Morphology and SyntaxFebruary 21, 2012keelin@ling.ed.ac.uk

Plan✴ Morphology:

✴ Hierarchical structure of words

✴ Dissecting word structure

✴ Exercises

✴ Syntax:

✴ Word classes

✴ Phrasal structure

Word - Sentence Level

Phonetics: acoustics and articulation of speech

Phonology: relevant sound segments

Morphology: minimal units of meaning

Syntax: sentence structure

Semantics: sentence meaning

Pragmatics: language in interaction

Sound Level

Word Level

Sentence Level

Morphology Recap✴ Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in language

✴ Not equal to words

✴ Free (independent words) and Bound (must attach to a free)

✴ Derivational: Can change the category of the word it’s attached to, will result in new dictionary entry (edit -> editor)

✴ Inflectional: Cannot change the category of the word it attaches to, only adds grammatical information (goes, walked, eating)

Ordering rules✴ A word is not just a sequence of morphemes

✴ Each word has internal structure

✴ Morphemes are added in a strict order - reflecting a hierarchy within the word

✴ Take the word “unsystematic”

✴ If we put it together step by step, we could have

✴ Noun + “un” = *“Unsystem”

✴ However, this results in a nonexistent word, as the order violates the hierarchy

Ordering rules✴ “Unsystematic”

✴ Noun + “atic” = Systematic

✴ “un” + adjective = Unsystematic

✴ The first step attaches a derivational suffix “atic” to the (free) root noun. This forms an adjective

✴ The second step takes this adjective and attaches a derivational prefix “un”, creating a new word, with the same category

✴ We use a tree structure to show the steps involved

Tree structure

Adjective

Adjective

Noun

Un

System aticDerivational

Derivational

Free Root

Structure✴ Structure is key to human language

✴ Words and sentences have component parts, relating to each other in rule-governed ways

✴ We’ll see trees again in syntax - sentence structure

✴ They’re common to many areas of linguistics

Some rules✴ Noun + atic = Adjective (Systematic)

✴ Un + Adjective = Adjective (Unhappy)

✴ Adjective + al = Adjective (Egotistical, Fantastical)

✴ [Noun + al = Adjective (Autumnal, National)]

✴ Adjective + ly = Adverb (Happily, Hopefully)

✴ Using these rules, work out the tree structure for “unsystematically”

Unsystematically (Adverb)

Adjective

Adjective

Noun

Un

System atic

Adjective

Adverb

al

ly

Deriv

Deriv

DerivDeriv

More rules✴ Verb + able = Adjective (Adorable, Desirable)

✴ Adjective + en = Verb (Darken)

✴ Noun -> Adjective = ish/esque/ous/ate/ful/ic/like(boyish, picturesque, joyous, affectionate, healthful, alcoholic, lifelike)

✴ Verb -> Noun = al/ance/ation/ence/er/ist/ion/dom(acquittal, clearance, accusation, conference, singer, conformist, prediction, freedom)

✴ Adjective -> Adverb = ly (exactly, quietly)

✴ Noun -> Verb = ize/ate/ish/n (moralize, vaccinate, brandish, hasten)

Some rules are more generative than others - i.e. will be useful in

more environments

More rules✴ Not all derivational morphemes cause a change in grammatical

class

✴ friend+ship, human+ity, un+do, re+cover, in+flammable

✴ This is often the case with prefixes: a+moral, auto+biography, ex+wife, super+human, re+print, semi+annual

✴ And suffixes: vicar+age, old+ish, America+n, music+ian

✴ There is a vast list of morphemes, and many rules to do with ordering etc. Best to be familiar with a few examples of Noun -> Adjective, Adjective -> Adverb, Verb -> Adjective, Adjective -> Verb, Verb -> Noun

Rule breakers✴ Some combinations of root + affix are not allowed in English (as

we’ve seen, morphological rules differ cross-linguistically, so this may well be different in different languages)

✴ E.g. *“Unsystem” is disallowed as it’s a combination of un + Noun

✴ 7Up used the slogan of “The Uncola” in the 70s

✴ This may have worked as it’s unusual - grabs our attention

✴ What about “Untruth”? Probably a back-formation from “untruthful”

✴ Not made up of un + truth

Trees✴ These are hypothetical ways in which people represent the internal

structure of morphologically complex words

✴ We have a complex mental structure which we are unaware of

✴ Some words are structurally ambiguous

✴ “Unlockable”

✴ Why is this ambiguous? Work it out!

✴ Un + Verb = Unlock (V) + able = Adjective

✴ Verb + able = Lockable (Adj) + un = Adjective

UnlockableAdjective

Adjective

Verb

Un

Lock able

Verb

VerbUn

Lock

able

Adjective

Deriv

Deriv

Deriv

Deriv

Deriv

Able to be unlocked

Unable to be locked

Some more exercises✴ Draw the trees for:

✴ befriended

✴ endearment

✴ unpalatable

✴ mistreatment

✴ deactivation.

