‘...
and even ... the patriotic archbisshop of Canterbury found it advisable—’
‘Found what?’ said the Duck. ‘Found it’, the Mouse replied rather crossly; ‘of
course you know what “it” means. ‘I know what “it” means well enough, when I
find a thing,’ sid the Duck; ‘it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is,
what did the archbishop find ? (Lewis Carrol, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.)
Morphological
rules for combining morphemes into words differ from the syntactic rules of a
language that determine how words are combined to form sentences. There is,
however, an interesting relationship between morphology and syntax. In the
discussion of derivational morphology, we saw that certain aspects of
morphology have syntactic implications in that nouns, and so on. There are other
ways in which morphology is dependent on syntax.
When
we combine words to form sentences, these sentences are combinations of
morphemes, but some of these morphemes, similar to –ceive or –mit, which were
shown to derive a meaning only when combined with other morphemes in a
sentence. For example, what is the meaning of it in the sentence it’s hot in
July, or in The Archbishop found it advisable? What is the meaning of to in He
wanted her to go ? To has a grammatical ‘meaning’ as an infinitive marker, and
it is also morpheme required by the syntactic, sentence-formation rules of
language. Similarly for have in Cows have walked here, which is a grammatical
marker for the ‘present perfect’; and for the different forms of be in both The
baby is crying and The baby’s nappy was changed, which function, respectively,
as a ‘progressive’ marker and a ‘passive voice’ marker.
INFLECTIONAL
MORPHEMES
Many
languages, including English to some extent, contain ‘bound’ morphemes that,
like to, are for the most part purely grammatical markers, representing such
concepts as ‘tense’, ‘number’, ‘gender’, ‘case’, and so forth.
Such
sound ‘bound’ grammatical morphemes are called infectional morphemes: they
never change the syntactic category of the words of morphemes to which they are
attached. They are always attached to complete words. Consider the forms of
verb in the following sentences :
(1)I
sail the ocean blue (2)He sail the ocean blue (3)John sailed the ocean blue.
(4)John has sailed the ocean blue. (5)Jhon is sailing the ocean blue.
In
the sentence (2) the –s at the end of the verb is an ‘agreement’ marker; it
signifies that the subject of the verb is ‘third person’, is ‘singular’, and
that the verb is in the ‘present tense’. It doesn’t add any ‘lexical meaning’.
The –ed and –ing endings are morphemes required by the syntactic rules of the
language to signal ‘tense’ or ‘aspect’.
English
is no longer a highly inflected language. But we do have other infectional
endings. The plurality of nouns, for example, is usually marked by a plural
suffix attached to the singular noun, as in boy/boys and cat/cats. At the
present stage of English history, there are a total of seven bound infectional
affixes :
English
infectional morpheme : -s (third-person singular present) for example: She
wait-s at home. –ed (past tense) for
example:She wait-ed at home. –ing (progressive) for example:she is eat-ing the
donut. –en (past participle) for example:mary has eat-en the donuts. –s
(plural) for example: She ate the donut-s. –er(comparative) for example:Disa
has short-er hair than Karin. –est(superlative) for example: Disa has the
short-est hair.
Infectional
morphemes in English may follow but not precede derivational morphemes. Thus,
to the derivationally complex word un+like+ly+hood one can add a plural ending
to form un+like+ly+hood+s but not *unlikes/lyhood. Some linguists would regard
the ‘s of constructions such as the boy’s hair as an infection marking a
possessive. We analyse it as a clitic (that is, a short form attached to the
end of the word) comparable to ‘ve in I’ve.
Some
languages are highly inflected. Finnish nouns, for example, have many different
inflectional endings, sa shown in the following example (don’t be concerned if
you do not know what all the specific case endings mean; sg.= singular, pl.=
plual):(7)
Mantere
:nominative sg. Mantereen : genitive (possesive)sg. Manteretta : partitive sg.
Mantereena : essive sg. Mantereseen : illative sg. Mantereita : partitive pl.
Mantereisiin : illative pl.
Students
often ask for definitions of derivational morphemes as opposed to infectional
morphemes. There is no easy answer; probably the simples is to say that
derivational morphemes are bound morphemes that are not infectional.
