September 15th
Today we practiced drawing tree structures for English words with two or more derivational affixes. I also handed out the second problem set, which is due next Monday. The first two questions on the second problem set ask you to do the same kind of thing that we practiced in class today, so unless you slept through class today you should be able to tackle that question with confidence.This wraps up our section on Morphology. Before going onto the phonetics unit, we spent some time considering what we learned about language and linguistic science during our investigation of English morphology. I argued that the structures and patterns we discovered for English morphology should be understood as patterns that exist in the minds of English speakers. Similarly, the patterns we find in other languages represent patterns in the minds of speakers of those languages. The mysterious thing is that no-one ever taught us these patterns, and no-one ever invented them or wrote them down. Yet they exist, and somehow when you were children you were able to figure them out, completely reflexively and unconsciously.
To transition from Morphology to Phonetics, I showed you an example in which a single morpheme (the plural suffix) is pronounced in different ways depending on which word it attaches to. To illustrate this, we used the made-up words wug and wuk:
| singular | plural |
| wug | wugs |
| wuk | wuks |
All native speakers of English know that the plural of wug is wugs, and that the plural of wuk is wuks. That is, all English speakers have acquired a pattern whereby the plural form of any new noun is formed by adding the suffix -s. But that's not all that English speakers (subconsciously) know. We saw in class that the suffix -s is pronounced differently in the two words above. You can see this by continuing to produce the -s sound at the end of these words while touching your adam's apple. We saw that when we pronounce the -s in wugs our larynx (adam's apple) is vibrating, but when we produce the -s in wuks it is not vibrating. This was true for everyone in the class. But why? How did you "know" that you should pronounce the -s differently in these two words?
To answer this question, we will take a detour into the area of linguistics called articulatory phonetics. We will learn about the physical basis for the sounds used in languages of the world, and we will be able to dissect individual sounds of English and other languages into simpler parts, just as we did for words in Morphology.
September 12th
The derivational affixes in English have the following pattern:- derivational suffixes usually change the category of the word they attach to.
| fix (V) | + | -able | = | fixable (A) |
| hospital (N) | + | -ize | = | hospitalize (V) |
| black (A) | + | -en | = | blacken (V) |
- derivational prefixes never change the category of the word they attach to.
| anti- | + | hero (N) | = | antihero (N) |
| de- | + | activate (V) | = | deactivate (V) |
| un- | + | happy (A) | = | unhappy (A) |
The question is, why? I argued in class that this generalization can be understood by connecting to the Righthand Rule that we saw in English compound word formation. Recall that the Righthand Rule says that the category of a compound word is the same as the category of the rightmost word in the compound. We can illustrate the principle with the following diagram:
The category of the node at the top of this tree is the same as the category of the rightmost word (word2). But what if we assume that derivational affixes have categories? Then the Righthand Rule can apply to words that contain derivational affixes as well as to compound words. This is illustrated in the following diagram:
By assuming that derivational affixes have a lexical category, we can explain the fact that derivational suffixes change the category of the words they attach to by making use of the Righthand Rule. The above trees above obey the Righthand Rule, and also show us why the suffixes change the category of the word.
What about derivational prefixes? Well, even if we assume that they too have a category, the Righthand Rule tells us that they will never be able to project that category in any words that they appear in. This is because prefixes attach on the left side of a word, and the Righthand Rule tells us that the category of the entire word is determined by the word or morpheme on the right side. And since derivational prefixes are bound morphemes, and hence never appear alone, we have no way of knowing what category they belong to. We can assume that, like derivational suffixes, they have a category, but we have no way of knowing which category they belong to. I use the question mark to show that the category of derivational prefixes is unknown.
The reasoning here is a bit subtle, but is typical of the kind of reasoning used by linguists. We will see similar kinds of arguments throughout the semester, so make sure that you are comfortable with the kind of reasoning involved.
