2: Morphological Definitions
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Compound Words, in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
Video Script
We’ve seen that English frequently uses affixation to derive new words. Affixation is quite productive, meaning that our mental grammar uses the process for many different words, even for new words that come into the language. You’ve probably generated new words yourself sometimes by adding affixes to existing words.
Another extremely productive derivational process in English is compounding. Compounding is different from affixation. In affixation, a bound morpheme is affixed to a base. Compounding derives a new word by joining two morphemes that would each usually be free morphemes.
For example, if I take the free morpheme green, an adjective, and combine it with the free morpheme house, a noun, I get the new word greenhouse. We can tell that this is a new word because its meaning is different from what we would get if we just combined the two words to make a phrase. We could walk down the street describing houses: This is a brown house and this one here is a tall house and here is a red house and here is a greenhouse. But a greenhouse is something different from a house that’s green! It’s a new word, derived by compounding.
Another way that words derived by compounding differ from words derived by affixation is that a compound word doesn’t really have a base or root that determines the meaning of the word. Instead, both pieces of a compound make a sizeable contribution to the meaning. For example, yoga pants are pants that you wear to do yoga, and emerald green is the particular colour of green that emeralds are. So it doesn’t make sense to say that compounds have a root.
On the other hand, there is one part of a compound that has a special role, which we can see if we think about the categories of the words that make up a compound. If you look at these examples,
dry clean
stir fry
outrun
power wash
Each compound is made up of a different category of the word on the left plus a verb on the right. But in each case, the compound word is a verb. Even if both parts of a compound contribute to the meaning of the compound, it’s the head of a compound that determines its category. We say that English is a head-final language because in English the second part of the compound determines the category of the compound. Some languages are head-initial, with the head as the first element in a compound.
In many compounds, the head determines the category and also constrains the meaning of the compound. So dog food is a kind of food, not a kind of dog, and yoga pants are a kind of pants, not a variety of yoga. Compounds like this, where the meaning relationship between the head and the whole compound is obvious, are called endocentric. But in some compounds, the meaning relationship is not so transparent. For example, a redhead is a person, not a kind of head; a nest egg is money that you’ve saved, not a kind of egg; a workout is not a particular kind of out, and facebook is not a book at all! Compounds where the meaning of the head does not predict the meaning of the compound are said to be exocentric.
Check Yourself
- Answer
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"Endocentric."
Hint: Think about what bearskin means, and the parts are represented there.
- Answer
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"Exocentric."
Hint: Think about what cowhand means, and the parts aren't represented there. Cows don't have hands.
- Answer
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"Endocentric."
Hint: Think about what bearskin means, and the parts are represented there.
Closed Class Categories (Function Words), in Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics
In Unit 7.1 we saw that linguists group words into syntactic categories according to how they behave. Content words convey a lot of the meaning of a sentence. But not many sentences would be complete if they contained only nouns, verbs, or adjectives. There are also several smaller categories of words called closed-class categories because the language does not usually add new words to these categories. These categories don’t have many members, maybe only a few dozen, in contrast with the many thousands of words in the open-class categories. They’re the function words or non-lexical categories that do a lot of grammatical work in a sentence but don’t necessarily have obvious semantic content.
The category of determiners doesn’t have many members but its members occur very frequently in English. The two little words the and a are the most recognizable members. Determiners most often appear before a noun, as in:
a student
an orange
the snake
the ideas
Any word that can appear in the same position as the counts as a determiner, like demonstratives:
those students
these oranges
that snake
this idea
Quantifiers and numerals also behave like determiners:
many students
twelve oranges
most snakes
several ideas
And the words that you might have encountered as “possessive adjectives” or “possessive pronouns” behave like determiners as well:
my sister
your idea
their car
The category of prepositions seems to have slightly more obvious semantic content than most other closed classes. Prepositions often represent relationships in space and time. They also have consistent syntactic distribution, usually appearing with a noun phrase immediately following them:
on the table
in the basket
around the block
through the centuries
near campus
after class
A very small category of words that does an important job are the conjunctions. There are only three conjunctions, and, or, but. The job that conjunctions do is to conjoin two words or phrases that belong to the same category:
oranges and lemons
brushed her teeth and went to bed
strong and fast
soup or salad
singing or dancing
hated her roommate but loved her roommate’s sister
small but mighty
You might have learned that words like because and although are a type of conjunction, but they don’t behave like and, or, but. Their behaviour is more similar to a category of words we label as complementizers. Complementizers are function words that introduce a clause, which is a sentence embedded inside a larger sentence:
Sam told us that she loved baseball.
