Structure
of language
Phonetics-
speech sounds-vowels,consonents,diphthongs
Phonemes
In linguistics, a phoneme is the
smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinct meaning, such as the s of sing and the r of ring. Adjective: phonemic.
Phonemes
are language specific. In other words, phonemes that are functionally distinct
in English (for example, /b/ and /p/) may not be so
in another language. (Phonemes are customarily written between slashes,
thus /b/ and /p/.) Different languages have different phonemes.
Etymology
From the Greek, "sound"
From the Greek, "sound"
Morphemes
In linguistics, a morpheme is the
smallest grammatical unit in a language. In other words, it is the smallest
meaningful unit of a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is
called morphology. A
morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference
between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand
alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. When it stands by
itself, it is considered as a root because
it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it
depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a
grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to
indicate that it is plural).Every word comprises one or more morphemes.
Classification of
morphemes
Free and bound morphemes
Every morpheme can be classified as either
free or bound.These categories are mutually exclusive, and as such, a given
morpheme will belong to exactly one of them.
·
Free morphemes can function independently
as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
·
Bound morphemes appear only as parts of
words, always in conjunction with a root and
sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears
only accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in
English are affixes, particularly prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -ation, -ible, -ing,
etc. Bound morphemes that are not affixes are called cranberry morphemes.
Classification of bound morphemes
Bound morphemes can be further classified as
derivational or inflectional.
Derivational morphemes
·
Derivational morphemes,
when combined with a root, change either the semantic meaning or part of speech of the affected word. For
example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound
morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the
word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness).
In the word unkind, un- functions as a
derivational morpheme, for it inverts the meaning of the word formed by the
root kind. Generally the affixes used with a root word are bound
morphemes.
Inflectional morphemes
·
Inflectional morphemes modify a verb's tense, aspect, mood, person,
or number, or
a noun's, pronoun's or adjective's number, gender or case, without
affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying
inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the
root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to
form waited. An inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word.
In English, there are eight inflections.
Allomorphs
Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme
that differ in pronunciation but
are semantically identical. For example, in English, the plural marker -(e)s of regular nouns can be pronounced /-z/, /-s/,
or /-ɪz, -əz/,
depending on the final sound of the noun's singular form.
For example, plural ending s (as in bats), z (as in bugs), iz (as in buses).
Zero morphemes/null morphemes
Generally these types of morphemes have no
visible changes. For instance the singular form of sheep is "sheep"
and its plural is also "sheep". The intended meaning is thus derived
from the co-occurring determiner (e.g. in this case "some-" or
"a-").
Content vs. function
Content morphemes express a concrete
meaning or content, while function morphemes have more of a
grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can
be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix –ed belongs
to the function morphemes given that it has the grammatical function of indicating
past tense. Although these categories seem very clear and intuitive, the idea
behind it can be harder to grasp given that they overlap with each other.Examples
of an ambiguous situation are the preposition over and
the determiner your, which seem to
have a concrete meaning, but are considered function morphemes because their
role is to connect ideas grammatically.A general rule to follow to determine
the category of a morpheme is:
·
Content morphemes include
free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and verbs. It also includes bound
morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.
·
Function morphemes can be
free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions.
Additionally, they can be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes.
Other features of morphemes
Roots are composed of only one morpheme, while
stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are
considered morphemes. An example of this is the word quirkiness.
The root is quirk, but the stem is quirky which
has two morphemes. Moreover, there exist pairs of affixes that have the same
phonological form, but have different meaning. For example, the suffix –er can
be derivative (e.g. sell ⇒ seller) or
inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). These
types of morphemes are called homophonous.
Some words might seem to be composed of
multiple morphemes, but in fact they are not. This is why one has to consider
form and meaning when identifying morphemes. For example, the word relate might
seem to be composed of two morphemes, re- (prefix) and the
word late, but this is not correct. These morphemes have no
relationship with the definitions relevant to the word like “feel sympathy”,
“narrate”, or “being connected by blood or marriage”. Furthermore, the length
of the words does not determine if it has multiple morphemes or not. To
demonstrate, the word Madagascar is long and it might seem to
have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but
it does not. Conversely, small words can have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs).
Morphological
analysis
In natural
language processing for Korean, Japanese, Chinese and other languages,
morphological analysis is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of
morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech
tagging, but word segmentation is required for these languages
because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces.
The purpose of morphological analysis is to
determine the minimal units of meaning in a language or morphemes by using
comparisons of similar forms—for example, comparing forms such as “She is
walking” and “They are walking” rather than comparing either of these with
something completely different like “You are reading”. Thus, we can effectively
break down the forms in parts and distinguish the different morphemes.
Similarly, the meaning and the form are equally important during the identification
of morphemes. For instance, agent and comparative morphemes illustrate this
point. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that transforms
a verb into a noun (e.g. teach ⇒ teacher).
On the other hand, –er can also be a comparative morpheme that
changes an adjective into another degree of the same adjective (e.g. small ⇒ smaller). In this case, the form is the
same, but the meaning of both morphemes is different. Also, the opposite can
occur in which the meaning is the same but the form is different.
Changing definitions of morpheme
In generative grammar,
the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have
morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.
·
Direct syntax to semantics
mapping
·
Leaves in syntactic trees
spell out morphemes: Distributed
morphology – leaves are morphemes
·
Branches in syntactic
trees spell out morphemes: Radical
Minimalism and Nanosyntax – leaves are "nano"
morpho-syntactic features
Given the definition of morpheme as "the
smallest meaningful unit" Nanosyntax aims to account for idioms
where it is often an entire syntactic tree which contributes "the smallest
meaningful unit." An example idiom is
"Don't let the cat out of the bag" where the idiom is composed of
"let the cat out of the bag" and that might be considered a semantic
morpheme, which is composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases where the
"smallest meaningful unit" is larger than a word include some
collocations such as "in view of" and "business
intelligence" where the words together have a specific meaning.
The definition of morphemes also plays a
significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following
theoretical constructs;
·
Event
semantics: the idea that each productive morpheme must have a
compositional semantic meaning (a denotation), and if the meaning is there,
there must be a morpheme (null or
overt).
·
Spell-out:
the interface where syntactic/semantic structures are "spelled-out"
using words or morphemes with phonological content. This can also be thought of
as lexical insertion into the syntactics.
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/ is the set of rules,
principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order and punctuation. The term syntax is also used
to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of
many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.
The word syntax comes
from Ancient Greek: σύνταξις "coordination",
which consists of σύν syn,
"together," and τάξις táxis,
"an ordering".
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