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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
•Go to Course Outline, , Go to Chapter 2, Go to Chapter 4,
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):
play
plays
PLAY
played
playing
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
formation, 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. The hypothesis is that speakers normally draw from the set of word forms in forming a
sentence. To form an unusual word, he must form the word-form from the lexeme using the rules of his
grammar. The above diagram is incomplete, but it will suffice for now.
3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
A morpheme rule 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, …
Some syntacticians question question whether rules such as the VP expansion rule is really
necessary. For example, the lexical entry for DESTROY should include the fact that it requires a direct
object (a complement):
E.g. [V DESTROY + ____ NP].
They query whether the rule ‘VP -> V + (NP) is really necessary.
I don’t like the idea that the VP ‘rule’ is really a rule. It is a statement of sets:
E.g. VP is a set that contains V and NP.
This is merely a statement of sets. We could also write as:
E.g. {VP} <--> {V, NP}.
Note: In set theory notation, the comma indicates linear order: VP is a set that contains
the ordered set V then NP. This notation is not normally used in linguistics; the
plus ‘+’ denotes order.
Note: the curly braces can be omitted once it is understood that VP, V and NP are each
a set.
The lexical expansion above is a statement that in essence says:
If one member of the set V is DESTROY, then the second set is NP, which is the
complement of the verb.
What remains in question is how to account for an optional member. In reality, there are no optional
members. Recall that ø as a phonological sign is permitted in set theory. An optional member actually
exists; it merely has ‘ø’ as its sign:
The S ‘John likes to eat’ implies he likes to eat something. The pronoun may take on a zero
form for certain verbs: [V EAT [NP ø].
3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
The lexical entry for EAT now should be:
[V EAT, {complement, NP, {-ø, ø}.
By ‘-ø’ I mean it has a phonetic sign.
Not all verb take a zero complement such as DESTROY.
[V DESTROY, {complement, NP, -ø}.
In morphology, the plural suffix ‘-s’ would have the grammical (lexical) indicating that it requires a noun
as a host:
H: [/z/, N ___, ‘plural’].
D: {[+Plural], N ___, /z/].
The ordering is not crucial, but it should be used consistently. The square brackets are often used to
denote a feature. The ‘+’ (or ‘-’) is a binary value:
E.g. [+Plural] = ‘plural’, [-Plural] - ‘singular’.
This distinction becomes important once the theory of binary oppositions is adopted.
3.2.2 The Word Based Model.