Morphology

1. Morphology • The study of the internal structure of words. Emerged as a linguistics sub-branch until the nineteenth century. • It played a pivotal role in the reconstruction of the Indo european.

2. Morphology in American Structural Linguistics • Dominant School of linguistics viewed linguistics not as much as theory of the nature of the language but rather as a body of descriptive and analytical procedures. Ideally analysis was expected to proceed by focusing selectively on one dimension of language structure at a time before tackling the next one. Each dimension was referred as linguistic level. Semantic deals with meaning Syntantic deals with sentence structure Morphological deals with word structure Phonology( phonemics) deals with sound systems

3. Language was seen as separated stages ( Doctrine of separation) This structuralist methodological insistence in the separation of the levels One of the structuralist main contributions was the recognition of the fact that words may have intricate internal structures. They showed that words are analysable interm of morphemes.

4. Generative Linguistics rules are intended to go beyond accounting for patterns in the data to a characterization of speakers linguistic knowledge.The primary objective of generative grammar is to model a speakers` linguistic knowledge Chomsky Competence primary Performance object Knowledge of the rules of a language that makes the productionand understanding of an indefinitelarge number of new utterances Actual use of language in real situations

5. Chomsky • Human linguistic capacity is innate. • The human child is born with a blue- print of language which is called Universal Grammar. • Universal Grammar is the faculty of the mind which determines the nature of language acquisition in the infant and of linguistic competence. • The language faculty of the mind is the same in all humans, this can only differ form each other within the limits predetermined by the neurology and physiology of the human brain, with determine the nature of universal grammar.

6. Universal grammar is modular in structure: it consists of various sub-systems of principles that consist of parameters( right/ left handed) which are fixed by experience on the basis of simple evidence of the kind available to the child. • The parametric approach assumes that the infant acquiring a language makes very clever guesses or hypotheses about rules of grammar beign acquired on the basis of rules already acquired after experience of a particular language.

7. Place of morphology in early generative grammar • Morphology received a lot attention when structuralism peaked in 1950s • Generative grammarians initially rejected the validity of a separate morphological module. • Generative grammar was a dominant school in the second half of the century the study of word structure was in the shadows for more than a decade. • Ie emerged in the mid of 1970s scholars Robins(1959) and Mathews(1972,1974) made important contributions to morphology. Word formation phonology syntax

8. Morphology – Phonology interactionThe selection of the form thet manifests agiven morpheme mey be influenced by the sounds thet realice neighbouring morphemes.E.g. a before a consonant an before a vowel Morphology – Syntax interaction The form of a word may be affected by the syntactic constrution in which the word is used. walk walk walks walked

9. Morphology – Lexicon interactionMajor role of the lexicon or dictionary is to list the meaning of words

10. Word • Particular physical realization of the lexeme in speech or writing. • Representation of a lexeme that is associated with certain morpho-syntactic properties.( i.e. noun, verb adjective, ec.) Morpheme Smallest, invisible units of semantic content or grammatical function which words are made up. f/ o / o / t /f/ /u/ /t/