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English Words
‘The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway. A life without words would be a horrendous privation.’ (from the Introduction) Words and language, keys to human identity, are fascinating subjects. The aim of this book is to arouse curiosity about English words and about the nature of language in general, especially among students who are not intending to specialise in linguistics. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the structure of words, the meaning of words, how their spelling relates to pronunciation, how new words are manufactured or imported from other languages, and how the meaning of words changes with the passage of time. It also investigates how the mind deals with words by highlighting the amazing intellectual feat performed routinely when the right word is retrieved from the mental dictionary during conversation. Words of all sorts are examined—from great poetry, nonsense verse and journalism to advertising. It is demonstrated that in their very different ways they are all worthy of serious study. This textbook is an accessible descriptive introduction, suitable for students of English language and communication, showing how the nature of words can be illuminated by insights from a broad range of areas of linguistics and related subjects. Francis Katamba is Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University. His publications include Morphology (1993) and Introduction to Phonology (1989).
English Words Francis Katamba
London and New York
First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Francis Katamba All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Katamba, Francis English words/Francis Katamba p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. English language—Lexicology. I. Title PE1571.K38 1994 423 .028–dc20 93–33393 ISBN 0-203-20528-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-20531-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-10467-X (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10468-8 (pbk)
To Janet, Francis and Helen
Contents
Preface
1
x
Acknowledgements
xii
Abbreviations
xiv
Key to symbols used
xvi
Introduction
1
1.1
Why study words?
1
1.2
Overview of coming chapters
4
What is a word?
6
2.1
Introduction
6
2.2
Words are like liquorice allsorts
7
2
2.2.1
Word-forms
2.2.2
Words as vocabulary items
11
2.2.3
Grammatical words
15
2.3
7
Summary
17
Exercises
18
Close encounters of a morphemic kind
19
3.1
The quest for verbal atoms
19
3.2
Close morphological encounters: zooming in on morphemes
19
3.3
Morphemes and their disguises
22
3.3.1
Allomorphs: morph families
22
3.3.2
Contrast
25
3
3.4
Freedom and bondage
26
3.5
Sound symbolism: phonaesthemes and onomatopoeia
27
3.6
Verbal blueprints
28
vi
3.6.1
Tiny words (isolating languages)
30
3.6.2
Get the glue (agglutinating languages)
31
3.6.3
Labyrinthine words (synthetic languages)
31
3.6.4
Verbal juggernauts (polysynthetic languages)
33
3.6.5
No thoroughbreds
33
3.7
Summary
35
Exercises
35
Building words
37
4.1
Words and jigsaws
37
4.2
Know the pieces of the jigsaw
37
4
4.2.1
Roots are the core
37
4.2.2
Affixes are for appending
38
4.3
The main types of word-building: inflection and derivation
40
4.4
Derivation: fabricating words
41
4.4.1
Affixation: prefixes and suffixes
42
4.4.2
Conversion
48
4.4.3
Compound parade
49
4.4.4
Wishy-washy words
54
4.5
Summary
55
Exercises
55
Masquerading allomorphs
57
5.1
The right mask
57
5.2
Phonologically conditioned allomorphs
57
5.2.1
Selecting underlying representations
61
5.2.2
Derivations
63
5
5.3
Phonology in the shade: lexical and grammatical conditioning
65
5.4
Madness without method: suppletion
66
5.5
Summary
66
Exercises
66
A lexicon with layers
69
6
vii
6.1
The nature of the lexicon
69
6.2
Morphological information in the lexicon
70
6.3
Syntactic information in the lexicon
70
6.4
Does it ring true (phonological information)
71
6.5
Rendezvous with lexical phonology and morphology
71
6.5.1
Neutral and non-neutral affixes
72
6.5.2
The lexicon is like a layered cake
73
6.6
Productivity, the time-warp and cranberries
77
6.7
Peeping beyond the lexicon
79
6.8
Summary
80
Exercises
80
Should English be spelt as she is spoke?
83
7.1
Writing systems
83
7.2
Is the English orthography mad?
84
7
7.2.1
The apparent madness in the English spelling system
85
7.2.2
There is a method in the madness: spelling rules and pronunciation
86
7.2.3
Is A for apple? Why vowel letters pinch like ill-fitting shoes
90
7.3
Morphological signposts in the spelling
94
7.4
Lexical signposting in the spelling
96
7.5
Spelling reform
96
7.6
Is speech degenerate writing?
