Word Formation (George Yule) PDF

## Word Formation ### 5 Word Formation Autocorrect I could do without. It thinks I am stupid and clumsy, and while it's true that I don't know how to disable it and I can't text with thumbs like a teenager (though I am prehensile), why would I let a machine tell me what I want to say? I text someo...

## Word Formation ### 5 Word Formation Autocorrect I could do without. It thinks I am stupid and clumsy, and while it's true that I don't know how to disable it and I can't text with thumbs like a teenager (though I am prehensile), why would I let a machine tell me what I want to say? I text someone "Good night" in German, and instead of "Gute Nacht" I send "Cute Nachos." I type "adverbial," and it comes out "adrenal," which is like a knife to my adverbial gland. Invited to dinner, I text my friend to ask whether I can bring anything, and she replies that the "food and dissertation" are under control. Norris (2015) The creation of new words in a language never stops and English is one language that is particularly fond of adding to its large vocabulary. Traditionally, we would check in a dictionary to be sure that we were using the right word, with correct spelling, but technological advances have provided us with programs that do the checking for us, or, even more insidiously, as in the situation described by Mary Norris above, try to choose the words for us. Unfortunately, at the moment, these programs do not seem to have any way of knowing if the words that are chosen are appropriate or if it is quite normal to send someone a communication out of the blue that reads "cute nachos." In this chapter, we won't solve the problem of inappropriate choice of words, but we will look in some detail at how those words came to be part of the language. ### Etymology The study of the origin and history of a word is known as its **etymology**, a term which, like many of our technical words, comes to us through Latin, but has its origins in Greek (étymon "original form" + logia “study of"), and is not to be confused with entomology, also from Greek (éntomon “insect”). Greek and Latin are the sources of many English words, often providing alternative ways to describe things, such as mono- from Greek (mono-cycle) and uni- from Latin (uni-cycle). The other major source, Germanic, provides an alternative form one- (one-wheeled cycle). When we look closely at the etymologies of everyday words, we soon discover that there are many different ways in which new words can enter the language. We should keep in mind that a lot of words in daily use today were, at one time, considered barbaric misuses of the language. It is difficult now to understand the views expressed in the early nineteenth century over the "tasteless innovation" of a word like handbook, or the horror expressed by a London newspaper in 1909 over the use of the newly coined word aviation. Yet many new words can cause similar outcries as they come into use today. Rather than act as if the language is being debased, we might prefer to view the constant evolution of new words and new uses of old words as a reassuring sign of vitality and creativeness in the way a language is shaped by the needs of its users. ### Neologisms Around 1900, in New Berlin, Ohio, a department-store worker named J\. Murray Spangler invented a device that he called an electric suction sweeper. This device eventually became very popular and could have become known as a spangler. People could have been spanglering their floors or they might even have spanglered their rugs and curtains. The use could have extended to a type of person who droned on and on (and really sucked), described as spanglerish, or to a whole style of behavior called spanglerism. However, none of that happened. Instead, Mr. Spangler sold his new invention to a local businessman called William H. Hoover, whose Hoover Suction Sweeper Company produced the first machine called a “Hoover.” Not only did the word hoover (without a capital letter) become as familiar as vacuum cleaner all over the world, but in Britain, people still talk about hoovering (and not spanglering) their carpets. The point of this small tale is that, although we had never heard of Mr. Spangler before, we really had no difficulty coping with the new words: spangler, spanglerish, spanglerism, spanglering or spanglered. That is, we can very quickly understand a new word, a **neologism**, and accept the use of different forms of that new word in the language. This ability must derive in part from the fact that there is a lot of regularity in the word-formation processes in a language. In this chapter, we will explore some of the basic processes by which new words are created. ### Borrowing One of the most common sources of new words in English is the process simply labeled **borrowing**, that is, the taking over of words from other languages. (Technically, it's more than just borrowing, because English doesn't give them back.) Throughout