At the end of class I introduced you to inflectional affixes in English. The four I asked you to remember were those appearing on verb:
| third person agreement suffix -s | He eats salad. She loves tigers. |
| past tense suffix -ed | John walked to school. |
| progressive -ing | Sarah is eating pizza. |
| past participle -en | Bill has eaten ramen. |
(Be careful not to confuse the inflectional suffix -ing with the two derivational suffixes that are also pronounced -ing!)
The final observation we made in class today was the following:
Derivational affixes must come
before inflectional affixes.
We saw that even though we can stack up derivational affixes on top of each other, once we attach an inflectional affix to a word, we can't attach any more derivational affixes. It turns out that this restriction is not a quirk of English grammar, but seems to be a language universal. As far as we know, all languages of the world require derivational affixes to be attached before inflectional affixes.
September 10th
Today we extended our understanding of the structure of compound words in English by examining more complex examples like the following:- babystroller maker
- city center subway stop
In both of these examples, we know that the entire compound word is built out of several individual words. But we saw that we don't just stick all of the words together at once to make the whole compound. Instead, we proceed two words at a time. So, for example, in babystroller maker, we first combine baby and stroller to get the new word babystroller. We then repeat the process, taking the new word babystroller and combining it with the word maker to get babystroller maker.
The ability to repeat the process in this way is an example of recursion. We can imagine our English compounding process as a kind of machine. This "compounding machine" is fed two words, and spits out a new word which combines the two words together into one.
The important thing is this: our compound machine takes words as inputs, and produces words as outputs. That is, it eats two words, and spits out a new word. But the thing it spits out is the same kind of thing that it eats. So, we can feed our machine two words, and the machine will spit out a new word. We can then take that word and feed it back into our machine (with some other word), and get yet another new word. Then you can take this word, and repeat the process. And so on.
This is the essence of recursion, and it is a very important property of human languages. Because we have this recursive procedure for making new compound words out of other words in English, it immediately follows that the number of English words is infinite. It also means that there is no longest word of English. This can be illustrated as follows:
- dog + food = [dog food]
- [dog food] + container = [dog food container]
- [dog food container] + maker = [dog food container maker]
- [dog food container maker] + factory = [dog food container maker factory]
- ... and so on
At the end of class we moved on to talk about derivational affixes. I gave you a handout which listed some common derivational prefixes and suffixes in English. We saw that a complex word containing derivational affixes can be dissected in the same way that compound words were, using tree diagrams.
We also noticed a peculiar pattern in our list of derivational affixes. We saw that almost all of the derivational suffixes change the category of the word that they combine with, while none of the derivational prefixes do. I asked you all to consider why this might be the case, and hinted that it might have something to do with the Righthand Rule that we proposed for determining the category of English compound words. Continue to think about the possible connection between these facts. On Friday we will try to find a way to connect the them.
September 8th
Today we examined the hypothesis that compound words in English are always nouns, and found out very quickly that the hypothesis is false. You all provided many examples of non-noun compound words like the following:
- bittersweet (adjective)
- overthrow (verb)
Is there a way of predicting the
category of a compound word in English?
We tried a number of different hypotheses, but found counterexamples to each one. By the end of class, we saw that the category of many (actually, most) compound words in English obeys the following rule:
The category of a compound word
in English is the same as the category of the rightmost word of the
compound.
We can call this hypothesis the Righthand Rule. This was our best hypothesis about how the category of compound words in English is determined, and I told you that this hypothesis is most likely the correct one. But we saw a number of apparent counterexamples to this rule as well:
- white (noun) + collar (noun) = whitecollar (adjective)
- bare (noun) + foot (noun) = barefoot (adjective)
So is our hypothesis wrong? Didn't I tell you that counterexamples disprove a hypothesis? How can I maintain that the hypothesis is correct, despite the counterexamples?
To answer this concern, I introduced the concept of productivity, and argued that the Righthand Rule in English is productive. What this means is that, if a speaker hears a new compound word, or invents a new one, then the category of the new word will be determined by the category of the rightmost word in the compound. Here are a few examples of invented compound words to test this idea:
- break (verb) + table (noun) = break table (noun)
- Texas (noun) + cute (adjective) = Texas cute (adjective)
The point of these examples is that a native speaker of English, upon hearing these words for the first time, is predicted by the Righthand Rule to treat the compound word as being the same category as the rightmost word from which it is built. This seems to be true. Thus, we can say that the Righthand Rule is productive. The apparent counterexamples, I argued, should be thought of as exceptions that you just have to memorize.
