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| language is a system of signs. A linguistic sign is an arbitrary pairing between what he called the significant ‘signifier’, a particular sequence of sounds and the ‘signified’ the concept that is denoted by the sound sequence. |
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defined entirely in terms of its parts.
Ex: doghouse is compositional because its meaning is derivable (understandable) from its two components. |
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derivational process that makes phrases a single noun. We can’t modify just one part of it and it keeps the same meaning, so it is compounding.
Ex: tool + bar, amusement + park, puppy + love, coffee + house, high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor. |
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a word refers to words that occur only once in the record corpus of a given language.
Words that someone made up, used once, and threw away. |
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a compound with a head
the head expressed the core meaning of the compound and it belongs to the same lexical category as the compound as a whole
Ex: Goldfish. The head, fish, determines the meaning and the lexical category (noun). |
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A compound whose meaning cannot be determined from the head are exocentric.
Ex: loony bin, pickpocket, lazybones |
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A productive derivational process that changes that changes the lexical category of a word without changing its phonological shape.
Ex: Don’t hair me! Rocker me, Mommy. |
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Derivational process that involves prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Has strict constraints.
May attach to stems of more than one category. |
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common derivational process that combines parts of more than one word. It is rare in Indo-European languages but common in Hebrew and Japanese.
Ex: spoon + fork = spork, smoke + fog = smog |
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Formed by taking the initial letters of a string of words and combining them to form a new one.
Acronyms are orthographically based
Ex: scuba, NATO, AIDS
In some languages, a characteristic of an acronym is that it can be used for further morphological operations. Page 121 at bottom. |
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The creation of a new word by truncation of an existing one.
Ex: Rob for Robert, Trish for Patricia, and Sue for Susan.
Bra from Brassiere, Ad from Advertisement, Fan from Fanatic. |
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Creation of words that occurs when speakers reinterpret a form – typically a borrowing from another language – on the basis of words or morphemes that already exist in the language.
Ex: cockroach – Spanish cucaracha |
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creation of a word by removing what appears to be an affix.
Not a productive derivational process.
It is responsible for words such as surveil from surveillance, or liposuct from lipsuction. |
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a words’ meaning has to refer to some entity or relation (real or imaginary) in the world.
Reptile refers to all individuals in the world that are reptiles.
Respect or love refers to relationships between individuals. |
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is a problem of lexical semantics where the meanings of individual lexemes are highly diverse.
•The verb lose has different meanings in the following sentences, but they are all instances of the same lexeme.
• They lost their passports
• Jake lost his job.
• Sarah lost her husband to cancer.
• I lost my temper.
• We both lose 10 pounds. |
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Represent single lexemes
Show that the same phonetic string can convey different, but related meanings depending on the linguistic and pragmatic context.
•Mass/Count – I love watermelon (mass)/I sold three watermelons (count)
•Figure-ground reversal – Hugh broke the window/we climbed through the window.
•Container-contained alternation – A hot glass put under cold water will shatter/Franny downed the glass in two seconds flat.
•Place-people alternation – The president lives in the White House/The White House announced yesterday that the peace talks will continue. |
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children using a word to refer to only a subset of its actual referents
Ex: underextending "dog" by using it to refer to more typical examples of the species but not to varieties like Chihuahua or Shar Pei. |
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using a word to refer to objects or individuals that are typically covered by the word.
Ex: overextending "tree" by using it to refer to potted plants or wreaths. |
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| Semantics of Zer-Derivation |
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Definition
Productive derivational process that results in lexemes whose interpretation is context-dependant.
Zero-derived verbs often have a wide range of meanings.
Noun to Verb dervation |
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The nouns extension is the set of entities it picks out in the world.
Ex: If Mary is good at piloting, she is a good pilot. If this shampoo is good, it is good for what you do with shampoo. |
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| Morphosyntactic information |
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syntactic info that is expressed morphologically.
•Tense, aspect, number, and case |
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the realization of morphosyntactic features through morphological means.
The set of all the inflected forms of a lexeme is called a paradigm.
formation of grammatical forms – past, present, future; singular, plural; masculine, feminine, neuter; and so on – of a single lexeme.
Changes the word’s meaning but not part of speech. |
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the realization of morphosyntactic features via inflection.
In the word "seas", the morpheme [z] is the exponent of the morphosyntactic feature plural.
In sailed [d] is the exponent of past tense. |
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there is a one-to-one relationship between form and meaning, since one morpheme realizes one morphosyntactic feature and meaning.
Ex: In sailed [d] is the exponent of past tense. |
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where more than one morphosyntactic feature maps onto a single form. One part of a word has more than one meaning
refers to affixes, like Latin -o: in am-o: 'I love', which simulteneously realize 1st Person, Singular Number, Indicative Mood, and Active Voice. |
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Two parts come together to mean one thing.
The use of more than one morpheme to encode a feature or feature bundle |
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Ex:
all present participles end in –ing so we know what it means in all situations. |
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| Context-Sensitive Inflection |
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where the realization of a morphosyntactic feature varies.
Past in English corresponds to several possible phonological realizations.