its history, the English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages, including these examples: | Word | Origin | |---|---| | dope | Dutch | | piano | Italian | | jewel | French | | pretzel | German | | glitzy | Yiddish | | ski | Norwegian | | lilac | Persian | | sofa | Arabic | | tattoo | Tahitian | | tycoon | Japanese | | yogurt | Turkish | | zebra | Bantu | Sometimes a new sound comes along along with new words. The voiced fricative /ʒ/ became part of English through borrowed French words such as measure and rouge. Other languages, of course, borrow terms from English, as in the Japanese use of suupaa or suupaamaaketto (“supermarket”) and taipuraitaa (“typewriter”). We can also hear of people in Finland using a šekki (“check”) to pay their bills, Hungarians talking about sport, klub and futbal, or the French discussing problems of le stress, over a glass of le whisky, during le weekend. In Brazilian Portuguese, the English words up and nerd have been borrowed and turned into verbs for the new activities upar (“to upload") and nerdear (“to surf the internet"). In some cases, the borrowed words are used with quite novel meanings, as in the contemporary German use of the English words partner and look in the phrase im Partnerlook to describe two people who are together and wearing similar clothing. Other German uses of English words are illustrated in Task F on page 69. ### Loan-Translation A special type of borrowing is described as **loan-translation** or **calque** (/kælk/). In this process, there is a direct translation of the elements of a word into the borrowing language. Interesting examples are the French term gratte-ciel, which literally translates as "scrape-sky," the Dutch wolkenkrabber (“cloud scratcher”) or the German Wolkenkratzer (“cloud scraper"), all of which were calques for the English skyscraper. The English word superman is thought to be a loan-translation of the German Übermensch, and the term loanword itself is believed to have come from the German Lehnwort. The English expression moment of truth is believed to be a calque from the Spanish phrase el momento de la verdad, though not restricted to the original use as the final thrust of the sword to end a bullfight. Nowadays, some Spanish speakers eat perros calientes (literally "dogs hot") or hot dogs, which have nothing to do with those four-legged perros. The American concept of "boyfriend” was borrowed, with sound change, into Japanese as boyifurendo, but as a calque into Chinese as “male friend” or nan pengyu. ### Compounding In some of the examples we have just considered, there is a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. Thus, Lehn and Wort are combined to produce Lehnwort in German. This combining process, technically known as **compounding**, is very common in languages such as German and English, but much less common in languages such as French and Spanish. Common English compounds are bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn, textbook, wallpaper, wastebasket and waterbed. All these examples are nouns, but we can also create compound adjectives (good-looking, low-paid) and compounds of adjective (fast) plus noun (food) as in a fast-food restaurant or a full-time job. This very productive source of new terms has been well documented in English and German, but can also be found in totally unrelated languages, such as Hmong (spoken in Laos and Vietnam), which has many recently created compounds. (More examples can be found in Task I, on page 70.) * hwj ("pot") + kais (“spout”) = hwjkais (“kettle”) * paj ("flower") + kws (“corn”) = pajkws (“popcorn”) * hnab ("bag") + rau ("put") + ntawv ("paper") = hnabrauntawv (“schoolbag”) ### Blending The combination of two separate forms to produce a single new term is also present in the process called **blending**. However, in blending, we typically take only the beginning of one word and join it to the end of the other word. To talk about the combined effects of smoke and fog, we can use the word smog. In places where they have a lot of this stuff, they can jokingly make a distinction between smog, smaze (smoke + haze) and smurk (smoke + murk). In Hawaiʻi, near the active volcano, they have problems with vog. Some common examples of blending are bit (binary/digit), brunch (breakfast/lunch), motel (motor/hotel), telecast (television/broadcast), Oxbridge (Oxford/Cambridge) for both universities considered together and the Chunnel (Channel/tunnel) connecting England and France. The activity of fund-raising on television that feels like a marathon is typically called a telethon, while infotainment (information/entertainment) and simulcast (simultaneous/broadcast) are other new blends from life with television. To describe the mixing of languages, some people talk about Franglais (Français/Anglais) and Spanglish (Spanish/English). In a few blends, we combine the beginnings of both words, as in terms from information technology, such as telex (teleprinter/exchange) or