Speaker
of a language can easily learn how to analyse a word of theri language into its
component morphemes, since their mental grammars include a mental lexicon of
morphemes and the morphological rules for their combination. But suppose you
didn’t know English and were a linguist from the planet Mars wishing to analyse
the language. How would you find out what the morphemes of English were ? How
would you determine whether a word in that language had one or two or more
morphemes ?
The
first thing to do would be to task native speakers how they would say various
words. (It would of course help if the speakers knew Martian so you could ask
your qestion in Martian. If not, you would have to do quite a bit of miming and
gesturing and acting.) Suppose then, you collected the following sets or
paradigms of forms:
Adjective
: ugly (very unattractive), uglier (more ugly), ugliest (most ugly), pretty
(nice looking), prettier(more nice looking), prettiest (most nice looking),
tall (large in height), taller (more tall), tallest (most tall)
To
determine what the morphemes are in such a list, the first thing a field
linguist would do is to see if there are many forms that mean the same thing in
different words, that is, to look for recurring forms. We find them: ugly occurs
in ugly, uglier, ugliest, all three of which words include the meaning ‘very
unattractive’. We also find that –er occurs in prettier and taller, adding the
meaning ‘most. Furthermore, by asking additional questions of our English
speakers we find that –er and est do not occur in isolation with the meanings
of ‘more’ and ‘most’. We can therefore concluded that the following morphemes
occur in English :
Ugly
(root morpheme), pretty (root morpheme), tall (root morpheme), er (bound
morpheme ‘comparative’), est (bound morpheme ‘superlative’)
As
we processed further we find there are other words that end with –er, singer,
lover, bomber, writer, teacher, and many more word in which in words in which
the –er ending does not mean ‘comparative’ but, when attached to a verb,
changes it to a noun who ‘verbs’ that is, sing is, sings, loves, bombs writers,
teaches. So we conclude that is a different morpheme even though it is
pronounced thae same as the comparative. We go on and find words such as anger,
butter, member, and many others in which the –er has no separate meaning at
all—an anger is not one who “angs and a member does not *memb—and therefore
these words must be monomorphemic.
Once
you have fully described the morphology of English, you might want to go on to describe
another language. A language called Paku was written by one of the authors of
this book (Fromkin) for a 1970s television series called Land of the Lost. This
was a language used by the monkey people called Pakuni. Suppose you found
yourself in this strange land and attempted to find out what the morphemes of
Paku were. Again, you would collect your data from a native Paku speaker and
proceed as the Martian did with English. Consider the following data from Paku
:
Me
(I), ye (You), we (he), wa (she), abuma (girl), adusa (boy), abu (child), Paku
(one paku), meni (we), yeni (you. pl), weni (they.masculine), wani
(they.feminine), abumani (girls), abusani (boys), abuni (children), Pakuni
(more than one Paku)
By
examining these words you find that all the plural forms and –ni and the
singular forms do not. You therefore conclude that –ni is a separate morpheme
meaning ‘plural’ which is attached as a suffix to a noun.
While
these are rather simple examples of how one proceeds to conduct a morphological
analysis, the principles remain the same and you are on the road to becoming a
morphologist.