99
Exercises
101
Word manufacture
103
8.1
The production line
103
8.2
Keeping tabs on idioms
106
8.3
Clitics
108
8.4
Summary
111
Exercises
111
Words galore
113
A verbal bonanza
113
8
9 9.1
viii
9.2
Jargon
113
9.3
Slang
114
9.4
Clichés and catch-phrases
115
9.5
A rose by any other name
119
9.5.1
Semantic widening
120
9.5.2
Semantic narrowing
121
9.5.3
Going up and down in the world
122
9.5.4
Loss account
122
9.5.5
Lexical revivals
124
9.5.6
Metaphors
124
9.6
Clipping
124
9.7
Acronyms and abbreviations
126
9.8
Fads and copycat formations
127
9.9
Back-formation
128
9.10
Blends
128
9.11
Euphemism
129
9.12
Summary
131
Exercises
131
A lexical mosaic: sources of English vocabulary
133
The nature of borrowing
133
10 10.1 10.1.1
Direct and indirect borrowing
133
10.1.2
Loanwords and loanshifts
134
10.1.3
Likely loans
135
10.1.4
Why borrow?
135
10.1.5
The grass is ever greener on the other side
138
10.1.6
Nativisation of loanwords
139
10.1.7
Effects of borrowing
142
10.2
Scandinavian loanwords
143
10.3
The French influence
144
10.3.1
The Norman French legacy
144
ix
10.3.2
French words in modern English
146
10.4
Words from other modern European languages
150
10.5
Loanwords from non-European languages
151
10.6
The Germanic inheritance
152
10.7
Summary
154
Exercises
154
11
The mental lexicon
157
11.1
A mind full of words
157
11.1.1
Types of lexical information
158
11.1.2
The organisation of the mental lexicon
160
11.1.3
To parse or not to parse
161
11.2
Modelling the mental lexicon
164
11.2.1
Understanding speech
164
11.2.2
Selective listening
166
11.2.3
Exploiting syntactic and semantic clues
167
11.3
The articulatory programme
169
11.3.1
Speech errors as evidence in favour of the articulatory programme
169
11.3.2
Two-stage models of lexical access in speech production
171
11.3.3
It’s just on the tip of my tongue
174
11.3.4
Malapropisms
175
11.4
Aphasia
176
11.4.1
Broca’s aphasia
176
11.4.2
Wernicke’s aphasia
177
11.5
Freudian slips
178
11.6
The spreading activation model
179
11.7
Summary
180
Exercises
181
Glossary
183
References
190
Indexes
195
Preface
This book developed out of a course on English words that I have taught at Lancaster over the last few years. It is intended to arouse curiosity about English words and about language in general, especially among students who are not intending to specialise in linguistics. Is it not strange that we spend so many of our waking hours talking and yet we know so little about words? Putting words under a microscope and peering at them seems to be a dead boring and absolutely unrewarding subject. Most people know more about sport, cars, computers, gardening, virtually about anything than they know about words. If you are one of them, then read on. This book was written for you. It is intended to disabuse you of the false impression that investigating words is tedious, dry and totally unenjoyable. English Words takes you on a voyage of discovery during which you find out how words are structured, how they convey meaning, how their spelling relates to pronunciation, how new words are manufactured, how the meaning of words changes as time passes and how words are imported from other languages. Finally, in the concluding chapter we marvel at the ability you and I have to store tens of thousands of words in our minds and to retrieve the right words instantaneously in conversation. All this is exciting stuff. Traditionally, the student is not offered a single course or course-book that covers all the various topics that I have listed above. My aim in departing from normal practice by covering such a wide range of topics in one book is to provide a synthesis of what linguists and students of neighbouring disciplines such as psychology have found out about words. So, this book gives a panoramic view of words in the English language. I think there is some virtue in making sure that students do not concentrate so hard on seeing the trees that they miss the forest. Another feature of the book is that it is primarily a descriptive study of words in the English language. It is only very occasionally that the structure of words in other languages is discussed. No previous knowledge of linguistics is assumed. I keep linguistic theory and jargon mostly in the background and focus on the description. Studying the contents of this book will not turn you into a morphologist, but it will teach you a lot of things about English. Your involvement in learning about English words is important. You will not be invited to watch all the interesting things about words from a distance as a mere spectator. Plenty of examples and exercises are provided for you to do some of the investigations yourself. It is my pleasure to thank many people who have helped me in various ways during the preparation of this book. First, I acknowledge the help of my family. The writing and preparation of the book would have been an even more arduous task without their constant support and active help in hunting for examples and illustrations.