modem (modulator/demodulator). A blend from the beginnings of two French words velours croché (“hooked velvet”) is the source of the word velcro. How about the word fax? Is that a blend? No, see next category. ### Clipping The element of reduction that is noticeable in blending is even more apparent in the process described as **clipping**. This occurs when a word of more than one syllable (facsimile) is reduced to a shorter form (fax), usually beginning in casual speech. The term gasoline is still used, but most people talk about gas, using the clipped form. Other common examples are ad (advertisement), bra (brassiere), cab (cabriolet), condo (condominium), fan (fanatic), flu (influenza), perm (permanent wave), phone, plane, porn and pub (public house). English speakers also like to clip each other's names, as in Al, Ed, Liz, Mike, Ron, Sam, Sue and Tom. There must be something about educational environments that encourages clipping because so many words get reduced, as in chem, exam, gym, lab, math, phys-ed, poly-sci, prof and typo. ### Hypocorisms A particular type of reduction, favored in Australian and British English, produces forms technically known as **hypocorisms**. In this process, a longer word is reduced to a single syllable, then -y or -ie is added to the end. This is the process that results in movie (“moving pictures") and telly (“television"). It has also produced Aussie (“Australian”), barbie ("barbecue"), bickie (“biscuit”), bookie (“bookmaker”), brekky (“breakfast”), hankie ("handkerchief”) and toastie ("toasted sandwich"). You can probably guess what Chrissy pressies are. By now, you may be ready to take a sickie (“a day of sick leave from work, whether for real sickness or not"). ### Backformation A very specialized type of reduction process is known as **backformation**. Typically, a word of one type (usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of another type (usually a verb). A good example of backformation is the process whereby the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was created from it. Other examples of words created by this process are: donate (from “donation”), emote (from "emotion”), enthuse (from “enthusiasm”) and liaise (from "liaison"). Indeed, when we use the verb backform (Did you know that “opt" was backformed from “option”?), we are using a backformation. Here are some other recent creations. * automation → automate * choreography → choreograph * syllabification → syllabify * bulldozer → bulldoze * mixture → mix * orientation → orientate → orient One very regular source of backformed verbs in English is based on the common pattern work – worker. The assumption seems to have been that if there is a noun ending in -er (or something close in sound), then we can create a verb for what that noun-er does. Hence, an editor will edit, a sculptor will sculpt and babysitters, beggars, burglars, peddlers and swindlers will babysit, beg, burgle, peddle and swindle. ### Conversion A change in the function of a word, as for example when a noun comes to be used as a verb (without any reduction), is generally known as **conversion**. Other labels for this very common process are “category change” and “functional shift.” A number of nouns such as bottle, butter, chair and vacation have come to be used, through conversion, as verbs: We bottled the home-brew last night; Have you buttered the toast?; Someone has to chair the meeting; They're vacationing in Florida. These forms are readily accepted, but some conversions, such as the noun impact used as a verb, seem to impact some people's sensibilities rather negatively. The conversion process is very productive in Modern English, with new uses occurring frequently. The conversion can involve verbs becoming nouns, with guess, must and spy as the sources of a guess, a must and a spy. Phrasal verbs (to print out, to take over) also become nouns (a printout, a takeover). One complex verb combination (want to be) has become a new noun, as in He isn't in the group, he's just a wannabe. Some other examples of conversion are listed here. | Noun | Verb | Noun | |---|---|---| | dust | to dust | He's a cheat. | | glue | to glue | We had some doubts. | | referee | to referee | I need a handout. | | water | to water | We have two new hires. | Verbs (see through, stand up) can also become adjectives, as in see-through material or a stand-up comedian. A number of adjectives, as in a dirty floor, an empty room, some crazy ideas and those nasty people, have become the verbs to dirty and to empty, or the nouns a crazy and the nasty. Some compound nouns have assumed other functions, exemplified by the ball park appearing in a ball-park figure (as an adjective) or asking someone to ball-park an estimate of the cost (as a verb). Other nouns of this type are carpool, mastermind, microwave and quarterback, which are also used as verbs now. Other forms, such as up and down, can also become verbs, as in They're going to up the price of