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Intuition: Words can be decomposed into smaller components which can be used to augment the word’s meaning.
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These components are called morphemes.
- Morphemes can be roots or affixes which are attached to roots. (beginning, middle or, end for prefixes, infixes, and suffixes respectively).
- Morphemes can be free - they stand as their own word or bound - the morpheme in itself is not a word (such as affixes)
- Open Class - is a category of morphemes that can accept new members (i.e., nouns and verbs). Closed-Class - remains finite (i.e., preposition
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We must consider the following when identifying the morphemes of a language:
- The sound
- Meaning
- Bound vs Free
- Prefix vs Suffix vs Infix
- What kind of morpheme can they attach to?
- What kind of category do they create? (i.e., nouns or verbs or nouns that end in -p)
Morphological Quirks
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Templates - a frame consisting of consonants or vowels which are filled in by other letters to change their meaning. (i.e., b-x-l in Egyptian)
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Reduplication - repeating some part of the word based on some rule.
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Truncation - one morpheme is deleted if it is internal to another suffix.
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Tone - for tonal languages, the way a morpheme is said has an effect on its meaning.
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Nothing Morpheme - morphemes which are not pronounced.
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Sometimes when morphemes are added, they can affect other morphemes in the word (sometimes due to how the word is pronounced.)
- When a morpheme has more than one form depending on what it is combined with, the forms are called allomorphs.
- The default allomorph is the morpheme that is used most of the time.
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Think of words as being assembled from morphemes in a particular order.
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Think of morphological rules as being applied in a particular order.
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Some morphemes have the same form but different forms (i.e., un- (as in undoing) and un- (as in opposite of))
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Morphemes can be pronounced differently across different languages.
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Some languages are:
- Isolating - have many free morphemes.
- Polysynthetic - have many bound morphemes.
- Agglutinative - have morphemes that are easily separable from each other.
- Fusional / Inflectional - have morphemes that tend to blend together.
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Inflectional Morphology - those that are based on agreement, grammar, and tense. These do not change the grammatical category
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Derivational Morphology - those that are causative or category-changing. These change the grammatical category of the word.
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Universal morphology:
- Derivational Morphology is very often merged first over Inflectional Morphology.
- We tend to construct our mental lexicon using morphemes rather than words. We manipulate the morphemes of the language.