TS 06 Morphology - Lexicology PDF

4 Morphology Introduction to English Linguistics – Schleburg 4 Lexical Morphology 2. Compounding Compounding is widespread in the world’s languages: German: Haut-Mikrobiom-freundlich, Rotkehlchen, Zebrastreifen French: san...

4 Morphology Introduction to English Linguistics – Schleburg 4 Lexical Morphology 2. Compounding Compounding is widespread in the world’s languages: German: Haut-Mikrobiom-freundlich, Rotkehlchen, Zebrastreifen French: sans-papier ‘without paper’, i. e. ‘illegal immigrant’ Italian: pesce-spada ‘fish-sword’, i. e. ‘swordfish’ Spanish: lava-platos ‘wash-dishes’, i. e. ‘dish-washer’ Japanese: 漫画 man-ga ‘whimsical-picture’ Some languages use (phonological? morphological?) linking elements in compounding. German forms are difficult to predict in this respect: Schreib-tisch ‘write-desk’ ~ Les-e-saal ‘read--room’ contrastive Tag-es-licht ‘day-’s-light’ (genitive?), Liebe-s-brief ‘love--letter’ Rind-fleisch ‘beef-meat’ ~ Rind-s-leder ‘--hide’ ~ Rind-er-braten ‘--roast’ Czech, Polish: list-o-pad ‘leaf--fall’, i. e. November’ Cf. English speed-o-meter – inspired by the likes of bar-o-meter, therm-o- meter, which are not based on free forms but on Ancient Greek stems: dēmo-kratia ‘people-government’, philo-sophos ‘love-wise’ 4 Lexical Morphology 2. Compounding vs. univerbation Compounding as a productive word-formation pattern must not be confused with unsystematic univerbation of syntactic phrases or clauses: anything, has-been, hereby, jack-o’-lantern, mother-in-law, ne’er-do-well, nevertheless, thereabout German: dort-hin ‘there-to’, jeder-zeit ‘any-time’, trotz-dem ‘despite-that’, Vergiss-mein-nicht ‘forget-me-not’ contrastive French: rendez-vous ‘present-yourself’, i. e. ‘meeting’ Italian: pomo-d-oro ‘apple-of-gold’, i. e. ‘tomato’ Spanish: va-i-vén ‘go-and-come’, i. e. ‘fluctuation’ While compounding works with lexemes at the abstract level of langue, univerbation happens spontaneously at the level of parole: Rattlesnake did not arise from speakers accidentally using the words rattle and snake next to each other thousands of times, but anything does come from the often-repeated phrase any thing. 4 Lexical Morphology Compounding or derivation or neither? Like almost anything in language, the morphological status of an element can change through time: OE cniht ‘boy’ + hād ‘condition’ → cnihthād ‘boyhood’ (compounding) diachronic ModE analysis: knight + -hood (suffixation) Hood is no longer used indedepently (cf. German -heit). OE freo ‘free’ + dōm ‘judgment, right’ → freodōm (compounding) ModE analysis: free + -dom (suffixation) Unstressed is no longer either formally or semantically associated with the noun doom ‘destruction’. OE hlāf ‘loaf’ + weărd ‘guardian’ → hlāfweărd ‘master’ (compounding) ModE analysis: lord (one morpheme) Sound change has obscured the original structure: > > > 4 Lexical Morphology 3. Conversion (zero derivation) noun → verb: to bottle, to father, to mushroom verb → noun: a call, a cover, a guess adjective → verb: to better, to clean, to empty adjective → noun: a daily, a gay, a regular; the poor (restricted) particle → verb: to up, to down, but me no buts! Conversion is extremely productive in Modern English and much easier than in languages like German, Italian or Russian because … … word-class membership and the resulting grammatical categories are no longer marked by morphology: OE lufu ‘love’ (noun), genitive lufe … OE lufian ‘love’ (verb), present iċ lufie, þū lufast, hē lufað, wē lufiað … diachronic ModE love (noun), love (verb), present I love, you love, he loves, we love … 4 Lexical Morphology 3. Conversion (zero derivation) As a consequence, practically any form is compatible with any of the open wordclasses, even overriding familiar morphological patterns: English verbs can sound like experiment, function, transition, vacation, witness, worship … Shakespeare uses famous and happy, kingdom and necessity as verbs. The sound sequence can represent … a noun: a round of ammunition was fired an adjective: representatives of all parties sat down at a round table a verb: the driver was trying to round the corner an adverb: the ideas went round and round in her head a preposition: this picture went round the world 4 Lexical Morphology 3. Conversion (zero derivation) By the process called coinage (eponymy) the name of an individual person, place or brand is converted into a ›normal‹ lexeme: Boycott → boycott → to boycott Lynch → to lynch Sandwich → sandwich → to sandwich Google → to google Hoover → hoover → to hoover Xerox → to xerox Like any instance of conversion, coinages can only be synchronically diagnosed as such if speakers know (at least intuitively) which was the original use of the form. 4 Lexical Morphology Non-morphemic patterns of word-formation In expanding the vocabulary, speakers of English sometimes misinterpret or blatantly disregard the morphemic structure of existing words and operate with meaningless syllables, sounds or, yes, even letters. The results of that kind of creativity are much less predictable and more open to subjective preferences of the sort ›sounds good‹. Though some of the results eventually catch on and become ›normal‹ words, on the whole non-morphemic word-formation is much rarer than any of the morphemic processes and tends to be associated with certain stylistic levels or semantic domains. 4 Lexical Morphology cf. smoke → smoker 4. Backformation base → derivation ›Reversal‹ of what speakers assume was an earlier process of derivation: to baby-sit ← baby-sitter burgle ← burglar to chain-smoke ← chain-smoker to edit ← editor Backformation creates a new word by ›restoring‹ a ›base‹ that actually never before existed: Historically accurate structure: + + Synchronically assumed structure: + + + ›Restored base‹: burgle chain-smoke After a while speakers cannot be expected to know which word was formed first, so backformation is difficult to diagnose and intrinsically problematic within a purely synchronic framework. 4 Lexical Morphology 5. Clipping Cutting away sounds or letters (!) at the beginning or the end, or both, of a longer word: ad, app, bike, exam, gym, lab, nuke, phone, hi-fi bus, plane flu, fridge Clippings can be phonologically modified, so they are not necessarily pronounced like any part of the original word: → → Clipping does not respect the morpheme boundaries of the original word, but the result becomes a morpheme in its own right. Semantically, the clipped form usually starts out as a less formal equivalent of the complete word (nuke ~ nuclear weapon) but can eventually replace it and become a neutral term (burger, pram, pub). 5 Lexical Morphology Iconicity: (a certain degree of) similarity between 6. Blending form and meaning Playful fusion of two words, usually combining the first sounds of one word with the last sounds of the other (preferably with some overlap): brunch, Chinglish, guestimate, kidult, mockumentary, smog, webliography Semantically, blends often mean ‘a mixture of …’ or ‘something between …’ but they can also stand in for normal compounds: Chunnel ← Channel Tunnel Splinters extracted from popular blends can become highly productive morphemes: (work + alcoholic →) workaholic → foodaholic, pizzaholic, sugarholic … (British + exit →) Brexit → Grexit, Nexit … → Bremain, Brentry … 4 Lexical Morphology 7. Acronymy Abbreviation pronounced as a word: AIDS, asap, laser, NATO, ROM, snafu CARE ← Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe PEN ← Poets Playwrights Editors Essayists and Novelists captcha ← completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart Acronymy varies in the way the words of the original phrase are represented in the outcome. ETA 8. Alphabetism Abbreviation pronounced letter by letter: CIA, FBI, OED, UN, USA, WWW 4 Lexical Morphology 9. Word-manufacture The invention of a new word without any basis in existing vocabulary: Kodak, Exxon, quark Even word-manufacture is not entirely free. It may use fancy spelling, but it has to follow basic phonotactic rules to be pronounceable. Speakers’ perception will be influenced by associations and sound-symbolism: : glare, gleam, glimmer, glisten, glitter, glitz, gloss, glow … : slack, slattern, sleek, slime, sloth, slouch, slow, slug, slump, slur … German : Knäuel, Knebel, Knödel, Knopf, Knoten, Knüppel … 5 Lexicology Introduction to English Linguistics – Schleburg 5 Lexicology The size of the English vocabulary Oxford English Dictionary: 600,000+ entries ›Defining vocabulary‹ of advanced learners’ dictionaries: 2000 – 3000 words Shakespeare’s corpus: 29,000 different words headwords »[A]n average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%.« [dx.doi.org/10.3389%2Ffpsyg.2016.01116] »Average absolute vocabulary sizes [in German] ranged from 5900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults« [doi.org/10.1177%2F0265532216641152] Problems of definition: What counts as a word? What counts as ›knowing a word‹?