verb can be turned into a noun by adding –(e)r. So, we aren’t dealing with a hard and fast distinction, but in general inflection is more productive than derivation.

       Another difference is that derivational affixes often have lexical meaning, while inflectional affixes usually have grammatical meaning. For example, one meaning of the derivational suffix –er can be expressed ‘a person who …’, but the meaning of the inflectional –(e)d is best expressed with the technical term  ‘past tense’.

      The third difference between inflection and derivation is that different inflected forms of a word can usually be useful organized into a type of chart called a PARADIGM.

(4)                                            Singular          Plural

            First person                do                   do

            Second person         do                   do

            Their person               does               do

This cross-classifying of forms in paradigms is characteristic of inflectional morphology, but not of derivational morphology. Derivational morphology groups together into pairs, like march and marcher, farm and farmer.

       The differences between inflection and derivation are summarized in the following chart?

 

 

The  importance of paradigm for inflectional morphology

Now we know about paradigms, we can look at morphology from a new perspective. Agglutinative languages have morphemes arranged in a sequence like beads on a string, with clear morpheme cuts between them. Position class charts often provide a convention way of summarizing their morphology, focusing on the relative ordering of the pieces of a word.

       However, this analogy to beads on  a string often breaks down. IRREGULAR (or SUPPLETIVE) verbs, which are found in most languages, cause it problems. In English, there is a large class of verbs which do not form their past tense using –(e)d.

(7)       Present                      past

            Sing                            sang

            Think                          thought

            Have                          had

            See                             saw

            Go                              went

            Is                                 was

Good consistent morpheme cuts are difficult at best, and there is little consistency from one verb to the next. Position class charts are useless for describing these verbs forms. But, if we think in terms of paradigms and grammatical categories we can at least make some sense of the situation; all verbs have a paradigm which includes both present and past tense forms.

 Grammatical categories and inflectional features

These essence of the word and paradigm perspective is its focus on GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES, like person, number, and tense.. what exactly is grammatical category? Grammatical categories are sets of abstract elements (like singular and plural) which are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. Each grammatical category has only a small and fixed number of elements, that is, grammatical categories are closed classes. Thus, a grammatical category is a small, closed class of mutually exclusive grammatical properties.

       How do we add this concept to our formal grammar? We do so with FEATURES. For example, to represent that a word is singular, we might assign it the feature [-plural]. To represent that a word is third person, we might assign it the feature [3 person]. In these examples, ‘plural’ and ‘person’ are the names of the features; ‘-‘ and ‘3’ are their VALUES.

       Many features are BINARY; they have only two values, usually ‘+’ and ‘-‘. Often this is because they represent grammatical categories that contain only two elements. For example, number (singular versus plural) is often represented with the binary feature ( ± plural).

        The inflectional category of person is like this; it normally has three choices: first, second, and third person. One way to represent this formally is with a single feature that has three values: [1 person], [2 person], and [3 person]. Another is to use two binary features, such as [±me] and [± you]. these work as follows:

(9)        first person                 [+me, -you]

            Second person         [-me, +you]

            Third person               [-me, -you]