Morphology & Syntax: Forming words and sentences

Morphology

• Definition: The study of how words are formed out of smaller meaningful pieces and other words.

• Questions: Which meaningful pieces of language can be combined to form words and what does it do to their meaning?

• Examples:

  • Wind--unwind, rewind, winding, windy, etc.

  • Replay, reunite, *rewoman

What is a word?

• Cat and dog differ in both form and meaning, although they still share similarity of meaning, as their both pets.

• Cat and catalog overlap in form but that overlap doesn't contribute to a similar meaning. Cat-a-log is not a cat that brought a log home. This is different for blackboard.

• Similarity and difference in meaning seem multidimensional

• Are cat and catty ('spiteful') the same word or different words?

• The words cat and catty are similar not only in terms of their form (the /kæt/ part) but also in terms of their meaning, since both (at least potentially) engender the image of nasty fighting.

Lexical Category

• However, they differ in their lexical category (or part-of-speech)

• Lexical category

• Definition: Classes of words that differ in how other words can be constructed out of them

• Examples:

  • To verbs, we can add -ing or -able (e.g., dance, drink)

  • To adjectives, we can add -nessor -est, and we can often add -ly to make it an adverb (e.g., happy, quiet)

• To nouns, we can usually add -s to make it plural, and you can add -like to make it an adjective (e.g., cat, desk)

• → Cat is a noun and catty is an adjective. Therefore, even though they overlap in form and meaning, the fact that they belong to different parts of speech is a clear sign that they're different words and not versions of one word.

• The relationship further seems to be directional where catty is derived from cat, rather than the other way around

• Are cat and cats the same word or different words?

  • Phonologically, the difference between /kæt/ and /kæts/ is the same as for /kæt/ (cat) and /kæti/ (catty).

  • With respect to meaning, however, cat and cats seem to refer to the same kind of thing, but expressed in singular vs. plural. They're also both nouns

Side note for word

• When two words are related and we simply change the grammatical form of a word (but not the lexical category), we call this inflection

  • Examples: waits (v), waited, waiting, eaten, chairs (n), taller, tallest

• When two words are related and we change the lexical category, we call this derivation

  • Examples: like able, sadly, giraffe like

Important terms

• We have seen words that cannot be broken down into smaller parts (cat, catalog), and words that contain more parts (catty, cats). The smallest meaningful units are called morphemes.

• A morpheme is defined as the smallest linguistic unit with a meaning (e.g., the morpheme cat) or a grammatical function (e.g., the morpheme -ed that indicates past tense).

• When we inspect complex words, we can usually identify a root (cat) and associated affixes (-s, -ty)

Compounding

• Compounding: process that forms new words not by means of affixes but from two or more independent words

• Examples in English: textbook, girlfriend, air-conditioner, lifeguard chair, life-insurance salesman

• Note that in English, compound words can have different spellings, e.g., hyphenated, written together or separately. We usually know that it's a compound by the way the stress is placed. Compare:

  • (a) I'm putting my makeup on.

  • (b) We had a fight but now she wants to make up

• Longer examples: mint chocolate chip ice cream waffle cone

Morphology gone wild: German Compounding

• German is one of many languages that use compounding to form new words

• About double from the English mint chocolate example

Reduplication

• Reduplication: Process of forming new words by doubling either an entire morpheme or part of it.

• English only has it to indicate intensity, but uses variable lexical categories.

  • Do you just like him as a friend, or do you like-like him?

  • That shirt isn’t what I had in mind; it’s much too pale of a green. I want a shirt that is green-green

• Yesterday we just went out for coffee, but this weekend we’re going on a date-date

• Indonesian uses total reduplication to form plurals of nouns.

  • rumah 'house'; rumahrumah ‘houses’

  • ibu 'mother'; ibuibu ‘mothers’

  • lalat 'fly'; lalatlalat ‘flies’

Syntax

• Definition: How sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words.

• Given an assortment of words in a language, you can only put them together in some ways but not others to create an acceptable sentence in a language.

• When a string of words forms a sentence of some language, we say it is grammatical in that language and syntactically well-formed.

• If a string of words does not form a sentence, we say it is ungrammatical in that language, term it to be syntactically ill-formed, and mark it with the asterisk symbol

• What are your grammaticality judgments for the following phrases:

  • Sally likes Bob.

    • Likes Bob Sally.

  • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

    • Green sleep colorless furiously ideas

• Syntax and semantics (i.e., meaning) are related but can be evaluated somewhat independently of one another

Syntax: Compositionality

• Nevertheless, the way meaningful linguistic expressions (i.e., a word (cake) or a phrase (my cake, Bob ate my cake)) are combined affects the meaning of the whole expression. This is called the principle of compositionality

• Sally likes Bob. =/ Bob likes Sally.

• My brown dog got a green collar =/ My green dog got a brown collar

• Some sentences can have different interpretations based on the underlying syntactic structure we attribute. This is called syntactic ambiguity

• I shot an elephant in my pajamas. (How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.)

Syntax: Crash Blossoms

• Sisters reunited after 10 years in checkout line at Safeway

  • [[Sisters] [reunited [after 10 years] [in checkout line at Safeway]]]

  • [[Sisters] [reunited [after 10 years [in checkout line at Safeway]]]]

• The pope’s baby steps on gays

  • [[The pope’s baby steps] [on gays]]

  • [[The pope’s baby] [steps on gays]]

• Boy paralyzed after tumor fights back to gain black belt

  • [[Boy [paralyzed after tumor]] [fights back to gain black belt]]

  • [[[Boy] [paralyzed]] [after tumor fights back to gain black belt]]

• Sheep farmer injured after wolf attack in Wapse, ordered to be shot 

• Police officer jailed for attacking members of the public found dead

Syntax: Garden Path Effects

• Garden path effect: As listeners comprehend temporarily syntactically ambiguous sentences, they sometimes momentarily recover a meaning that was not intended by the speaker.

• The syntax of the sentence has led the comprehender “down the garden path” (to a spot where they can go no further and must retrace their steps; think of coming to a dead end in a maze)

• Note that garden path sentences are only locally syntactically ambiguous. This is in contrast to the crash blossoms from the previous slide

  • (a) While Mary was knitting the scarf fell off her lap.

  • (b) While Mary was knitting the scarf it fell off her lap.

  • (a) The horse raced past the barn fell.

  • (b) (The woman driven to the hospital fainted.)

• Time fiies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

• The old man the boat.

• The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families