xi
I am also grateful to various other people whose comments, advice and support have been very useful. I thank Claire L’Enfant, Senior Editor at Routledge, who started it all when she invited me to undertake this project and would not take no for an answer. In addition, I would like to thank the editorial and design staff at Routledge, in particular Beth Humphries and Emma Cotter for their advice and help in the preparation of this book. Next, I would like to thank in a special way first-year undergraduates on Course LING 152: English Words at Lancaster over the last couple of years who have been such co-operative, critical and really excellent guinea pigs. I am also grateful to a number of colleagues and friends. I thank Jenny Thomas, Mick Short and Keith Brown, who commented on part of an early draft. And I thank Ton That Ai Quang from whom I received the Vietnamese data. Finally, above all, I am indebted to Dick Hudson and an anonymous American reader who went through the entire manuscript thoroughly and provided numerous useful comments and suggestions on matters of substance and presentation. The book is much better in every way than it would otherwise have been without their assistance. Any imperfections that still remain are my responsibility. Francis Katamba Lancaster, 1993
Acknowledgements
‘Appellation controlée’. In 40 Ans de politiques. Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Paris: Flammarion. Auden, W.H. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. In W.H.Auden (1968) Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. London: Faber. Bliss, A.J. (1966) Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burns, R. (1786) ‘Address to the devil’ in W.Beattie and H.W.Meikle (eds) Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carroll. L. (1982) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. First published in 1865 and 1872 respectively. Illustration of Humpty Dumpty (from p. 270) and the quotation (from p. 274). Chaucer, G. (1964) The Canterbury Tales, edited by A.Hieatt and C.Hieatt. New York: Bantam Books. Chirol, L. (1973) Les ‘mots français’ et le mythe de la France en anglais contemporain. Paris: Editions Klincksieck. Cole, W. and U. and Ungerer, T. (1978) Oh, What Nonsense! A Collection of Nonsense Verse. London: Methuen. Crystal, D. (1987) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahl, R. (1982) The BFG. Harmondsworth: Puffin Books. BGF text and cartoon. Eliot, T.S. (1963) Collected Poems (1963). London: Faber & Faber. ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (1954). English children’s rhyme ‘Beg parding’ in W.Cole (1968) Oh, What Nonsense, London: Methuen, p. 85. Fantoni, B. (1984) Private Eye’s Colemanballs 2. London: Private Eye/André Deutsch. Gairdner, J. (ed.) (1983) The Paston Letters. Gloucester: Alan Sutton. Vol. 2, pp. 46–8. Gleason, H.A. (1961) An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 2nd edition, p. 414. Hopkins, G.M. (1970) ‘Spring and Fall’ in W.H.Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie, The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 5. Kwik Fit advert in Lancaster Citizen Newspaper 24 June 1993. Lawrence, D.H. (1960) ‘Love among the Haystacks’ (1930) in Love among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 13; London: Methuen, p. 85. Milligan, S. ‘Questions, Quistions & Questions’ in W.Cole (1972) Oh, That’s Ridiculous. London: Methuen, pp. 16–17. Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era (1888) ‘Humble Pie’ (1872). London: Bradbury, Agnew.
xiii
Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era (1888) ‘Chef Sauce’ (1872). London: Bradbury, Agnew. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1980) A Nursery Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Philips, M. ‘Another day, another scandal’. The Guardian, 16 January 1993, p. 24. Sampson, G. (1985) Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. London: Hutchinson, p. 195, Figure 31. Shakespeare, W. The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quotations from: Henry V, IV, iii. Romeo and Juliet, II, ii. Sonnet 69. The Tempest, Epilogue. Sheridan, R.B. The Rivals in C.Price (ed.) (1975) Sheridan Plays. London: Oxford University Press. I, ii. Standens advert. What Hi-Fi, June 1993, p. 138. Reproduced by courtesy of Standens (Tonbridge) Limited. Vidal, J. ‘The big chill’. An extract from The Guardian, 19 November 1992. Winchester, S. (1993) The Guardian (Saturday magazine), 12 June, p. 27. Young, J. and Young, P. (1981) The Ladybird Book of Jokes, Riddles and Rhymes. Loughborough: Ladybird Books, pp. 40, 57. Yves St. Laurent advertisement. The Guardian (Saturday magazine), 30 June 1992.