oil or We downed a few beers at the Chimes. It is worth noting that some words can shift substantially in meaning when they go through conversion. The verb to doctor often has a negative sense, not normally associated with the source noun a doctor. A similar kind of reanalysis of meaning is taking place with the noun total and the verb run around, which do not have negative meanings. However, if you total (= verb) your car, and your insurance company gives you the runaround (= noun), you will have a double sense of the negative. ### Coinage The invention and general use of totally new terms, or **coinage**, is not very common in English. Typical sources are trade names for commercial products that become general terms (usually without capital letters) for any version of that product. Older examples are aspirin, nylon, vaseline and zipper; more recent examples are granola, kleenex, teflon and xerox. It may be that there is an obscure technical origin (e.g. te(tra)-fl(uor)-on) for some of these invented terms, but after their first coinage, they tend to become everyday words in the language. The most salient contemporary example of coinage is the word google. Originally a misspelling for the word googol (= the number 1 followed by 100 zeros), in the creation of the word Googleplex, which later became the name of a company (Google), the term google (without a capital letter) has since undergone conversion from a noun to become a widely used verb meaning “to use the internet to find information.” New words based on the name of a person or a place are called **eponyms**. When we talked about a hoover (or even a spangler), we were using an eponym. We use the eponyms teddy bear, derived from US president Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, and jeans (from the Italian city of Genoa where the type of cloth was first made). Another eponym dates from 1762 when John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, insisted on having his salt beef between two slices of toasted bread while gambling. Apparently his friends started to ask "to have the same as Sandwich." ### Acronyms **Acronyms** are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words. These can be forms such as CD ("compact disk") or SPCA (“Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals") where the pronunciation consists of saying each separate letter. More typically, acronyms are pronounced as new single words, as in NATO, NASA or UNESCO. These examples have kept their capital letters, but many acronyms simply become everyday terms such as laser ("light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation"), radar ("radio detecting and ranging"), scuba (“"self-contained underwater breathing apparatus"), a sim (“subscriber identity module") card and zip ("zone improvement plan") code. You might even hear talk of a snafu, which is reputed to have its origins in "situation normal, all fouled up,” though there is some dispute about the appropriate verb in there. Names for organizations are often designed to have their acronym represent an appropriate term, as in "mothers against drunk driving” (MADD) and “women against rape” (WAR). Many speakers do not think of their component meanings. Innovations such as the ATM ("automatic teller machine") and the required PIN (“personal identification number") are regularly used with one of their elements repeated, as in I sometimes forget my PIN number when I go to the ATM machine. The ATM example is also known as an "initialism" (see Task A, page 68). ### Derivation In our list so far, we have not dealt with what is by far the most common word-formation process to be found in the production of new words. This process is called **derivation** and it is accomplished by means of a large number of small "bits" of the English language that are not usually given separate listings in dictionaries. These small "bits" are generally described as **affixes**. Some familiar examples are the elements un-, mis-, pre-, -ful, -less, -ish, -ism and -ness which appear in words like unhappy, misrepresent, prejudge, joyful, careless, boyish, terrorism and sadness. #### Prefixes and Suffixes Looking more closely at the preceding group of words, we can see that some affixes are added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-, mis-). These are called **prefixes**. Other affixes are added to the end of the word (e.g. -less, -ish) and are called **suffixes**. All English words formed by this derivational process have either prefixes or suffixes, or both. Thus, mislead has a prefix, disrespectful has both a prefix and a suffix, and foolishness has two suffixes. According to Dixon (2014: 11), English has about 200 derivational affixes, divided into 90 prefixes and 110 suffixes. We will investigate the range of English affixes in more detail in Chapter 6. #### Infixes There is a third type of affix, not normally used in English, but found in some other languages. This is called an **infix**, which is