Quiz tomorrow

1. Quiz tomorrow • Phonetics • Phonology • Similar questions to homework • 15 minutes

2. Morphology

3. Overview • What is a ‘word’? What is a morpheme? • Types of morphemes • Derivation of new words • Compounding • Inflection • Other stuff

4. Definitions • What is a word? • A minimal free form • Words are the smallest independent, meaningful units • What is a morpheme? • Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units • Can be free or bound • Bound morphemes are those that cannot appear without attaching to something else • Examples: possessive -s, -ceive, cran-, past -ed • What is an allomorph? • An alternate form of an underlying morpheme • a chest an elbow • a navy an army • permit permission • remit remission

5. Word structure • Root • The word to which affixes are eventually added • Morphologically simple, i.e. there are no affixes attached to it • Base • The part of the word to which one affix is attached • Can include previously attached affixes • Affix • A bound morpheme that changes the meaning or lexical category (i.e. type of word) of the base • Suffix – attaches to the end of the base like believable • Prefix – attaches in front of the base, like unbelievable • Infix – attaches inside the base, like unbe-freakin’-lievable • Arabic infixes are quite different

6. Derivation • Derivation • The process by which you build a new word from existing morphemes in the language • Not all derivational affixes can attach to all lexical categories, or even all the members of a lexical category • Compare -ityand -ness • beige • passive • pretty • monstrous • enormous • active

7. Sample structure

8. Compounding • What is a compound? • A word composed of two or more full words • One word usually serves as the head, the main word that the other word modifies • What is the head of compound word? blackbird? whitewash? • Not all languages are right-headed • Heads can be endocentric (visible in the compound) or exocentric • Which are exocentric? blackhead, nighthawk, buttercup, pickpocket, glee club • Compounds can take many different forms • P. 128, figure 4.9 • Other possible forms: V+ N+-er (bottle-opener, evildoer, gold-digger), N+V+-er (do-gooder), N + V (buttmunch, buzzkill), • What happens with words like pick up and help out? • Stress patterns • http://youtu.be/zvwbVGDk_5A

9. Inflection • What is inflection? • Word change to show some grammatical information • Some languages use inflection extensively, but English does not • What are the differences between inflection and derivation? • Inflection is relevant for (among other things): • Tense (past, non-past) • Voice (active, passive) • Agreement (gender, number) • Some words can have more than one plural: person/persons/people • Case (semantic role) • Mood (degree or kind of reality assigned to sentence) • Aspect (distribution through time)

10. Other inflectional phenomena • Internal change • Change of one segment, e.g. sing/sang/sung, mouse/mice • Shows that morphology is not just concatenative, i.e., it doesn’t just string things together one after the other • Suppletion • Replacement of one word with another, underivable word • The word be is almost totally suppletive: am, is, are, was, were • Reduplication • Repetition of all or part of a word (eensy weensy, punch punch as in, ‘It wasn’t a punch punch, more of a slap)

11. Other morphological processes • Cliticization • Reduction of a form that leans on another word, like -n‘t, -’m, -’s • Conversion/Zero derivation • Change of category with no change in form, e.g. google, youtube(N, V) • Clipping • Shortening a word • Blends • Combining two words into one, such as infotainment and spork • Backformation • Creation of a new word by breaking down an existing word • editor used to be like author and doctor, until people started seeing it as advisor, with two morphemes • Acronyms and initialisms • Acronym: word of initial letters pronounced like a word, like NASA • Initialism: word of initial letters pronounced like letters, like FBI, CIA • Onomatopoeia • Sounds like a rough approximation of the sound, like pop, thwack, moo • Coinage • Word manufacture, like name creations

12. Morphophonemics • Phonological changes that depend on morphological combinations to take effect. • It’s electr[icity] making the lights go on. • It’s electr[ic. It e]mitslight.