The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis by Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog

Author:Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog [Heine, Bernd]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Reference
ISBN: 9780199544004
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-12-17T21:15:33+00:00

c h a p t e r 20

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M O R PH O LO G I C A L

A NA LYS I S

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geert e. booij

20.1 What is morphological analysis?

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Morphology is the subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with the internal structure of words. Consider the following sets of English word pairs:

(1) Verb

Noun

bake

baker

eat

eater

run

runner

write

writer

In these word pairs we observe a systematic form–meaning correspondence: the presence of - er in the words in the right column correlates with the meaning component “one who Vs” where V stand for the meaning of the corresponding verb in the left column. The observation of such patterns is the basis for assigning the words in the right column an internal morphological structure [[x]V–@r]N where the variable x stands for the phonological form of the base verb. We thus consider these nouns to be complex words. The morphological schema that generalizes over these sets of paradigmatically related words may be formalized as follows:

(2) [[x]V–@r]N ‘one who Vs’

This schema expresses the systematic form–meaning correspondence found in this set of word pairs. Words are signs with properties at a number of levels of the

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geert e. booij

grammar: they have a phonological form, syntactic properties such as being a noun or a verb, a meaning, and sometimes a particular pragmatic value. Hence, morphology is not a component of the grammar on a par with phonology or

syntax. It deals not only with form, unlike what the etymology of the word suggests, but pertains to all levels of the grammar (Jackendoff, 2002). Morphology is the grammar of a natural language at the word level, and calling morphology “the grammar of words” (Booij 2007) is therefore quite appropriate.

The schema in (2) expresses a generalization based on a number of existing verb–

nouns pairs of the relevant type. Such schemas also indicate how new complex words can be made. Indeed, the process of creating deverbal - er-nouns is quite productive in English. Morphological schemas are word-based since they express generalizations concerning established complex words. In that sense, morphology is word-based. The language user will learn these abstract schemas gradually, after having been exposed to a sufficient number of words that instantiate those schemas.

The acquisition of these schemas does not imply that the complex words on which they are based are removed from lexical memory once the schemas have been

acquired. Schemas co-exist with the complex words that instantiate these schemas (Bybee 1988 b, 1995). Hence, the grammar exhibits redundancy, which is no problem given the vastness of human memory. The wrong assumption that the existence of a rule excludes listing outputs of that rule is referred to as the rule-list fallacy (Langacker 1987 b).

In morphological analysis we also make use of the notion “morpheme”, tradi-

tionally defined as the minimal meaning-bearing unit of a language. The word baker, for instance, might be said to consist of the lexical morpheme bake and the bound morpheme - er. However, the systematic paradigmatic relationships between words may also be signaled by other means than morpheme concatenation, such as stem alternation, reduplication, stress, and tone patterns.

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