Abbreviations
Adj. Adv. Af. Ag. BVS Class. Det. FLH Fr. habit. indic. Instr. ME N NP Obj. OE OED ON 3p. P part. Pat. Pl./pl. PP Pres. RP S
Adjective Adverb Affix Agent Basic verbal suffix which is normally -a Classifer Determiner Full Listing Hypothesis French Habitual Indicative mood Instrumental case Middle English Noun Noun Phrase Object Old English Oxford English Dictionary Old Norse 3rd person singular Pronoun Participial mood Patient Plural Prepositional phrase Present Received Pronunciation Sentence
xv
1s. Sing./sg. Subj. V Ven Ving VP WP
1st person singular Singular Subject Verb Verb ending in -en (past participle) Verb ending in -ing (present participle) Verb phrase Word-and-paradigm
Key to symbols used
1. SYMBOLS FOR PHONEMES A key word for each phoneme is given, first in ordinary spelling and then in phonemic transcription. The phonemic transcription represents the pronunciation in British Received Pronunciation. Vowels I e æ
U e eI aI I Ie/ ee e Ue
sit set sat mud dog good sender above eight pie toil beer bare bore boor
/sIt/ /set/ /sæt/ /m d/ /dg/ /gUd/ /sende/ /eb v/ /eIt/ /paI/ /tIl/ /bIe/ /bee/ /be/ /bUe/
i: : : u: :
seed bar saw zoo fur
/si:d/ /ba:r/ /s /zu:/ /f :/
eU aU
low town
/leU/ /taUn/
Consonants p b t
pan ban tan
/pæn/ /bæn/ /tæn/
f V
fan van thin
/fæn/ /væn/ / In/
xvii
d k g
did kit get
/dId/ /kIt/ /get/
t d m n
chest jest mail nail long leap rip yes win
/t est/ /dest/ /meIl/ /neIl/ /l / /li:p/ /rIp/ /jes/ /wIn/
l r j w
s z
h
then seal zeal ship measure hop
2. NON-PHONEMIC SYMBOLS Glottal stop as in water/w:e/ as said in accents where between vowels the t ‘can be swallowed’. Dark 1. Clear 1. (Under a consonant) syllabic consonant as in kettle [ket].
3. OTHER SYMBOLS
· < > ` ' * // [] ~ ()
The symbol over a vowel indicates that it is a long vowel. A raised dot indicates that the preceding vowel is stressed (in examples from OED). Is derived from. Becomes, develops into. Marks main stress on the following syllable. Secondary stress. An asterisk shows that a given form is disallowed. Slashes indicate a broad or phonemic transcription which only shows phonemes. Square brackets indicate a narrow (i.e. detailed) transcription that shows allophones. This indicates that forms alternate. Rewrite as; or becomes (depending on context). Optional items are put in parenthesis.
/en/ /si:l/ /zi:l/ / ip/ /mee/ /hp/
xviii
4. SMALL CAPITALS Small capitals are used for technical terms when first introduced and occasionally thereafter to highlight their technical sense.
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 WHY STUDY WORDS? Imagine a life without words! Trappist monks opt for it. But most of us would not give up words for anything. Every day we utter thousands and thousands of words. Communicating our joys, fears, opinions, fantasies, wishes, requests, demands, feelings—and the occasional threat or insult—is a very important aspect of being human. The air is always thick with our verbal emissions. There are so many things we want to tell the world. Some of them are important, some of them are not. But we talk anyway—even when we know that what we are saying is totally unimportant. We love chitchat and find silent encounters awkward, or even oppressive. A life without words would be a horrendous privation. It is a cliché to say that words and language are probably humankind’s most valuable single possession. It is language that sets us apart from our biologically close relatives, the great primates. (I would imagine that many a chimp or gorilla would give an arm and a leg for a few words—but we will probably never know because they cannot tell us.) Yet, surprisingly, most of us take words (and more generally language) for granted. We cannot discuss words with anything like the competence with which we can discuss fashion, films or football. We should not take words for granted. They are too important. This book is intended to make explicit some of the things that we know subconsciously about words. It is a linguistic introduction to the nature and structure of English words. It addresses the question ‘what sorts of things do people need to know about English words in order to use them in speech?’ It is intended to increase the degree of sophistication with which you think about words. It is designed to give you a theoretical grasp of English word-formation, the sources of English vocabulary and the way in which we store and retrieve words from the mind. I hope a desirable side effect of working through English Words will be the enrichment of your vocabulary. This book will help to increase, in a very practical way, your awareness of the relationship between words. You will be equipped with the tools you need to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words and to see in a new light the underlying structural patterns in many familiar words which you have not previously stopped to think about analytically. For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general. Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they impinge on every aspect of language structure. This book stresses the ramifications of the fact that words are complex and multi-faceted entities whose structure and use interacts with the other modules of the grammar
2
ENGLISH WORDS
such as PHONOLOGY, the study of how sounds are used to represent words in speech, SYNTAX, the study of sentence structure, and SEMANTICS, the study of meaning in language. In order to use even a very simple word, such as frog, we need to access various types of information from the word-store which we all carry around with us in the MENTAL LEXICON or DICTIONARY that is tucked away in the mind. We need to know: [1.1] (i)
its shape, i.e. its PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION/frg/ which enables us to pronounce it, and its ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION frog, if we are literate and know how to spell it (see the Key to symbols used on page xix); (ii) its grammatical properties, e.g. it is a noun and it is countable—so you can have one frog and two frogs; (iii) its meaning.