an affix that is incorporated inside another word. It is possible to see the general principle at work in certain expressions, occasionally used in fortuitous or aggravating circumstances by emotionally aroused English speakers: Hallebloodylujah!, Absogoddamlutely!, Aladamnbama and Unfuckinbelievable!. We could view these examples of "expletive insertion" as a special version of infixing in English. However, a much better set of examples can be provided from Khmu (or Kamhmu), a language spoken in northern Laos and Vietnam. | Verb | Noun | |---|---| | ("to drill") see | srnee ("a drill") | | ("to chisel") toh | trnoh ("a chisel") | | ("to eat with a spoon") hiip | hrniip ("a spoon") | | ("to tie") hoom | hrnoom ("a thing with which to tie") | From these examples, we can see that there is a regular pattern whereby the infix -rn- is added to verbs to form nouns. If we know that the form srnal is the Khmu noun for "an ear ornament," then we can work out the corresponding verb “to put an ornament in the ear." According to Merrifield et al. (2003), the source of these examples, it is sal. For examples of another type of affix called a “circumfix,” see Task G, on page 70. ### Multiple Processes Although we have concentrated on each of these word-formation processes in isolation, it is possible to trace the operation of more than one process at work in the creation of a particular word. For example, the term deli seems to have become a common American English expression via a process of first borrowing delicatessen (from German) and then clipping that borrowed form. If someone says that problems with the project have snowballed, the final word can be analyzed as an example of compounding in which snow and ball were combined to form the noun snowball, which was then turned into a verb through conversion. Forms that begin as acronyms can also go through other processes, as in the use of lase as a verb, the result of backformation from laser. In the expression waspish attitudes, the acronym WASP ("white Anglo-Saxon Protestant") has lost its capital letters and gained a suffix (-ish) in the derivation process. An acronym that never seems to have had capital letters comes from "young urban professional," plus the -ie suffix, as in hypocorism, to produce the word yuppie (first recorded in 1984). The formation of this new word, however, was helped by a quite different process, known simply as **analogy**, whereby new words are formed that are similar in some way to existing words. Yuppie was made possible as a new word by analogy with the earlier word hippie and another short-lived analogy yippie. The word yippie also had an acronym basis ("youth international party") and was used for some students in the USA who were protesting against the war in Vietnam. One joke has it that yippies just grew up to be yuppies. And the process continues. Another analogy, with the word yap (“to make shrill noises"), helped label some of the noisy young professionals as yappies. Many of these new words can, of course, have a very brief life-span. Perhaps the generally accepted test of the "arrival" of recently formed words in a language is their published appearance in a dictionary. In recent years, we have added app (from "application") and vape (from "vaporizer"), both via clipping, blog (from "web log") and sexting ("sexual texting”) via blending, and unfriend and mint (= “cool”) via conversion. Further examples are included in Task E, on page 69. However, new additions can sometimes lead to protests from some conservative voices, as Noah Webster found when his first dictionary, published in 1806, was criticized for citing words like advocate and test as verbs, and for including such "vulgar" words as advisory and presidential. It would seem that Noah had a keener sense than his critics of which new word forms in the language were going to last. ### Morphology Throughout Chapter 5, we approached the description of processes involved in word formation as if the unit called the "word" was always a regular and easily identifiable form, even when it is a form such as ambimoustrous that we may never have seen before. This new word is based on an established form, ambidextrous ("able to use either hand equally well"), with the middle element, dext(e)r ("right hand"), replaced by mous(e). Clearly this single word has more than one element contributing to its meaning. Yet we don't normally think of a "word” as having internal elements. We tend to think of words as those individual forms marked in black with bigger spaces separating them in written English. In this chapter, we'll investigate ways of taking a closer look inside words. #### Morphology In many languages, what appear to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large number of "word-like” elements. For example, in Swahili (or Kiswahili, spoken throughout East Africa), the form nitakupenda conveys what, in English, would have to be represented as something like I will love you. Now, is