Ex: ablaut, suppletion, zero morpheme, /-t/, /-d/ |
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If inflection realizes an innate morphosyntactic feature of a word stored in the speaker’s mental lexicon
Ex: pants is inherently plural in English
Ex: Gender of nouns in Romance languages |
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a feature is realized by a syntactic process such as government and agreement
Ex: The gender of an adjective must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies |
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One words dictates the form of another.
Case assignment by verbs is usually thought of this way.
Ex: a noun is assigned the accusative case if it is the object of a verb. |
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Agreement between two morphosyntactic features.
Noun-adjective agreement = Adjectives take on the number and gender of the noun they modify in Romance languages. |
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Term
Inflectional Category
Number |
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Definition
Nominal category that some languages use to distinguish between singular and plural number of nouns and pronouns.
•Trial number – marking nouns that refer to sets of three
•Paucal number – marking nouns that refer to a few |
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Inflectional Category
Gender |
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Definition
less common than number and more varied. Linguistic genders do not always refer to biological sex.
•In English, gender is sex based.
•The Romance languages (French, Portuguese and Spanish) have two genders, masculine and feminine, corresponding very roughly to male and female.
•Many languages have genders that refer to animacy, shape, or other natural properties.
•In North American languages, when they exhibit gender, most commonly have the two genders animate and inanimate.
•Niger-Congo have genders based on shape as well.
•Some languages have numerous genders. |
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Term
Inflectional Category
Case |
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Definition
the simplest cases are:
•Nominative and Accusative- usually reserved for syntactic subjects and objects respectively.
•Genitive and Dative- are used for possessors and indirect objects.
•Locative (denoting a place) and instrumental- more directly semantic |
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Inflectional Category
Person |
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Definition
Universally, there are only three persons, and all spoken languages have all three. Nouns are always third person, and first and second person forms are always pronouns. The major differences among languages are in the plural, especially the first person plural
•Exclusive- a form meaning ‘me and others, but not you’
•Inclusive-a form meaning ‘me and others, including you’. |
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Inflectional Category
Tense |
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Definition
| It is directly connected to time, and languages often express three tenses morphologically: past, present, and future. |
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Term
Inflectional Category
Aspect |
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Definition
The way in which we view the unfolding of an event than with its simple position in time.
• Many languages distinguish imperfective from perfective aspect, where the first denotes an action in progress while the second denotes a completed action. |
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Inflectional Category
Mood |
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Definition
reflects a speaker’s commitment to a proposition.
• In English, modal auxillary verbs include may or must, which express different degrees of commitment to obligation or truth. |
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Definition
the alternation of sounds within a word that indicates grammatical information (often inflectional).
like Ablaut |
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Definition
the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate.
suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular".
This takes place when the syntax requires a form of a lexeme that is not morphologically predictable.
Ex: English verb "go" past tense is "went" |
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Term
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Definition
this is when a single inflected form corresponds to more than one set of morphosyntactic features.
the identity of form of distinct morphological forms of a word.
For example, in English, the nominative and accusative forms of "you" are the same, whereas he/him, she/her, etc., have different forms depending on grammatical case |
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Term
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| Morphological typology was the first systematic method used by linguists to compare the structures of different languages. Typology has to do with a scale running from analytic to synthetic languages, which encodes the degree to which the individual meaningful elements in a language are expressed. |
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| a language that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically with separate morphemes rather than inflectional processes
Ex: Vietnamese
analytic> isolating, inflective, Fusional, synthetic, |
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Term
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Definition
A language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio
Synthetic languages are frequently contrasted with isolating languages. It is more accurate to conceive of languages as existing on a continuum, with strictly isolating (consistently one morpheme per word) at one end and highly polysynthetic (in which a single word may contain as much information as an entire English sentence) at the other extreme. Synthetic languages tend to lie around the middle of this scale. |
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Analytic subtype and agglutinative '
turkish or hungarian |
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Term
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a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment.
Characterized by the combination of two or more morphosyntatic features in a single morpheme; adjective applied to morphological systems where this type of morphology. |
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| This is when the speaker can build complex words that express what a speaker of English would express using several words or even an entire sentence. |
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| deals with the relationship and interactions between morphology and syntax. |
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| Grammatical Function Change |
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| refers to “alterations in the grammatical encoding of referential expressions.” |
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Definition
example: This article was written by Ashley.
•unmarked case-neutral
•marked case-non-neutral |
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a verb voice that works on transitive verbs by deleting the object.
Most languages with the antipassive voice are Australian Aboriginal or Native American languages
the deletion of an object changes the subject from ergative case to absolutive |
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| a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. (Non-intended) |
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| a grammatical voice which promotes an indirect argument of a verb to the (core) object argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb. |
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| Morphological Productivity |
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Definition
how likely forms are to become actual words
• Productive – there is a higher probability of a potential word in the first pattern being accepted in the language than there is of a potential word in the second pattern. |
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A word that is coined but has not reached enough popularity yet to become a word in the dictionary.
Ex: "Mugglehood" |
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| the knowledge that speakers and hearers have of their language. |
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| how the language is actually used in concrete situations. |
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| the use of the prefix "non" |
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| the addition to a word x results in a new word meaning ‘opposite of x’. –un, -in |
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