But words tend not to wear their meaning on their sleeve. Normally, there is nothing about the form of words that would enable anyone to work out their meaning. Thus, the fact that frog refers to one of these simply has to be listed in the lexicon and committed to memory by brute force. For the relationship between a LINGUISTIC SIGN like this word and its meaning is ARBITRARY. Other languages use different words to refer to this small tailless amphibian. In French it is called (la) grenouille. In Malay they call it katak and in Swahili chura. None of these words is more suited than the others to the job of referring to this small reptile. And of course, within a particular language, any particular pronunciation can be associated with any meaning. So long as speakers accept that sound-meaning association, they have a kosher word. For instance, convenience originally meant ‘suitability’ or ‘commodiousness’ but in the middle of the nineteenth century a new meaning of ‘toilet’ was assigned to it and people began to talk of ‘a public convenience’. In the early 1960s the word acquired the additional new meaning of ‘easy to use, designed for hassle-free use’ as in convenience food. We are the masters. Words are our servants. We can make them mean whatever we want them to mean. Humpty Dumpty had all this worked out. The only thing missing from his analysis is the social dimension. Any arbitrary meaning assigned to a word needs to be accepted by the speech community which uses the language. Obviously, language would not be much use as a means of communication if each individual language user assigned a private meaning to each word which other users of the language did not recognise. Apart from that, it is instructive to listen in on the lesson on the nature of language that Humpty Dumpty gave to Alice (see overleaf). Let us now consider one further example. All competent speakers of English know that you can add -s to a noun to indicate that it refers to more than one entity. So, you say cat when referring to one and cats if there is more than one. If you encountered in the blank in [1.2a] an unfamiliar word like splet (which I have just made up), you would automatically know from the context that it must have the plural form splets in this position since it is specified as plural by all. Further, you would know that the plural of splet must be splets (rather than spletren by analogy to children or spleti by analogy to stimuli). You know that the majority of nouns form their plural by adding the regular plural suffix or ending -s. You always add -s unless express instructions are given to do otherwise. There is no need to memorise separately the plural form of most nouns. All we need is to know the rule that says ‘add -s for plural’. So, without any hesitation, you suffix -s to obtain the plural form splets in [1.2b]:
INTRODUCTION
3
[1.2] a. b.
We put all the big______on the table. We put all the big splets on the table.
The study of word-formation and word-structure is called MORPHOLOGY. Morphological theory provides a general theory of word-structure in all the languages of the world. Its task is to characterise the kinds of things that speakers need to know about the structure of the words of their language in order to be able to use them to produce and to understand speech. We will see that in order to use language, speakers need to have two types of morphological knowledge. First, they need to be able to analyse existing words (e.g. they must be able to tell that frogs contains frog plus -s for plural). Usually, if we know the meanings of the elements that a word contains, it is possible to determine the meaning of the entire word once we have worked out how the various elements relate to each other. For instance, if we examine a word like nutcracker we find that it is made up of two words, namely the noun nut and the noun cracker. Furthermore, we see that the latter word, cracker is divisible into the verb crack and another meaningful element -er (roughly meaning ‘an instrument used to do X’), which, however, is not a word in its own right. Numerous other words are formed using this pattern of combining words (and smaller meaningful elements) as seen in [1.3]: [1.3] [tea]Noun—[strain-er]]Noun [lawn]Noun—[mow-er]]Noun [can]Noun—[open-er]]Noun
Given the frame [[______]Noun—[______er]] Noun, we can fill in different words with the appropriate properties and get another compound word (i.e. a word containing at least two words). Try this frame out yourself. Find two more similar examples of compound words formed using this pattern. Second, speakers need to be able to work out the meanings of novel words constructed using the wordbuilding elements and standard word-construction rules of the language. Probably we all know and use more words than are listed in dictionaries. We can construct and analyse the structure and meaning of old words as well as new ones. So, although many words must be listed in the dictionary and memorised, listing every word in the dictionary is not necessary. If a word is formed following general principles, it may be more efficient to reconstitute it from its constituent elements as the need arises rather than permanently commit it to memory. When people make up new words using existing words and wordforming elements, we understand them with ease—providing we know what the elements they use to form those words mean and providing the word-forming rules that they employ are familiar. This ability is one of the things explored in morphological investigations. In an average week, we are likely to encounter a couple of unfamiliar words. We might reach for a dictionary and look them up. Some of them may be listed but others might be too new or too ephemeral to have found their way into any dictionary. In such an event, we rely on our morphological knowledge to tease out their meanings. If you heard someone describe their partner as ‘a great list maker and a ticker-off’, you would instantly know what sort of person the partner was—although you almost certainly have never encountered the word ticker-off before. And it is certainly not listed in any dictionary. The -er ending here has
4
ENGLISH WORDS
