Morphology cont.

  • hierarchical structure
    • speech is executed and planned as syllables
    • don't have to overlap with morphemes
  • morphophonology: interplay between phonology and morphology
    • phoneme ➝ allophones
    • morpheme ➝ allomorphs
    • ex: z. cats (s), dogs (z), foxes (-əz)
    • allomorphy is not the same as phonological assimilation
      • assimilation always applies
      • allomorphs apply to specific morphemes
  • morphological analysis
  1. Isolate and compare word-forms (roots, prefixes, suffixes)
  2. Look for contrasting meanings
  3. Look for complementary forms
    • Principles
    • forms w/ same meaning and same sound shape in all occurrences are instances of the same morpheme
      • ex: habla, hablas, hablamos
      • if one sound form has two distinct meanings, treat them as 2 dif morphemes
      • ex: habla = he/she speaks
    • forms w same meaning but different sound shapes may be same morpheme if distributions don’t overlap
      • ex: websurfed (t), downloaded (d), etc.
    • not all morphemes are segmentable
    • also: not all languages have the same morphological property!