9: Analyzing Morphological Data

Video Script

When we go to analyze morphological data, the process is going to be really similar to what we did for phonological data. This is for a good reason; in many ways we're trying to see those puzzle pieces. In order to see those puzzle pieces, we have to compare and we have to contrast. We're going to take some morphological data and I'm going to walk you through how to solve some puzzles. When we go to do this, take note of the environment in which every morpheme exists, how it is used, if there are changes, or if there are patterns that we can pick up. Take note of the meaning—what we term as glosses, the direct translation—and look at their usages. Notice that we're going to use languages that are very different than English. Let's take a very straightforward morphological data set and let's analyze and pick out some puzzle pieces.

This is Isthmus Zapotec. It is a Mayan language spoken in South-Central Mexico, it is spoken kind of down near Chiapas, Michoacán, and Southern Mexico. This is a data set in which you have three different columns. The leftmost column is the bare noun, so the straightforward noun with no inflection. The middle column has a genitive inflection, meaning possession. Think of the apostrophe-s that we have an English (e.g. Mariela’s book), that is a genitive; it means possessive or possession. We have a genitive here, that is third person singular and, in this case, masculine, 'his'. We also have a second person singular genitive. You’ll notice in the glosses we have the bare noun, and then we have 'his...' whatever the noun is, and then we have 'your...' whatever the noun is. We're being asked to find three puzzle pieces: the genitive marker or possessive marker, the second person and third person singular markers, the difference between 'his' and 'your'. We have these written out in international phonetic alphabet (IPA): [palu], [ku:ba], [tapa], [geta], [bere], and [doʔ]. We then have third person singular second person singular forms.

How do we analyze this? First thing you do look for patterns. This is the bare noun. Can you see it in [spalube] and [sku:babe]? Can you see the bare noun? I bet you can and I bet specifically you can see [palu]...[palu]...[palu]. Do the same for the other nouns. [ku:be]...[ku:be]. [tapa]...[tapa]...[tapa]. [geta]... and notice there's also a devoicing thing going on but [g] and [k] are the exact same sound, so we know that's the same morpheme; ...[keta]...[keta]. Same thing here: [bere]...[b] and [p] are same sound just voicing difference so [pere]...[pere]. [doʔo]...same thing, [t] and [d], right? [toʔ].

Those are the bare nouns. Now, do we see something a puzzle piece, that is, in common with all of these third person singular genitives? The prefix, right? That [s-] at the beginning, do we see this also here? Yes, we do. It's entirely probable. For example, that [s-] is in common, and we take note of that.

Now let's look at what comes after. Do we see the same suffix in all of the third person singular forms? We do; let's take note of that. Is it a different suffix in the second person singular? Yes, it is, but it's the same form in this entire column; let's take note of that.

Now we get to see what we can see. Let's look at that data. We see a prefix that's the same in both of those columns and we see a suffix that's different. We know that all of these in the second and third column, are all genitive in some way. That pretty much gives us our clues; that tells us that, for example, the genitive marker in general is [s-]. We write the hyphen after it so that we notify to everybody that it is a prefix. It goes before the root; where that hyphen is, that is where we would put the root. We can say that the different person markers, third person versus second person, they are suffixes. Third person is that middle column, so that is [-be]; second person is that third column, and that is [-lu]. Again, we are using the hyphen to say where the root would go.

This is a fairly straightforward process but we'll be using this process whenever we analyze anything having to do with morphology.