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7 - Morphological processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Peter H. Matthews
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Summary

Problems with irregular forms in English (man:men, come:come). ‘Zero morphs’; the model works but its spirit is broken. An alternative model: morphological operations. Item and Arrangement vs Item and Process.

Inflectional formations. Parallel with ‘derivation’. Grammatical representation of words: lexemes vs features. Inflectional formatives; addition of formatives to roots and stems; semantic role of operations; link-up with the lexicon. Vowel-change as an operation (English teeth, etc.); sequences of operations (English caught). Inflectional classes: regular and exceptional processes. Identity operations.

Types of morphological process. Lexical and inflectional processes. Affixation: base vs affix. Prefixation, suffixation, infixation; boundaries not always clear-cut. Reduplication, partial vs complete. Modification: vowel-change; patterns of vowel-change in Verbs in English. Direction of modifications: problems in Indo-European and in Arabic; in suppletion. Accentual and tonal modifications; ‘superfixes’. Addition vs subtraction: problem of Adjectives in French.

We remarked in the last chapter that there were difficulties when the morphemic model was applied to English. What are the difficulties and how do we respond to them?

Let us return once more to two of the examples introduced in chapter 1. In

That is no country for old men

men is Plural. Syntactically, a proportion such as

man:men = sea:seas

is exact. But where seas and other regular Plurals have the ending -s, men has no ending. The distinction between man and men is marked differently, by a vowel change. Where then is the allomorph of the Plural morpheme? If seas is grammatically sea + Plural, how can men be man + Plural?

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Morphology , pp. 122 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1991

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