She hoped that the Blue Jays would win the World Series.
Leilani wondered whether it would rain that afternoon.
She asked her roommate if she had heard the forecast.
The roommate checked the forecast because she wanted to go for a run.
She decided to go running although a storm was forecast.
Mel washed the dishes while the cupcakes were in the oven.
Morphological Definitions, from Sarah Harmon
Video Script
I'm going to add a little bit more with respect to the morphological definitions that Catherine Anderson has posted above. This just gives a little more clarity when we're talking about what these definitions are, as we analyze morphology.
In the previous section use the term morpheme. What is a morpheme? It is the smallest unit in a language that has meaning there's minimal matching of sound and meaning. That's a very fancy definition so let's break that down a little bit more. If I have the term preschool, it is a lexicon; it is a minimal free form. In this case, preschool has two different morphemes, two different puzzle pieces that combined to create that lexicon. There is the morpheme school, and that is the root, and there is the morpheme pre-, a prefix that is a type of affix. They combine their two puzzle pieces to building blocks to combine to make the lexicon preschool.
You'll notice I keep saying lexicon; I’m not using the term 'word' and there's a good reason, as we saw in Chapter 1. ‘Lexicon’ is just a little bit more precise. We often use 'term' or 'terminology' as the same concept; 'lexicon' is used in linguistic circles. The term 'word' is not exactly precise enough, because in a given language, a word could have just a couple different morphemes put together and is an entire lexicon of a specific part of speech—it's all a noun or a verb or an adjective, etc. The problem is that in many languages, that is not the case that a word is frequently multiple pieces put together multiple parts of speech, all combined; we'll see examples of that later on. We use the term 'lexicon' to denote that this is a unit, a free-standing unit doesn't have to be combined with anything else; maybe it is, but it doesn't have to be it can stand alone. A lexicon can have only one single morpheme, or it can have multiple morphemes.
Remember that arbitrariness is always going to be a factor, that we are combining morphemes in a certain way, and that is language specific. Why a given language combines morphemes in one way versus another, that's arbitrary. Most of you have experienced in learning a second language, whether it was English or another language and, in many cases they had very different rules as far as how to put lexicon together, how to put morphemes together, and how to put sentences together. All of those rules are arbitrary; those no real reason why North American English does one thing, but South Asian English does a different thing. There's no reason why English does one thing, but Japanese does a different thing, and Kikuyu does a third thing, and Cherokee does a fourth thing. It simply is the way the languages work; they're put together in different ways.
One more term that I think will be very crucial, not just for morphology but as we go further, and especially in semantics and pragmatics when we get to Meaning, and that is a mental lexicon. I think of a mental lexicon as a type of mental dictionary, but it does so much more than a dictionary does. A dictionary tells you the definition, it might tell you the part of speech, it may give you the pronunciation, but it really doesn't give you much more. A mental lexicon gives you all of that, plus the slew of grammatical functions, a very large corpus of synonyms, antonyms, maybe relational memory and meaning. We'll come back to this when we get to Meaning and, specifically, having to refer to an ontology but more on that late. For now, as we go through morphology, just remember that these are mental lexicon are our storage units, or a box of knowledge with respect to a given language or even a given dialect. It includes all the possible entries of lexicon and the relationships.