Answers

friend

Be edNoun

Verb

Verb

dearEn mentAdj

Verb

Noun

palate ableUnNoun

Adj

Adj

Answers

iveactDe

mentMis treatVerb

ionate

Noun

Verb

Noun

Noun

Verb

Adj

Verb

Answers

iveactDe

mentMis treatVerb

ionate

Noun

Noun

Noun

Verb

Verb

Adj

Verb

We don’t have mis+ Noun

Bound Roots✴ So far we’ve only looked at words with free roots

✴ We said that bound morphemes have to attach to a root

✴ This is true, however, the root can also be bound

✴ In this case, the bound root and the bound morpheme affixes “cling” to one another

✴ Think of words like unkempt, horrify, vengeance, inept, salvation

✴ Based on our knowledge of morphology so far, we can select the affixes, leaving us with the bound root. This cannot exist on its own

Trees with bound roots

kempt In Un ept Salv ation

Affix Affix AffixBound Root

Bound Root

Bound Root

Adjective Adjective Noun

Types of word formation✴ Conversion

✴ Clipping

✴ Blends

✴ Back formation

✴ Acronyms

✴ Compounds

Conversion✴ This is when an already existing word is assigned a new syntactic

category

✴ Even though there’s no overt morpheme added, it still resembled morphological derivation because of the change in category and meaning

✴ This is sometimes called zero derivation (as if there’s an invisible derivational morpheme)

✴ N to V = butter (butter the bread)/ ship (ship the package)

✴ V to N = a permít from to pérmit/ a cóntest from to contést

✴ Adj to V = dirty (to dirty a shirt)/ empty (to empty the bin)

Clipping✴ Clipping forms new words by deleting syllables

✴ Most common are names: Robert - Rob etc

✴ Some words which you may not know are examples of clippings are: (ham)burger, lab(oratory), (omni)bus, porn(ography), deli(catessen), zoo(logical garden)

Blends✴ Words that are created from non-morphemic parts of two already

existing words, usually the start of one word and the end of another

✴ “brunch” from breakfast and lunch

✴ “smog” from smoke and fog

✴ “telethon” from telephone and marathon

✴ “chunnel” from channel and tunnel

✴ “motel” from motor and hotel

Back formation✴ Sometimes words enter our language because of an incorrect

morphological analysis

✴ Here, a new word is created by “removing” an affix from an existing word

✴ “Resurrect” was backformed from “resurrection”

✴ “Enthuse” from “enthusiasm”

✴ Lots of examples such as “edit” from “editor”, “housekeep” from “housekeeper”

Acronym✴ Acronyms are formed by taking the first letters of a phrase or title

and reading them as a word

✴ AIDs for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

✴ UNICEF for United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund

✴ Sometimes, acronyms enter normal vocabulary, so speakers aren’t aware of their provenance

✴ RADAR for Radio Detecting and Ranging

✴ SCUBA for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

✴ “Textspeak” examples have entered the language - lol/rofl

Compounds✴ Another way to build words involves compounding, the

combination of lexical categories (nouns, adjective, verbs, prepositions)

✴ Usually, the resulting compound is a noun, verb, or adjective

✴ Examples of compounds are words like greenhouse, spoonfeed, nationwide

✴ In compounds, we use the Right Hand Head rule to work out the category of the word

✴ Greenhouse is a Noun, because its rightmost morpheme is a Noun

✴ The morpheme that determines the category for the word is known as the Head

Right Hand Head✴ Work out the heads for each of these compounds:

✴ fire-engine

✴ after-thought

✴ white-wash

✴ drop-kick

✴ red-hot

✴ in-grown.

NounNoun

(Noun?)VerbVerb

Adjective

Adjective

(Noun?)

Compounds & stress✴ English orthography is inconsistent in how it represents compounds

- sometimes they’re presented as single word, sometimes hyphenated, sometimes as separate words

✴ This is where stress can help

✴ greén-hoùse vs greèn hoúse

✴ bláckboàrd vs blàck boárd

✴ wét suìt vs wèt suít

✴ In non-compounds, the second element is usually stressed

Compounds & tense/plural✴ Another way of distinguishing compounds is looking at tense and

plural markers

✴ These cannot typically be attached to the first element, but to the compound as a whole

✴ *The player dropped kick the ball

✴ The player drop kicked the ball

✴ The foxes hunter did not have a licence

✴ The fox hunters did not have a licence

Endocentric vs Exocentric✴ There are two main types of compound

✴ In most cases the rightmost component of a compound determines something about the meaning of the entire compound.

