LINGUISTIC PRELIMINARIES PART II:

INTRO TO MORPHOSYNTAX

Linguistics 187 / Cultural Anthropology 187 / English 187 / ICS 151C

Variety in Language: English in the United States

Duke University

Erin Callahan-Price

Spring 2011

Announcements 1/31/2011• Will hand back Phonetics Exercises at end of class; you did good!• Announcements section on blog• Poll• Attendance• Updated Syllabus• Presentations sign up: I’ll pass around a sheet Monday 2/7 in class;

be ready to sign up individually or in partners.• Blog Post 2: Grade is out of 10; average of 2 LF exercises• Blog Post 3: Will be due this Sunday; will display/discuss topic at end

of class• Office hours start Wednesday; watch for email for location• Today: In-class exercises, count as part II of Blog #2 grade

SECTION IMorphology: The Structure of Words (Finegan 2004: 39)

LF 5.1

Morphosyntax: Sample Scenarios• Your 3-year old niece asks you if you “maked” her

birthday cake yet, as well as if you “speaked” with your friends and “telled” them about it. How would you explain why she uses the patterns she does?

• Can you guess the “top ten” words used most often in printed English? Can you hypothesize a reason for their high frequency?

• Why, in some English dialects, can we say “fan-freaking-tastic” but not “fanta-freaking-stic” (or even fantas-freaking-tic)?

The Easy Part• The principles behind lexicon and morphology of your

language tend more readily accessible, so we’ll spend less time here.*

• What does it mean to know a word?• The sounds and their sequencing (phonetic, phonological

information)• Its meaning (semantic information)• How related words, like the plural (for nouns) and past tense (for

verbs) are formed (morphological information)• Its category (e.g. noun/verb/adjective) and how to use it in a

sentence (syntactic information)

* though this may be the same reason morphosyntactic features “I might could go to the store” may be more salient– and thus stereotypable– in varieties of English. Some linguists have hypothesized that phonetic features, on the whole, are somehow less able (or at least less likely) to “rise to the level of consciousness,” and, as such, become stark social emblems.

The Easy Part

“THE SPLIT ORANGE” BY ANTHONY BRIDGE POCHADES

• THERE ARE NO DUMB QUESTIONS• Can the words girl, ask, tall, uncle, and orange be divided into

smaller meaningful units?• Like oh, say, o + range?

Definitions• However: many words do have more than one meaningful part. Like

grand + mother, which is relatively transparent.

• The smallest meaningful units in a word are called morphemes.

• Thus: truly has two morphemes: true + ly.

• CAUTION: Just as you learned not to treat (transcribed) sounds and their respective spellings the same way, be careful not to fall into the trap of equating morphemes with syllable:

-harvest, grammar, river, Connecticut (= 1 morpheme)-kissed (= KISS + ‘PAST TENSE’)

Characteristics of Morphemes• They can be free or bound

• true, mother, orange vs. –un, tele-, -ness, and –er

• Certain bound morphemes can change the category of the word to which they are attached.

• This is one easy way to know that these morphemes are derivational morphemes

Doubtful (NOUN ADJ)Establishment (VERB NOUN)

Darken (ADJ VERB)Frighten (NOUN VERB)Teacher (VERB NOUN)

Characteristics of Morphemes, cont.• Another type of bound morpheme is illustrated in the words

cats, collected, and sleeps

• These inflectional morphemes change the form of a word but not its lexical category or central meaning.• Inflectional morphemes, instead, create variant forms of a word to

conform to different roles in a sentence*. • On nouns and pronouns, inflectional pronouns serve to mark

semantic notions like number and grammatical categories such as gender and case.

• On verbs, they can mark such things as tense or number, while, on adjectives they can indicate degree.

* Here we start to see some “bridges” between morphology and syntax

Examples: English inflectional affixes

Cats (CAT + PLURAL)Collected (COLLECT + PAST )

Sleeps (SLEEP + 3RD SG. PRESENT)

In case you were wondering:English doesn’t have a lot of these.

• You’ll notice we don’t have many inflectional affixes… how do we make up for it? Some strategies:

I. Homophony: • PAST marker vs. PAST PARTICIPLE forms (i.e. that are identical):

• I marked/have marked• I closed/have closed • I emailed/have emailed (neologisms get regular endings)

• What stays the same (i.e. “resists” regularization) is often a L’s “core vocabulary” (was/been, saw/see, ate/eaten, tell/told…). These forms are:

1. learned last in the language acquisition process because they are irregular

2. often “regularized” in vernacular

I seen a horse

I’ve ate a lot of fish in my life.

