Linguistics 201, Section G

Handouts

• DQ #7 (was not distributed as a handout, since there’s only one question)

Today we continued with the morphologically complex words from the last class and I introduced tree diagrams for representing their structure.  The words we used were: ex-disobeyer, prelengthenable, demagnetized, unjoyfully, and rehospitalization, along with undoable, unzipable, untieable, unlockable, and unfriendable.  All of the affixes used in these words illustrate derivational morphology, because they serve to derive new words based on old ones.  We talked about the “rule” or “formula” for each affix that indicates what category it can attach to and what category it creates.  For example, the rule for -able is V + able = A, which means that adding the suffix -able to a verb creates an adjective.  And then we discussed the ambiguity present in the un-/-able words listed above; they each have two different meanings and a different tree structure corresponds to each one.

On Monday we’ll do a little bit of review of the new stuff (namely, the tree diagrams and morphological ambiguity), and then hopefully have time to start talking about phonetics.

Handouts, etc.

• DQ #6
• Homework #2
• Slides — 1-up or 4-up

Today we had some additional morpheme segmentation practice and then discussed the notion of allomorphy, when a single morpheme has multiple pronunciations.  We then began looking at derivational morphology with some complex English words.  We’ll pick up with those on Friday.

Handouts, etc.

• DQ #5
• Slides — 1-up or 4-up

Today we continued our discussion of morphology.  We didn’t get to questions 3 & 4 on today’s DQs, but we’ll pick up with those on Wednesday.

A question that came up in several forms today was about identifying morphemes in English words when the current analysis is at odds with etymology (i.e., the history of the word).  In some cases it looks like a single morpheme has a history that suggests it was once morphologically complex, and in other cases it looks like a complex word is no longer transparently related to its parts.  Some borderline examples we discussed were scissors, comfortable, and amoral/moralizes.

For scissors the question is whether there is a morpheme scissor; the existence of words like scissor-kick suggest there might be, but it’s not clear what scissor means in isolation.  For comfortable, it could clearly break down into comfort and able, but then we are left with the puzzle of its meaning, which isn’t exactly what you’d expect given the meaning of its parts.  And finally, amoral and moralizes both have the word moral as their root, but moral seems to be related to the idea of mores (as in social mores), so we wondered whether there is a root mor in English and what it would mean.

I think it’s true that most people would treat moral as a simplex word. The scoop seems to be that moral is derived from Latin via French (OED link), and the related mores was borrowed much later (OED link) with some attestations of now-obsolete mours before that (OED link). We can’t rule out the possibility that some English speakers have analyzed moral and mores as sharing a root, even though it never appears in isolation, though the histories of the words suggest multiple borrowings.

As for scissors, it seems to have had a somewhat long and confusing history. The link to its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is here.

[Thanks to Nick for some sleuthing, which turned up these websites with etymological info: moral & scissors!]

Handouts, etc.

• DQ #4
• Slides — 1-up or 4-up
• Pullum’s new preposition

Today we continued our discussion of morphology mainly by taking a closer look at lexical categories.  In addition to the “open class” items like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, which are on display in the Jabberwocky poem (from Monday), we also discussed “function words” which are considered a closed class because new ones are rarely added to a lexicon.  You can check the slides to review the different categories of function words we looked at.  We spent the end of class talking about whether the category preposition is a closed class, as traditional grammar would suggest, or whether it might admit new members, as Geoff Pullum argues in the radio transcript we read (handout linked above).

We didn’t get to the last question on today’s DQs, so that won’t be on the quiz on Monday.

Handouts, etc.

• Michoacan Aztec data & handout
• Homework #1

Today we discussed morpheme segmentation with a problem set of data from Michoacan Aztec and Homework #1, which was handed out today and is due next Wednesday.

Handouts

• DQ #3
• Course calendar

Today we started talking about morphology, the study of words and their parts.  We discussed “lexical categories” like noun, verb, adjective, and so forth, and how we know what category a word belongs to.  We also covered some basic morphology terminology like bound/free morpheme, inflectional and derivational, isolating and agglutinative, affix, prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and non-concatenative morphology.