✴ These compounds are called “Endocentric”

✴ However, in some cases, the meaning of the compound does not follow from the meaning of its parts

✴ These compounds are called “Exocentric”

✴ Endocentric = the head is contained within the word

✴ Exocentric = the head is not contained within the word

Examples✴ Endocentric compounds

✴ steamboat = a type of boat

✴ water hose = a hose that carries water

✴ bath tub = a tub in which people bathe

✴ bath towel = a towel used after bathing

✴ Exocentric compounds

✴ bluebottle = not a bottle that is blue, but a fly

✴ redneck = not a neck that is red, but a hick

Exercise✴ Are these compounds endocentric or exocentric?

✴ party hat

✴ bluestocking

✴ sugar-daddy

✴ dimwit

✴ underdog

✴ turncoat

✴ raincoat.

Endocentric

Endocentric

ExocentricExocentric

Exocentric (semantic relationship)Exocentric

Endocentric

Summary of Morphology✴ Words consist of meaningful units called morphemes

✴ These, when affixed to a root, can change the meaning and/or category of a word

✴ Operations which can modify and combine morphemes include affixation, internal change, suppletion, reduplication

✴ Two basic forms of word formation = derivation (using derivational morphemes) and inflection

✴ Key to remember is that morphemes are the smallest meaningful units

✴ Words have internal structure in a similar way to sentences, as we’ll see next

Break

Syntax✴ Now we’re moving on from structure at a word level, to structure at

a phrasal and sentence level

✴ Syntactic theory is about the rules and principles that determine how people combine words to make meaningful sentences

✴ Again, sentences are not just strings of words (in the same way that words are not just strings of morphemes)

✴ There are strict syntactic rules about the structure of sentences

✴ We know how to combine words in specific way to reach a certain meaning

Bag of words✴ Consider these words: Bit A The Dog Cat

✴ A cat bit the dog

✴ The cat bit a dog

✴ A dog bit the cat

✴ The dog bit a cat

✴ All of these have specific, and different meanings

✴ These different meanings come about solely from our combinations of words

Syntax✴ Languages differ not only in sounds, or the way words are put

together, but also the ways in which words can be put together into larger units

✴ This is Syntax

✴ Rules about how words can be put together differ according to language spoke, dialect spoken, social group, time frame etc

✴ “They know not what they do” - does not follow the rules we use for modern English, but was totally normal in the 17th Century

✴ Even though the word meanings haven’t changed, the syntax has

Prescriptive vs Descriptive✴ This is where this argument is very important

✴ Linguists do not tell people how they should be combining words, they’re describing what they actually do

✴ When a syntactician talks about “rules”, they mean “generalisations based on observation of what actually happens”, rather than “instructions on how to behave”

✴ When we describe a sentence that is considered ungrammatical, we’ll use an asterisk beside it. This holds for most of linguistics

✴ Keelin ate the chocolate

✴ *Ate Keelin chocolate the

Word classes✴ People are often taught ways to remember word classes in school

✴ Noun = “Person, place or thing”

✴ Verb = “Doing word”

✴ Adjective = “Word that describes a noun”

✴ However, as we’ll see as we learn more, these definitions can be too simple

✴ Chrissy gave us some definitions last week

✴ We need to look at operational definitions - how words function within a sentence

Definitions of word classes✴ We need definitions based on the function of words within a

sentence

✴ Verbs (V): Finite verbs are verbs which indicate the tense, person, number of an element in the sentence

✴ e.g. She dreams of retiremente.g. I walked home yesterday

✴ We also have verb forms which don’t express tense - infinitive

✴ Harry wants to leave the country

✴ In the future tense, we also use the infinitive form, but without “to”

✴ Keelin will eat the chocolate cake later

Verbs (V)✴ Keelin will eat the chocolate cake later

✴ Here, we appear to have two verbs - what’s going on?

✴ The “will” is known as an auxilliary verb

✴ “will” is telling us information about the tense, but “eat” is the main verb

✴ English is an SVO (Subject Verb Object) language, so if we have a declarative sentence, the verb can usually be found directly after the subject (which tends to be an NP)

Nouns (N)✴ We have multiple kinds of nouns, with multiple distinctions

✴ A noun that can take a plural is known as a count noun

✴ house - houses, cat - cats, etc

✴ However, we also have mass nouns. These are nouns that cannot be pluralised

✴ water - *waters, gold - *golds, etc

✴ Another distinction is abstract vs concrete

✴ abstract = luck, love, hate, justice

✴ concrete = bottle, floor, apple, etc

Nouns (N)✴ How do we determine if something is a noun?

