🆗Language and Cognition Unit 5 – Morphology and Word Formation

What's Morphology Anyway?

• Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they are formed
• Focuses on the smallest meaningful units of language called morphemes
• Analyzes how morphemes combine to create words with specific meanings and grammatical functions
• Explores the rules and patterns governing the formation of words in a language
• Investigates the relationship between word structure and meaning
• Considers both the form and function of morphemes within words
• Examines how words are related to each other based on their morphological structure
  • For example, the words "happy," "unhappy," and "happiness" are related through their shared root morpheme "happy"

Building Blocks: Morphemes Explained

• Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning or grammatical function in a language
• Can be classified as free morphemes (can stand alone as words) or bound morphemes (must be attached to other morphemes)
  • Free morphemes: "cat," "run," "happy"
  • Bound morphemes: prefixes (un-, re-), suffixes (-ly, -ness), infixes (-bloody- in "abso-bloody-lutely")
• Morphemes can be further categorized as roots (core meaning) and affixes (modify meaning or grammatical function)
  • Root morphemes: "cat," "run," "happy"
  • Affixes: prefixes (un-, re-), suffixes (-ly, -ness), infixes (-bloody-)
• Some words consist of a single morpheme (monomorphemic), while others are composed of multiple morphemes (polymorphemic)
  • Monomorphemic words: "cat," "run," "happy"
  • Polymorphemic words: "cats," "running," "unhappy"
• Allomorphs are different phonetic realizations of the same morpheme
  • The plural morpheme in English has three allomorphs: /s/ (cats), /z/ (dogs), and /ɪz/ (horses)
• Zero morphemes are morphemes that have no phonetic form but carry meaning or grammatical function
  • In the word "sheep," the plural is indicated by a zero morpheme (no change in form)

Word Formation 101

• Word formation refers to the processes by which new words are created in a language
• Involves the combination of morphemes to form new words with distinct meanings or grammatical functions
• Major word formation processes include affixation, compounding, conversion, clipping, and blending
• Affixation is the addition of affixes to a root morpheme
  • Prefixation: adding a prefix to the beginning of a word (un-happy, re-write)
  • Suffixation: adding a suffix to the end of a word (quick-ly, kind-ness)
  • Infixation: inserting an infix within a word (abso-bloody-lutely)
• Compounding combines two or more free morphemes to create a new word
  • Endocentric compounds: the meaning is related to the head morpheme (doghouse, textbook)
  • Exocentric compounds: the meaning is not related to either morpheme (hotdog, deadline)
• Conversion changes the grammatical category of a word without changing its form
  • "Google" (noun) → "to google" (verb)
• Clipping shortens a word by removing one or more syllables
  • "advertisement" → "ad," "gymnasium" → "gym"
• Blending combines parts of two or more words to create a new word
  • "breakfast" + "lunch" → "brunch," "smoke" + "fog" → "smog"

Inflection vs. Derivation: What's the Difference?

• Inflection and derivation are two main types of morphological processes
• Inflection modifies a word to express grammatical categories without changing its core meaning or word class
  • Plural inflection: "cat" → "cats"
  • Tense inflection: "walk" → "walked"
  • Comparative and superlative inflection: "happy" → "happier" → "happiest"
• Derivation creates a new word with a different meaning or word class by adding affixes to a root morpheme
  • Noun to adjective: "beauty" → "beautiful"
  • Verb to noun: "sing" → "singer"
  • Adjective to adverb: "quick" → "quickly"
• Inflectional morphemes are more productive and regular than derivational morphemes
  • Inflectional morphemes can be applied to most words in a grammatical category
  • Derivational morphemes are more selective and may change the meaning more drastically
• Inflectional morphemes occur at the periphery of a word, while derivational morphemes are closer to the root
  • "unhappiness": derivational prefix "un-" is closer to the root than the inflectional suffix "-ness"
• Inflectional morphology is more relevant to syntax, while derivational morphology is more relevant to lexical semantics

