LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Pro-Form, Broccoli, Semantic Change
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Monday, October 2nd, 2017
Morphology (finishing up):
Creating new words from existing morphemes
• At the end of last week we discussed ways languages have of expanding and changing their
lexicons
• Every language has ways to combine existing morphemes to create new words
ü Compounding – combining existing wordsq Derivational morphology – bound morphemes to
create new words
Derivational morphology
• In addition compounding, languages may have bound morphemes that create new words
• These bound morphemes are referred to as derivational because they derive new words
from other ones
• English has a large inventory of derivational affixes
Derivational suffix: -er
• The suffix -er is use to derive agentive nouns from verbs
write
➞
writ-er
sing
➞
sing-er
win
➞
winn-er
• The word that results from combining a verb and -er eas oe ho VERBs
Derivational suffix: -able
• The suffix -able is used to derive adjectives nouns from verbs
read
➞
read-able
break
➞
break-able
pay
➞
pay-able
• -able combines with a verb and produces and adjective a readale ook
Derivational suffix: -able
• -able enforces a requirement on the verb it combines with
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go
➞
*go-able
sit
➞
*sit-able
cry
➞
*cr y-able
• This table shows us that –able can only combine with transitive verbs – those that can have a
direct object
Other English derivational affixes
• Some other English derivational affixes
re-
V➞V
start ➞ re-start
-y
N➞N
mom ➞ momm-y
-ion
V➞N
imitate ➞ imitat-ion
-ness
A➞N
real ➞ real-ness
Inflection vs. derivation
• A distinction is often draw between derivational morphology and inflectional morphology
• These are categories of bound morphemes
Inflection vs. derivation
• A high level characterization of the difference:
• Inflection marks grammatical properties of a word - singular vs. plural for nouns in English-
present tense vs. past tense for verbs in English
• Derivation changes the meaning or category of the word in some way and
Inflection vs. derivation
• Examples of inflectional affixes in English
• Plural -s: cat vs cat-s• Past tense -ed: talk vs. talk-ed • Comparative -er: big vs. bigg-er
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Document Summary
Creating new words from existing morphemes: at the end of last week we discussed ways languages have of expanding and changing their lexicons, every language has ways to combine existing morphemes to create new words. Compounding combining existing words q derivational morphology bound morphemes to create new words. Derivational morphology: in addition compounding, languages may have bound morphemes that create new words, these bound morphemes are referred to as derivational because they derive new words from other ones, english has a large inventory of derivational affixes. Derivational suffix: -er the suffix -er is use to derive agentive nouns from verbs write sing win writ-er sing-er winn-er: the word that results from combining a verb and -er (cid:373)ea(cid:374)s (cid:862)o(cid:374)e (cid:449)ho verbs(cid:863) Derivational suffix: -able the suffix -able is used to derive adjectives nouns from verbs read break pay read-able break-able pay-able: -able combines with a verb and produces and adjective (cid:894)(cid:862)a reada(cid:271)le (cid:271)ook(cid:863)(cid:895)