the meaning of ‘someone who does whatever the verb means’. Given the verb tickoff, a ticker-off must be a person who ticks off. Similarly, if you know what established words like handful, cupful and spoonful mean, you are also able to figure out the meanings of novel words like fountain-penful (as in a fountain-penful of ink) or hovercraftful (as in hovercraftful after hovercraftful of English shoppers returned from Calais loaded down with cigarettes, cheese and plonk). Virtually any noun denoting a container can have -ful added to it in order to indicate that it is ‘full of something’. To take another example, a number of words ending in -ist, many of which have come into use in recent years, refer to people who discriminate against, or hold negative views about, certain less powerful subgroups in society, e.g. racist, sexist. Anyone who knows what racist and sexist mean, given the right context should have no difficulty in understanding the nature of discrimination perpetrated by people who are described using the novel words ageist, sizist and speechist. Ageism is discrimination on grounds of (old) age —for instance, denying employment to people over the age of 60; sizism is discrimination (usually against fat people) on grounds of size and speechism is discrimination against people with speech impediments like stuttering. Did you notice how I exploited your tacit knowledge of the fact that words ending in -ist and -ism complement each other? You were glad to accept ageism, sizism and speechism because you know that corresponding to an adjective ending in -ist there will normally be a noun ending in -ism. This is important. It shows that you know that certain word-forming bits go together—and others do not. I suspect that you would reject putative words like *agement, *sizement and *speechment. (An asterisk is used conventionally to indicate that a form is disallowed.) In word-formation it is not a case of anything goes. A challenging question which morphology addresses is, ‘how do speakers know which non-occurring or non-established words are permissible and which ones are not?’ Why are the words fountainpenful, hovercraftful and speechist allowed while *agement, *speechment and *sizement are not? Morphological theory provides a general theory of wordformation applicable to any language but, as mentioned earlier, this book focuses on word-formation in English. Its objective is to provide a description of English words designed to make explicit the various things speakers know, albeit in an unconscious manner, about English words. The emphasis will be on the description of English words rather than the elaboration of morphological theory. So, data and facts about English words are brought to the fore and the theoretical and methodological issues are kept in the background for the most part. The use of formal notation has also been kept to a minimum in order to keep the account simple. 1.2 OVERVIEW OF COMING CHAPTERS At the very outset we need to establish the nature of the subject we are going to be examining. So, Chapter 2 discusses the nature of words. Then the next three chapters delve deep inside words and investigate their internal structure. In the process, traditional morphological concepts of structural linguistics are introduced and extensively exemplified. Morphology is not a stand-alone module. After the introductory chapters, in Chapter 6 you are introduced to a theory where morphology is an integral part of the LEXICON or DICTIONARY. This chapter focuses on the interaction of phonology and morphology in word-formation. Chapter 7 explores the relationship between words in speech and in writing. What is the relationship between saying words and writing them down? Is writing simply a mirror of speech—and an apparently distorting one in the case of English?
INTRODUCTION
5
The following chapter continues the discussion of the role of the lexicon. It attempts to answer questions like ‘what is the lexicon for?’ ‘What items need to be listed in the dictionary?’ ‘What is the difference between idioms (like to nail one’s colours to the mast) and syntactic phrases (like to nail a notice to the door)?’ The next two chapters highlight the fact that the English word-store is vast and infinitely expandable. First, in Chapter 9 we consider the ways in which, using the internal resources of the language, speakers are able to produce an indefinitely large number of words. In Chapter 10 attention shifts to the expansion of English vocabulary through the importation of countless words from other languages. The story of imported words is in many ways also the story of the contacts that speakers of English have had with speakers of other languages over the centuries. Most of the space in this book is devoted to an examination of the structure of English words. But the analysis of word-structure is seen not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an end. And that end is to understand what it means to know a word. What sorts of information about words do you need to have in order to use them in communication? So the final chapter is devoted to the MENTAL LEXICON. It addresses the question, ‘how is it that people are able to store a vast number of words in the mind and to retrieve the right one so fast in communication?’ We will see that words are not piled in a muddle in the mind. Rather, the mental lexicon is very highly organised. This concluding chapter will also pull together the various strands developed in the earlier chapters. I have already stressed the point that morphology is not a selfcontained module of language. Any discussion of word-formation touches on other areas of linguistics, notably phonology and syntax, so I have provided a key to the list of pronunciation symbols at the beginning of the book. I have also included at the end a glossary of linguistic terms (many of them from other branches of linguistics) which might be unfamiliar. But still I may have missed out some terms. If you encounter any unfamiliar technical terms that are not explained in this book, I suggest that you consult a good dictionary of linguistics like Crystal (1991). Sometimes it is useful to present data using phonetic notation. A key to the phonetic symbols used is to be found on pp. xix–xx. After this introductory chapter, all chapters contain exercises. Several of the analytical exercises require you to look up words and parts of words in a good dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary. Access to such a dictionary is essential when you study this book. This is a practical way of learning about the structure of English words (and may also be a useful way of enriching your vocabulary).