• II. Word order: • She [NOM] hit him [ACC] (correctly marked for case– it’s not “Her hit he.”)• Alice hit Bill vs. Bill hit Alice (MEANING CHANGE: must pay attention to word order since

NOT marked for case)

Side Note:Bound Roots– a thorn in our morphological sides.

• “Bound roots” like the riv- in river (or the “-ceive” in “conceive”) might have once been free in the history of English (and in fact still are in closely related langs; cf Fr. Rive Gauche). Now, due to language change, they don’t have the same kind of (morphological) autonomy.

• So how many morphemes does river have? The answer depends on YOU! (remember back to our definition of morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in a language.)

• In the case of, river, you must first (crucially) ask yourself if the bound root has an independent meaning for YOU. Does the “word” riv mean anything to you (i.e. without the suffix –er)? Probably not. In this case, “river” would be coded in your mind as a single morpheme.

• The situation might be a little different for, say, –ceive (as conceive). First of all, maybe you have a fuzzy idea of some kind of “core” meaning for this root…. Something like, oh, “get or see meaning/information” (that’s my best stab/intuition). That’s because we have a lot of –ceiv-y type words hanging out in the lexicon of English.

Bound Roots, cont.• When you check to see if –ceive appears in other words,

does it preserve this meaning (i.e. consistently)? (Why yes: in per-ceive, de-ceive, re-ceive…)

• If you find the root in closely related Ls [that you know] (bound roots usually come from Latin), you have even more evidence that it’s a bound root coded as such in your mind.

• So, if rece(voir/bir) (Fr./Sp. “to receive”) occurs to you from your 11th grade French class, you have lots of material for your argument that the word is indeed built of 2 morphemes in your mind.

• Someone who never studied any Romance Ls, or, for that matter, whose English vocabulary might not include “perceive, deceive,” etc., would be more likely to analyze/process the word “conceive” as one morheme.

Finite Set of English Inflectional AffixesYou can memorize them!

• These are affixes which sound alike but have a different meaning (different grammatical shape)

• Another example is –er• Marks comparative degree on adjectives/adverbs (sweet, sweet +er)• Derive an agent noun from a verb (dive diver)

Flow Chart

In-class practice with a partner• Get out LF 5.2

• p. 150: do exs. 1 & 3 • In ex. 1, just tell whether it’s DERIVATIONAL vs. INFLECTIONAL and

BOUND vs. FREE (don’t worry about content/function for now).• for the …tell the meaning of function of each suffix part, just use your

own words; don’t worry about fancy terminology

• p. 151: do ex. 5

• You and your partner only have to turn in one paper; just make sure both names are on it.

Please make sure your and your partner’s first and last names are on your paper and turn it in after class.

Homework: Blog Post #3• The study of linguistics can be seen as an exercise in learning not to take language for granted.

• In the last few weeks, my goal was for you to begin to be able to “see under the hood” of the sounds and words we produce (and understand) effortlessly every day.

• The “reading” you will be responding to is the LF readings as well as the text of the class lectures.

InstructionsIn blog post #3, you will address the following topic:What continuous themes do you observe in the content we’ve covered so far (Universals/Design Features, Phonetics, Morphosyntax)?• Here you can go wild according to your own background/field of study.

Use what you know to connect with what you’ve learned.• The “themes”(/connecting strands, unifying devices, recurrent

models, resonating ideas) may be structural, analogical, philosophical, biological, metaphorical, allegorical, mythical, mathematical, social, logical, spatial… use the “register” you can write most authoritatively in.

• Some questions to get you brainstorming: • Are there other social/biological/allegorical, etc. systems which function in the same way

language does? Do we draw on similar metaphors in describing these systems?• What assumptions are necessary for our “model” of language not to ‘fall apart’ (e.g.

analytically, empirically, rhetorically)?• Could the resonant models/themes/”thought styles” you identify here “mis-fire” or

malfunction at any point to make the model inconsistent with the (socio)linguistic realities (data) you observe in the “real world”?