✴ Nouns can be combined with a determiner

✴ definite = the, indefinite = a/an/some, demonstrative = this/that/these/those

✴ Proper nouns (names) don’t fit this criterion* The Keelin

✴ But, if we modify the noun slightly it worksShe is no longer the Keelin I used to know

✴ Verbs cannot combine with determiners: *The walked, *a breathes

Nouns vs Verbs✴ Verbs can combine directly with nouns

✴ Keelin examines books

✴ But nouns cannot combine directly with other nouns

✴ *Keelin’s examination booksKeelin’s examination of books

✴ Note: pronouns (it, he, she, etc). These stand for another noun. It should be clear from the context which noun they refer to

Adjectives (Adj)✴ Adjectives qualify a noun or noun phrase

✴ One way to test for adjectives is superlatives

✴ cold - colder - coldest, big - bigger - biggest etc

✴ Some are irregular: good - better - best

✴ Some add more and most: enthusiastic - more enthusiastic etc

✴ We talk about two kinds of adjective - predicative and attributive

✴ John is ill, Keelin is blonde, Chrissy is tall = predicative

✴ An ill man, a blonde woman, a tall woman = attributive

Adverbs (Adv)✴ Adverbs qualify a verb

✴ As we saw in morphology, adverbs are often hallmarked by the suffix -ly

✴ Keelin quickly ate all the cake

✴ But, as ever, we have exceptions - Chrissy often laughs, Simon presented well

Prepositions (P)✴ Prepositions can express ideas of place (in, on), time (during,

throughout), direction (towards) etc

✴ They usually combine with a noun to their right

✴ Keelin ate cake in France

Phrase structure✴ We have rules in syntax about what word classes can pattern

together in phrases

✴ NP -> (Det) N

✴ This means that Noun Phrases can be made up of Determiners and Nouns. Determiners are optional

✴ The girl

✴ Keelin

✴ Both of these are NPs - they each contain a N, and the first also has a determiner

Phrase structure✴ We also have rules about Verb Phrases, Adjective Phrases,

Prepositional Phrases etc

✴ NP -> (Det) N

✴ PP -> P NP

✴ VP -> V NP

✴ AP -> A NP

✴ Again, we use trees to represent this

Phrase Trees

The cat

NP

Det N

On wheels

P N

PP

Sentence structure✴ This allows us to build up sentences from phrases

✴ If I want to analyse the sentence “the cat sat on the mat”, I look at the internal phrases

✴ The cat sat on the mat

✴ Det N V P Det N

✴ NP VP PP NP

✴ However, there are rules in syntax (as is morphology) about what order these interact in

✴ It’s not just a bag of words!

Constituency✴ A sentence is divided into groups of words. The connections

between words in one group is closer than between words belonging to different groups

✴ A group of words that cling together is called a constituent

✴ To test whether a group of words is a constituent, we have 3 tests:

✴ Replacement/Substitution: a constituent can be replaced by a single word

✴ Movement: a constituent as a whole, can be placed in a different position in a sentence

✴ Clefting: Change sentences to “it was...”

Constituency tests✴ Replacement tests: we can use slightly different tests to test the

constituency of different phrase types

✴ NPs can be replaced by pronouns

✴ PPs can be replaced by adverbs

✴ Adj Ps can be replaced by “so”

✴ VPs can be replaced by “do so”

Examples✴ If I want to check whether “a car” is a constituent of “bought” in the

sentence “Keelin bought a car”, I use

✴ Replacement: “Keelin bought it”

✴ Movement: “A car, Keelin bought”

✴ Clefting: “It was a car that Keelin bought”

✴ All of these new sentences are grammatical.

✴ This means that “a car” is a constituent of “bought”

✴ In a way, it is “licensed” by the verb

✴ We can show this graphically like this:[NP] [VP [NP]]

NP is a constituent of the VP, and so, is bracketed with it

Examples✴ I want to test whether “over the hill” is a constituent of the verb in

the sentence “She went over the hill”

✴ Replacement: “She went there”

✴ Movement: “Over the hill she went”

✴ Clefting: “It was over the hill she went”

✴ All of these sentences are grammatical, and so I know that “over the hill” is a constituent of the V “went”

✴ She went over the hill

✴ [NP] [VP [PP]]

Test Exercises✴ “She collected leprechaun statues” - is “leprechaun statues” a

constituent of the Verb?

✴ “The water went under the bridge” - is “the bridge” a constituent of the Preposition?

✴ “Keelin felt sick” - is “sick” a constituent of the Verb?

Answers✴ “She collected leprechaun statues” - is “leprechaun statues” a

constituent of the Verb?

✴ “She collected them” / “Leprechaun statues, she collected”/ “It was leprechaun statues that she collected”. YES!

✴ “The water went under the bridge” - is “the bridge” a constituent of the Preposition?

✴ “The water went under it” / “The bridge, the water went under” / It was the bridge the water went under” YES!

✴ “Keelin felt sick” - is “sick” a constituent of the Verb?

✴ “Keelin felt sick, and so too did Chrissy” / “Sick, Keelin felt” / “It was sick that Keelin felt” YES!

Next week✴ Constituency

✴ Syntactic trees

✴ More complex trees

✴ Semantics