Infectional morphemes signal grammatical relations and are required by the
syntactic sentence formation rules. Derivational morphemes, when affixed to
roots and stems, change the grammatical words class/or the basic meaning of the
word, which may then be inflected as to number (singular or pural), tense
(present, past, future), and so on.
(7)
Examples are from L. Campbel, 1977, ‘Generative phonology vs Finnish phonology:
retrospect and prospect’, Texus Linguistic Forum, 5, pp.21-58.
EXCEPTION
AND SUPPLETIONS
The
singular rule forms plurals from singular nouns does not apply to words such as
child/children, man/men, sheep/sheep, criterion/criteria. These words are
exceptions to the English infectional rule of plural formation. Similarly,
verbs such as sing/sang or bring/brought are exceptions to the regular
past-tense rule in English.
When,
as children, we are learning the language, that is, acquiring (or constructing)
the grammar, we have to learn specifically that the plural of man is men and
that the past of gi is went. For this reason we often hear children asy mans and
goed; they apply them generally to all the nouns and verbs. These children’s
errors, in fact, support our position that the regular rules exist.
Some
of the irregular forms must be listed separately in our mental lexicon, as
suppletive forms. That is, one cannot use the regular rules of infectional
morphology to add affixes to word that are exceptions such as bring/brought,
but must replace the non-infected form with another word. It is possible that
for regular words, only the singular forms are listed since we can use the
infectional rules to form plurals. But this can’t be so with exceptions.
When
a new word enters the language it is regular infectional rules that apply. The
plural of the noun sheep, as in The sheep are in the paddock, show that some
morpheme seem to have no phonological shape at all. We know that hit in the
above sentence is hit+past because of the time adverb yesterday, and we know
that sheep is the phonetic form of sheep+plural because of the plural verb form
are. Thousands of years ago Hindu grammarians suggested that some morphemes
have a zero form; that is, they have no phonological representation. In our
view, however, because we would like to hold to the definition of a morpheme a
constant sound-meaning form, we will suggest that the moepheme hit is marked as
both represent and past in the lexicon, and the morpheme sheep is marked as
both singular and plural.
MORPHOLOGY
AND SYNTAX
‘Couriouserr
and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so moch surpriced, that for the moment she
quite forgot how to speak good English). (Lewish Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland)
Some
grammatical relations can be expressed either inflectionally (morphologically)
or syntactically (as part of the sentence structure). We can see this in the
following sentences:
He
loves books. (He is a lover of books). The planes which fly are red (The flying
planes are red). He is hunger than she (He is more hungry than she)
Some
of you may form the comparative of beastly only by adding –er. Beastlier is
often used interchangeably with more beastly. There are speakers who say
either. We know the rule that determines when either form of the comparative
can be used or when just want can be used, as pointed out by Lewis Carroll in
the quotation above.
What
one language signals with infectional affixes, another does with word order and
another with function words. For example, in English, the sentence Maxim
defends Victor’: (The letter c is pronounced like the ch in the word cheese;
the j is pronounced like the y in yet.)
Maksim
zasciscajet Viktora. Maksim Victora zasciscajet. Viktora zasciscajet Maksim
The
infectional suffix –a added to the name Viktor to derive Viktora shows that
Victor, not Maxim, is defended.
In
English, to convey the future meaning of a verb we normally use a function word
such as will, as in John will come on Monday. In French, the verb is infected
for future tense. Notice the difference between ‘John is coming on Monday’,
Jean vient lundi, and ‘John will come on Monday’, Jean viendra lundi.
Similarly, where English uses the grammatical marker have and be, mentioned
earlier, other languages use affixing to achieve the same meaning, as
illustrated with Indonesian:
Dokter
mem+eriksa saya (The doctor examines me) saya diperiksa oleh doctor (I was
examined by the doctor)
In
discussing derivational and compounding morphology, we noted that knowing the
meaning of the distinct morphemes may not always reveal the meaning of the
morphologically complex word. This problem is not true of infectional
morphology. If we know the meaning of the word linguist, we also know the
meaning of the plural orm linguists; if we know the meaning of the verb
analyse, another diference between derivational and inflectional morphology.
Figure 3.2 shows the way one may classify English morphemes.
The
mental grammar of the language that is internalized by the language learner
includes a lexicon listing all the morphemes and all the derived words of the
language. The morphological rules of the grammar permit you to use and
understand the morphemes and words in forming and understanding sentences, and
in forming and understanding new words.