Reminders• Post as “NEW POST” on the front page

• Attach category blog3 (already in list) plus one more category you pick/create

• You will be graded exactly according to the response rubric (posted under “Assignments”)• REMINDERS: Use linguistic terms! Always re-read your sentences to ask

yourself “Can I be more specific? Can I give examples?”• Responses should be ~500 words• Responses should be technically correct (punctuation, spelling, sentence

structure). PROOFREAD.• No citations necessary unless you refer to a text outside of class lectures

and LF readings.

SECTION IISyntax, proper: The Structure and Function of Phrases & Sentences (Finegan 2004: 146-154)

LFs 6.1-6.2

What is Syntax?

• Let’s think back to the pipe organ… and do an experiment.

• Listen to the following sound. • Is it recognizable as “music”?• What gives it “order” vs. “disorder”?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbG1sOjizPU

What is Syntax, cont.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFis0Jj8YK4

Let’s think back to the pipe organ… and do an experiment.Listen to the following sound.

Is it recognizable as “music”?What gives it “order” vs. “disorder”?

What Do YOU think?

The Lesson?

Framing Questions for a Study of Syntax

• What do we mean by ‘unrelated’? That’s sort of the key. If we knew the answer to that, it’d be the end of the field of syntax.

• But seriously: a sentence isn’t just an arbitrary list of words, like the list of your names on my attendance sheet….

• And music– at least the way we conceive of Modern, Western, tonal, etc. etc. music– isn’t just an arbitrary string of sounds.

• As such, a sentence of any human language is a sequence of particular kinds of words in particular kinds of orderings which produce particular kinds of meanings.

In this chapter we ask the question “What determines whether a string of words in a language is a sentence or simply a string of unrelated words”?

Rules for Meaning(s): What makes sentences/major-key sonatas “well-formed”?

.• But– what are the rules for producing the meanings we

want to produce with the sentences of our language? • In other words… what were the rules that make us be

able to put Brahms or Mozart on our ipod to go to sleep at night, and associate the experimental music (at best) with an avant-garde horror movie?

The Nuts and Bolts (6.1):What You Need to Know

• The order of word in a sentence or phrase is connected to its meaning: Bill hit Alice vs. Alice hit Bill

• Not every linear ordering of words expresses a meaning: a. *Collar on is the dog the b. *Dog on the is collar the.

• We call orders that form possible sentences of a language “grammatical” (vis a vis prescriptive meaning).

• Impossible sentences because words are in the wrong order with respect to each other are “ungrammatical.”

Nuts and Bolts cont.: Phrase Structure (6.4)What You Need to Know

• In English, main categories are N, V, Adj, Prep, Adv. These lexical categories (built around a structural “head”) can be built with different combinations of ingredients:

• Phrase structure trees represent phrase structure rules in “3D” (in other words, not just order of categories but the relatedness of the categories to each other)• Help us visualize structure of the sentence• “Nodes” are categories• Can be read “vertically” as well as “horizontally”

Book the funny book on the table Phrase structure rule: NP (DET) (ADJ) N (PP)

Pretty Basic Phrase Structure Tree: Phrase Structure Rules Represented Graphically

Phrase Structure Trees Resolve Structural Ambiguity

Vs.

Vs.

Another experiment: Wernicke’s Aphasiac• Leaving pipe organs behind… let’s think about the question in

another mode. What do people who have syntax sound like?

www.physiology.wisc.edu

www.physiology.wisc.eduhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhYN7NTIKU

Broca’s Aphasiac• What do people who don’t have syntax sound like?

www.physiology.wisc.educhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM

Complementary Disordering?

• Broca’s Aphasia:• Semantically-ready; grammar-

deficient• “an inability to plan the motor

sequences used in speech of sign… [but also] display telegraphic speech, or speech without inflections and function words such as to or the…”

• “Comprehension … is not too much of a problem, although they may have some difficulty matching the correct semantic interpretation to the syntactic order of sentences.

• The lion was killed by the tiger as The tiger was killed by the lion

• Wernicke’s Aphasia• Grammar-ready; semantically-

deficient• receptive disorder• Semantically incoherent speech

which is usually syntactically/grammatically fluent

• Lexical retrieval messed up• Table: “chair”• Clip: “plick”• Ceiling: “leasing”• Ankle: “ankley, no mankle, no kankle” (Pinker 1994: 311)

….but! Syntactic framework (“slots” for those word-like things) remains mostly intact

Defining Syntax:Another Polemical Question…

1957

~1993

~2010

Core Principles

Chomsky 1957, p. 19