Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Principal references
- 1 What is morphology?
- 2 Word, word-form and lexeme
- 3 Inflections and word-formation
- 4 Lexical derivation
- 5 Compounds
- 6 Morphemes and allomorphs
- 7 Morphological processes
- 8 Morphophonemics
- 9 Properties and their exponents
- 10 Paradigms
- 11 Inflectional morphology and syntax
- 12 Iconicity
- Index
7 - Morphological processes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Principal references
- 1 What is morphology?
- 2 Word, word-form and lexeme
- 3 Inflections and word-formation
- 4 Lexical derivation
- 5 Compounds
- 6 Morphemes and allomorphs
- 7 Morphological processes
- 8 Morphophonemics
- 9 Properties and their exponents
- 10 Paradigms
- 11 Inflectional morphology and syntax
- 12 Iconicity
- Index
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?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Morphology , pp. 122 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991