Transcript 323-Morphology

323 Morphology
The Structure of Words
3. Lexicon and Rules
3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
The lexicon is in theory infinite, but in practice it is limited. Human beings know only a
certain amount of information at any one time and it is impossible for a human to know an infinite
amount of information. This holds in the lexicon, as well. Comparing a lexicon to a dictionary (the
printed lexemes), a dictionary can hold only so much information at one time. The list can grow
and grow, but it is never infinite.
The potentiality for making up new words by means of the rules of word building is
potentially infinite, but this has never been proved. Nevertheless, it possible to create a large
number of words, larger than what most humans could possibly memorize. Thus we must
distinguish between actual words and potential words.
A neologism is a new word that has been created. Neologisms that do not catch on
except occasionally are called occasionalisms. Note that this word was probably created
recently and I doubt if it has really caught on. If true, then the word occasionalism is itself an
occasionalism.
Affixes that are readily adjoined to words to create new words (bases and stems) are called
productive.
E.g. The English suffix ‘-er’ can be added to most verbs that denote an agent oriented
action: doer, fixer, baker, worker, runner, swimmer, writer, and so forth. The same suffix can also
denote an instrument ‘cooker, pickle slicer, popcorn maker, double-boiler, but it is doubtful that
this verb productive, though it may be productive if the semantic class is known. Other affixes
are clearly not productive:
E.g. ‘-ic’, ‘ion’, ‘-ive’, ‘be-’, ‘de-’, and so forth.
Another problem with unproductivity (sic) is that unproductive affixes easily change the meaning
of the word.
3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
E.g. head, be-head; give, forgive; stand, understand; woman, womanize; and so
forth.
There are affixes that are very productive, rather unproductive, somewhat unproductive, very
unproductive. H lists a finer list of productiveness (p. 42). Another problem are complex words
that are lexical, but underlying base is not lexical. To illustrate this, consider disgruntled. It is
derived from the base *‘gruntle’, which is not a lexeme with the associated meaning of
disgruntled. I take the view that forming bases is productive given the restrictions on the base,
but the base is not always a lexeme. There no way to be absolutely sure whether a given base
will or will not be a lexeme. As a consequence, all lexemes must be enterred in the lexicon. If a
base is created, one must check to see if it is a lexeme, or one may occasionally determine a
lexical meaning for the new base thus creating a new word, as I did with unproductivity above.
H argues that a word-form lexicon is not desirable. A word-form lexicon is one in which
every declined or conjugated form of each word is listed in it. Inflected forms are generally
predictable given the class forms of each lexeme, except the irregular ones such oxen, children,
brethren; is, are, be, was, were (being and been) are regular (except for the pronunciation of
been in the US and in Canada whether the American pronunciation has taken over the earlier
one which is still standard in Britain.
Even so, there is evidence that all the word forms of everyday usage are memorized and
listed in the lexicon. I read a paper at SFU claiming that the lexicon is divided into two parts: the
list of lexemes and the list of word-forms derived from them. Each set of word forms derived from
a lexeme are linked to that lexeme at little cost to the grammar. Linking is another research topic
of mine, which I cannot get into here.
3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
H mentions that a lexicon should be elegant which means the least number of rules that will produce
all the inflected forms. The lexical part of the lexicon contains a list of all lexemes that a speaker has.
The word-form part of the lexicon contains the inflected forms for each inflectable lexeme
(conjunctions, prepositions and other functions are not inflected in English):
The lexeme PLAY is connected to the word-forms play, plays, played, and playing by means of a link.
The links are for information transference from the lexeme to the word-form, which we might call
production, and from the word-form to the lexeme; the latter is called interpretation. The most
common word-forms are most likely memorized. The word-form component will differ for each speaker
just each speakers probably knows a different set of lexemes, everybody’s experiences are unique to
that individual.
3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
A morpheme drule is any kind of regularity that is ‘noticed’ by speakers and is reflected in their
unconscious linguistic knowledge (H p. 44). Though there may be several formal descriptions that can
be conjectured, H will discuss two formalisms: the morpheme based model and the word-based
model.
3.2.1 The morpheme based model
In this model morphemes are combined together to form a new form, expressed by a set if wordbuilding rules. H compares these to syntactic rules forming phrases, clauses and sentences. Consider
the following words as examples:
E.g. fox -> foxes, school + house -> schoolhouse, build -> rebuild, contrast ->
contrast-ive-ness, sad -> saddest.
Word-structure (word-formation) rules:
word-form <--> stem (+ inflectional suffix)
stem <--> base + lexical meaning (bad format here)
base <--> {{(deriv. prefix +) {root, base} + (deriv. suffix)} , {stem + stem}}
inflectional suffix = -es, -est
derivational prefix = rederivation suffix = -ive, -ness
root = fox, school, house, build, contrast, sad.
Phrase-structure rules (top down and bottom up):
S <--> NP + VP
VP --> V + NP
NP <--> Det + Adj + N
N = car, house, mouse, stupidity, delight, …
V = run, sleep, smoke, rise, depend, forage, …
3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
D = the, this, that
Q = {a, an, one, ø}, some, few, a few, several, … }
A = happy, red, large, petite, long, deep, fuzzy, …