Chapter 2 What is a word?
2.1 INTRODUCTION Often we find it very difficult to give a clear and systematic account of everyday things, ideas, actions and events that surround us. We just take them for granted. We rarely need to state in an accurate and articulate manner what they are really like. For instance, we all know what a game is. Yet, as the philosopher Wittgenstein showed, we find it very difficult to state explicitly what the simple word game means. The same is true of the term word. We use words all the time. We intuitively know what the words in our language are. Nevertheless most of us would be hard pushed to explain to anyone what kind of object a word is. If a couple of Martian explorers (with a rudimentary understanding of English) came off their space-ship and stopped you in the street to enquire what earthlings meant by the term WORD what would you tell them? I suspect you might be somewhat vague and evasive. Although you know very well what words are, you might find it difficult to express explicitly and succinctly what it is that you know about them. The purpose of this chapter is to try to find an answer to the question: what is a word? It is not only Martian explorers curious about the way earthlings live who might want to know what words are. We too have an interest in understanding words because they play such an important role in our lives. As we saw in the last chapter, it is impossible to imagine human society without language. And equally, it is impossible to imagine a human language that has no words of any kind. It is impossible to understand the nature of language without gaining some understanding of the nature of words. So, in this chapter we will clarify what we mean when we use the term ‘word’. This clarification is essential if our investigations are to make any headway for, as you will see presently, we mean quite a few very different things when we talk of words. A standard definition of the word is found in a paper written in 1926 by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, one of the greatest linguists of the twentieth century. According to Bloomfield, ‘a minimum free form is a word’. By this he meant that the word is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used on its own. It is a form that cannot be divided into any smaller units that can be used independently to convey meaning. For example child is a word. We cannot divide it up into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand alone. Contrast this with the word childish which can be analysed into child- and -ish. While the child bit of childish is meaningful when used on its own (and hence is a word), the same is not true of -ish. Although according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) -ish means something like ‘having the (objectionable) qualities of’ (as in mannish, womanish, devilish, sheepish, apish etc.), there is no way we can use it on its
ENGLISH WORDS
7
own. If some shouted to you in the street, ‘Hey, are you -ish?’ you might smile bemusedly and think to yourself, ‘Isn’t he weird!’ In the next chapter we will take up the question of what to do with pieces of words that cannot be used meaningfully on their own. But for the moment we will focus exclusively on words. 2.2 WORDS ARE LIKE LIQUORICE ALLSORTS When we talk of words we do not always mean exactly the same thing. Like liquorice allsorts, words come in all sorts of varieties. We will start our discussions by distinguishing the different senses in which we use the term ‘word’. 2.2.1 Word-forms Let us use the term WORD-FORM to describe the physical form which realises or represents a word in speech or writing. Consider the words in the following extract from T.S.Eliot’s poem: [2.1] Half-past one, The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered, The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin… (‘Rhapsody on a windy night’ in Eliot 1963)
In written English, words are easy to recognise. They are preceded by a space and followed by a space. Using this criterion, we can say that there are thirty-one words (i.e. word-forms) in the extract from ‘Rhapsody’. We will call word-forms like these which we find in writing ORTHOGRAPHIC WORDS. If you look again at the extract, you might wonder if some of the hyphenated orthographic words are ‘really’ individual words. Many people would hyphenate half-past as Eliot does but not street-lamp. They would write street lamp as two separate words, with a space between them. What would you do? The use of hyphens to indicate that something is a complex word containing more than one word-like unit is variable, largely depending on how transparent the compound nature of a word is. Shakespeare wrote today as to-day and tomorrow as to-morrow: [2.2] a.
To-morrow, Caesar, I shall be furnished to inform you rightly… (Antony and Cleopatra, I, iv)
8
WHAT IS A WORD?
b.