the Swahili form a single word? If it is a "word,” then it seems to consist of a number of elements that, in English, turn up as separate "words.” A rough correspondence can be presented here: ni- ta- ku- penda I will you love It would seem that this Swahili "word" is rather different from what we think of as a written English "word.” Yet there clearly is some similarity between the languages, in that similar elements of the whole message can be found in both. Perhaps a better way of looking at linguistic forms in different languages would be to use this notion of “elements” in the message, rather than depend on identifying only “words.” The type of exercise we have just performed is an example of investigating basic forms in language, known as **morphology**. This term, which literally means "the study of forms," was originally used in biology, but is now also used to describe the study of those basic "elements” in a language. What we have been describing as "elements” in the form of a linguistic message are technically known as “morphemes." #### Morphemes We do not actually have to go to other languages such as Swahili to discover that “word forms" may consist of a number of elements. We can recognize that English word forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of one element talk, and the other four elements -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these five elements are described as **morphemes**. The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function." Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural, for example. So, we can take words apart, as shown in Table 6.1 with the verb re-new-ed and the noun tour-ist-s, to reveal the different elements in their morphology. | Minimal units of meaning | Grammatical function | |---|---| | re- ("again") new ("recently made") | -ed (past tense) | | tour ("travel for pleasure") -ist ("person who") | -s (plural) | #### Free and Bound Morphemes Looking at the examples in Table 6.1, we can make a broad distinction between two types of morphemes. There are **free morphemes**, that is, morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, new and tour. There are also **bound morphemes**, which are those forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. These forms were described in Chapter 5 as affixes. So, we can say that all affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in English are bound morphemes. The free morphemes can generally be identified as the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. When they are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known as **stems**. For example: * undressed * un- (bound) * dress (free) * -ed (bound) * carelessness * care (free) * -less (bound) * -ness (bound) We should note that this type of description is a partial simplification of the morphological facts of English. There are a number of English words, typically derived from Latin, in which the element treated as the stem is not a free morpheme. In words such as receive, reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms in English and hence cannot be free morphemes. These types of forms are sometimes described as "bound stems." #### Lexical and Functional Morphemes What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns (girl, house), verbs (break, sit), adjectives (long, sad) and adverbs (never, quickly) that we think of as the words that carry the “content” of the messages we convey. These free forms are called **lexical morphemes**. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an “open” class of words. Other types of free morphemes are called **functional morphemes**. Examples are articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me). Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a "closed" class of words. #### Derivational Morphemes The set of affixes that make up the category of bound morphemes can also be divided into two types. One type is described in Chapter 5 in terms of the derivation of words. These are **derivational morphemes**. We use these bound forms to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme -ment changes the verb encourage to the noun encouragement. The noun class can become the verb classify by the addition of the derivational morpheme -ify. Derivational morphemes can be suffixes like -ment and -ify and also prefixes, such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-. #### Inflectional Morphemes The second set of bound morphemes contains **inflectional morphemes** (or "inflections"). These are not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form. English has only eight inflectional morphemes, all suffixes. * Jim's two sisters are really different. * One likes to have fun and is always laughing. * The other enjoyed school as a child and has always been very serious. * One is the loudest person in the house and the other is quieter than a mouse. In the first sentence, both inflections are attached to nouns, marking