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Morphology (linguistics)
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Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Morphology. In linguistics, morphology is the study of word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dogcatcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
[edit] History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pini who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text A dhy y. The Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Fr die Lehre von der Wortform w hle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the science of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", Mmoires Acad. Impriale 7/1/7, 35).
the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma, or citation form.
rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves. An important difference between inflection and word-formation is that inflected word-forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word-formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word-formation not so. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.
The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the category of sandhi.
Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach. Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach. Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm approach. Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.
straightforward for oxen, assuming the stem ox and a suppletive plural morpheme -en. How then would the same analysis "split up" the word geese into a root and a plural morpheme? In the same manner, how to split sheep? Theorists wishing to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve the idea in cases like these by saying that geese is goose followed by a null morpheme (a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem is a morphophonological rule. Also, morpheme-based analyses commonly posit null morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun dogs is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme -s, then one might analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.
[edit] Footnotes
1. ^ The existence of words like appendix and pending in English does not mean that the English word depend is analyzed into a derivational prefix de- and a root pend. While all those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, this was so only in Latin, not in English. English borrowed the words from French and Latin, but not the morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine de- and the verb pendere 'to hang' into the derivative dependere.