The situation is parallel to that of English past tense. The best hypothesis about how past tense in English works is something like the following:
To make the past tense of a verb in English, add the suffix -ed to the end of
the verb.
This rule has many exceptions (eat/ate, run/ran, sing/sang, etc). But the hypothesis is not falsified by these exceptions, because the "add -ed" rule is productive. We showed this by inventing a new verb, plep, and asking how the past tense would be formed. All of you agreed that the past tense should be plepped, in accordance with the hypothesis that past tense in English is formed by adding the suffix -ed.
The notion of productivity is very important when developing and testing hypotheses, not only in morphology, but in other areas of linguistics as well. When we look at possible counterexamples to a hypothesis, we have to ask whether those counterexamples are simply exceptions that are memorized by speakers of the language, or whether they are a systematic part of the language that force us to revise our hypothesis. One of the best ways to test this is to check how speakers treat novel (i.e. new) forms in the language.
The final thing I introduced today was the use of trees for the representation of morphological structure, as in the following examples:
We will be using trees like these to represent the structure of complex words throughout the morphology section, so make sure you understand how to draw them (the second part of your first problem set should give you some practice).
September 5th
On Friday we discussed the difference between the following two notions of grammar:- Prescriptive Grammar
- A set of rules or injunctions that describe how (someone thinks that) people should use language.
- Descriptive Grammar
- A description of the way that people actually use language.
Descriptive
grammarians ask the question, "What is English (or another language)
like—what are its forms and how do they function in various
situations?" By contrast, prescriptive grammarians ask "What should
English be like—what forms should people use and what functions should
they serve?"
Whenever I use the word "grammar" in class, you should understand me as referring to descriptive, rather than prescriptive, grammar.
We also reviewed how words in English can be grouped into different lexical categories. We saw that the category membership of a word can be determined based on its distribution, or the places in a sentence in which the word can occur. We focused on the following four categories:
- Nouns (N)
- The crazy (dog|cat|information) ran around the (house|sandwich)
- Verbs (V)
- The crazy dog (ran|shifted|crawled|trespassed) around the house.
- Adjectives (ADJ)
- The (crazy|huge|elaborate) dog ran around the house.
- Prepositions (P)
- The crazy dog ran (around|toward|up|against) the house
At the end of class, we began looking at the process of compounding in English. We looked at the following examples of English compound words:
- fire-engine (noun-noun compound)
- greenhouse (adjective-noun compound)
- afterthought (preposition-noun compound)
- The crazy (fire-engine|greenhouse|afterthought) ran around the house.
All compound words in English
are nouns.
We can now test this hypothesis by trying to falsify it. That is, we can check if all compound words in English are nouns by trying to find a counterexample. This is your "homework" for next class (Monday September 8th). Look for a counterexample to the hypothesis that all compound words in English are nouns. You will have to show that the counterexample is not a noun by using the tests from the two-page guide to lexical categories. You can show that the counterexample is not a noun by showing that the word fails the test for nouns. You should also tell me what category the counterexample does belong to (verb, adjective, etc).
Just for fun: a four-page description of the honeybee dance I mentioned in class
September 3rd
Welcome to the Lin 201 Section B course website! I will post summaries, notes, things to think about, and other useful things here, so please check the site on a regular basis.Today we dove right into morphology, and you all did a fine job figuring out a bit about the morphology of Michoacan Aztec. We also began to learn some of the technical terms that we will be using in our study of morphology; these included:
- free and bound morphemes
- affixes, which can be divided into prefixes, suffixes, and infixes
At the end of class today, we considered whether or not English has any infixes. We saw that there is in fact a very restricted class of words that can act as infixes in English; these are words such as bloody, frickin, goddamn, and so on, as shown in the following examples:
- Massa-frickin-chusetts
- Ala-frickin-bama