possessive (-'s) and plural (-s). There are four inflections attached to verbs: -s (3rd person singular, present tense), -ing (present participle), -ed (past tense) and -en (past participle). Two inflections attach to adjectives: -er (comparative) and -est (superlative). There is some variation in the form of these inflectional morphemes. For example, the possessive sometimes appears as a plural form -s' (those boys' bags) and the past participle is often -ed (they have talked already). Table 6.2 has a summary. | | Nouns | Verbs | Adjectives | |:---|:---|:---|:---| | Derivational | critic-ism, encourage-ment | critic-ize, class-ify, like-s, laugh-ing, enjoy-ed, be-en | critic-al, wonder-ful, quiet-er, loud-est | | Inflectional | Jim-'s, sister-s | | | #### Morphological Description The difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes is worth emphasizing. An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. The -er inflection here (from Old English -ra) simply creates a different version of the adjective. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme -er (from Old English -ere). So, the suffix -er in Modern English can be an inflectional morpheme as part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun. Just because they look the same (-er) doesn't mean they do the same kind of work. Whenever there is a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix used together, they always appear in that order. First the derivational (-er) is attached to teach, then the inflectional (-s) is added to produce teachers. Armed with all these terms for different types of morphemes, we can now take most sentences of English apart and list all the "elements." For example, in the sentence The teacher's wildness shocked the girls' parents, we can identify thirteen morphemes. * The -er -ness * teach -'s wild * -s * shock -ed the girl -s' parent * lexical inflectional functional lexical inflectional lexical inflectional lexical inflectional A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes is presented in Figure 6.1.  #### Morphs, Allomorphs and Special Cases The rather neat chart presented in Figure 6.1 conceals a number of outstanding problems in the analysis of English morphology. The inflectional morpheme -s is added to cat and we get the plural cats. What is the inflectional morpheme that makes sheep the plural of sheep, or men the plural of man? These two words are clearly exceptions to the general pattern and have to be treated as special cases. One way to describe more regular differences in inflectional morphemes is by proposing variation in morphological realization rules. In order to do this, we draw an analogy with processes already noted in phonology (Chapter 4, page 47). Just as we treated phones as the actual phonetic realization of phonemes, so we can propose morphs as the actual forms used to realize morphemes. For example, the form cats consists of two parts, /kæt/ + /-s/, with a lexical morpheme ("cat") and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”). The words dogs and horses also consist of two parts, /dog/ + /-z/ and /hors/ + /-əz/, each consisting of a lexical morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”). So we have at least three forms (/-s/, /-z/ and /-əz/) used to realize the inflectional morpheme "plural." Just as we noted that there were "allophones" of a phoneme, so we can recognize the existence of **allomorphs** of a morpheme, again using the prefix "allo-" (= one of a closely related set). The three allomorphs of the one morpheme ("plural") are shown in Table 6.3. | Morpheme | Allomorphs | |---|---| | plural | /-s/ ("cats") | | | /-z/ ("dogs") | | | /-əz/ (“horses") | Returning to our special cases, we could propose that there may be a “zero-morph” involved when we add the "plural” morpheme to a word like sheep, so that the plural of sheep can be analyzed as /fip/ + /0/, adding another form (//) to the set of allomorphs of "plural." When we add “plural” to /mæn/, we could have a vowel change in the word (æ → ɛ) as the morph that produces the “irregular" plural form men. However, it is more likely that we treat the two forms /mæn/ and /men/ as two distinct lexical morphemes that we learn as separate words. There is a similar pattern in the way "past tense” is realized in English. The inflectional suffix -ed is used in the typical derivation: flirted, hugged and kissed. The irregular forms are like separate lexical morphemes: go/went, be/was/were. See Task C, on page 84, for more on the allomorphs of past tense in English. ### Other Languages When we look at the morphology of other languages, we can find other forms and patterns realizing the basic types of morphemes we have identified. In the following examples, based on Gleason (1955), we can try to work out how different forms in the languages are used to realize morphological processes and features. #### Kanuri This first set of examples is from Kanuri, a language spoken in Nigeria. |