Morphological Processes Across Languages

• Languages exhibit diverse morphological systems and processes
• Isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, with most words consisting of a single morpheme
  • Mandarin Chinese: "wǒ" (I), "ài" (love), "nǐ" (you)
• Agglutinative languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio, with words formed by combining multiple morphemes in a linear sequence
  • Turkish: "ev" (house), "ev-ler" (houses), "ev-ler-im" (my houses), "ev-ler-im-de" (in my houses)
• Fusional languages have morphemes that express multiple grammatical categories simultaneously
  • Latin: "am-o" (I love), "am-a-s" (you love), "am-a-t" (he/she/it loves)
• Polysynthetic languages have a high degree of morphological complexity, with words expressing entire sentences
  • Inuktitut: "tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga" (I can't hear very well)
• Some languages exhibit non-concatenative morphological processes, such as reduplication and templatic morphology
  • Reduplication in Indonesian: "buku" (book) → "buku-buku" (books)
  • Templatic morphology in Arabic: "k-t-b" (write) → "kataba" (he wrote), "kutiba" (it was written)

Morphology and Meaning: How Words Get Their Sense

• Morphological structure contributes to the meaning of words
• The meaning of a complex word is often compositional, derived from the meanings of its constituent morphemes
  • "unhappy" = "un-" (not) + "happy" (feeling pleasure or contentment)
• However, the meaning of some complex words is not entirely predictable from their morphological structure
  • "understand" ≠ "under" + "stand"
• Morphological transparency refers to the degree to which the meaning of a complex word can be inferred from its morphemes
  • Transparent: "teacher" (someone who teaches)
  • Opaque: "cupboard" (a cabinet for storing cups and other dishes)
• Semantic drift can cause the meaning of a word to diverge from its original morphological composition over time
  • "silly" originally meant "blessed" or "happy" in Old English
• Morphological analysis can help in understanding the relationships between words and their meanings
  • The shared root "vis" in "vision," "visible," and "revise" suggests a common semantic theme

Cognitive Aspects of Morphological Processing

• Morphological processing involves the cognitive mechanisms underlying the recognition, production, and comprehension of morphologically complex words
• The mental lexicon stores morphemes and rules for combining them, allowing for efficient processing and creativity in language use
• Morphological decomposition is the process of breaking down a complex word into its constituent morphemes during word recognition
  • "unhappiness" → "un-" + "happy" + "-ness"
• Morphological composition is the process of combining morphemes to create a complex word during word production
  • "un-" + "happy" + "-ness" → "unhappiness"
• Morphological priming studies suggest that morphologically related words are linked in the mental lexicon
  • Exposure to "teacher" facilitates the recognition of "teach" and "teaching"
• Morphological awareness, the ability to recognize and manipulate morphemes, is crucial for vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension
  • Children with better morphological awareness tend to have larger vocabularies and better reading skills
• Morphological processing is influenced by factors such as word frequency, morphological complexity, and semantic transparency
  • High-frequency words and morphologically simple words are processed more quickly
  • Semantically transparent words are easier to process than opaque words

Practical Applications and Language Learning

• Understanding morphology has various practical applications in fields such as language education, natural language processing, and language documentation
• In language education, teaching morphological awareness can help learners expand their vocabulary and improve their reading and writing skills
  • Learning the meanings of common prefixes and suffixes (e.g., "un-," "-tion," "-ly")
  • Practicing word formation exercises and analyzing the structure of complex words
• Morphological analysis is essential for natural language processing tasks, such as text segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and machine translation
  • Identifying morpheme boundaries and grammatical categories in words
  • Generating appropriate word forms based on context and grammatical rules
• Morphological documentation is crucial for preserving and revitalizing endangered languages
  • Recording the morphological structure and processes of a language
  • Creating morphologically annotated corpora and dictionaries
• Morphological knowledge can facilitate second language acquisition by helping learners recognize familiar morphemes and infer the meanings of new words
  • Recognizing the shared root "port" in "transport," "import," and "export"
  • Applying morphological rules from one's native language to the target language (e.g., English "-ly" and Spanish "-mente" for adverbs)
• Morphological typology can inform language teaching methods and materials by considering the specific morphological features of the target language
  • Adapting teaching strategies for isolating, agglutinative, or fusional languages
  • Focusing on the most productive and frequent morphological patterns in the language