O! that we now had here But ten thousand of those men in England That do not work to-day. (Henry V, IV, iii)
Hyphenating to-day and to-morrow is less common now, probably because most speakers are unaware of the compound nature of these words. Today comes from Old English t dæ ‘to+day’ and tomorrow is from Middle English to mor(e)we (i.e. to (the) morrow) —to- can be traced back ultimately to a form that meant ‘this’ in Indo-European. Note in passing that three major periods are distinguished in the history of the English language: Old English (conventionally abbreviated as OE) was spoken c.450–1100; Middle English (conventionally abbreviated as ME) was spoken c.1100–1500 and Modern English from 1500 to the present. Generally, the use of the hyphen in such words that are no longer seen as compounds is in decline. The hyphen tends to be mostly used in compounds that are regarded as fairly new words. Many well-established words that are transparently compounded, e.g. schoolboy, are normally written without a hyphen. Of course, judgements as to what is an established word vary greatly. There are few firm rules here. For instance, in the OED both seaway and sea-way are shown to be accepted ways of writing the word pronounced as / si:weI/. Similarly, the compilers of the OED show variation in the way they enter both hyphenated first-rate and first rate written as two words separated by a space. Interestingly, hyphenation is also used creatively to indicate that an idea that would normally be expressed by a phrase is being treated as a single word for communicative purposes because it has crystallised in the writer’s mind into a firm, single concept. Thus, for example, the expression simple to serve is normally a phrase, just like easy to control. But it can also be used as a hyphenated word as in simple-to-serve recipe dishes (M&S Magazine 1992:9). Similarly, on page 48 of the same magazine, the writer of an advertising feature uses the phrase fresh from the farm’ as a hyphenated word in ‘fresh-fromthe-farm eggs’. But for creative hyphenation you are unlikely to find anything more striking than this: [2.3] On Pitcairn there is little evidence of the what-we-have-wehold, no-surrender, the Queen’s-picture-in-every-room sort of attitude. Simon Winchester in The Guardian magazine, 12 June 1993: 27; (italics added to highlight the compounds)
What we have established is that as a rule, orthographic words have a space on either side of them. But there are cases where this simple rule of thumb is not followed. There is a degree of flexibility in the way in which words are written down: being, or not being, separated by a space is in itself not a sure sign of word status. Some orthographic words which are uncontroversially written as one unit contain two words within them. They are compound words like firstrate, seaway, wheelbarrow and teapot. Furthermore, there are forms like they’re, hadn’t and I’m which are joined together in writing yet which are not compound words. When you scratch the skin, you see immediately that they’re, hadn’t and I’m are really versions of the pairs of words they are, had not and I am. Our theory needs to say something about awkward customers like these. Since the issues they raise are complex, we will postpone discussion of them until sections (4.3) and (8.3). Finally, there are words which are compounded (and maybe hyphenated as in [2.3]) as a one-off to crystallise a particular meaning.
ENGLISH WORDS
9
So far we have only considered orthographic words, i.e. recognisable physical written word-forms. Obviously, words as physical objects exist not only in writing, but also in speech. We will now briefly turn to word-forms in spoken language. We will refer to them as PHONOLOGICAL WORDS. The challenge of word recognition arises in an even more obvious way when we consider speech. Words are not separated distinctly from each other. We do not leave a pause between words that could be equated to a space in writing. (If we did that, conversation would be painfully slow! Just try speaking to one of your friends today leaving a two-second gap between words. See how they react.) In normal speech words come out in a torrent. They overlap. Just as droplets of water cannot be seen flowing down a river, individual words do not stand out discretely in the flow of conversation. So they are much harder to isolate than words in writing. None the less, we are able to isolate them. If you heard an utterance like: [2.4] The cat slept in your bed. /ekæt slept In : bed/ (Note: ‘`’ shows that the following syllable is stressed; phonemic transcription is written between slant lines.)
you would be able to recognise the six phonological words that have been written in PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION (which shows the PHONEMES, i.e. the sounds that are used to distinguish the meanings of words) although what you hear is one continuous stream of sound. For purely practical reasons, throughout the book, unless otherwise stated, phonemic transcriptions and references to pronunciation will be based on RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP), the prestige accent of standard British English—the variety popularly known as the Queen’s English or BBC English. An intriguing question that linguists and psychologists have tried to answer is: how do people recognise words in speech? We will address this question in detail in section (11.2.1) below. For now let us simply assume that phonological words can be identified. Our present task will simply be to outline some of their key properties. To do this it will be useful to distinguish between two types of words: the so-called CONTENT WORDS and FUNCTION WORDS. Content words are the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs which contain most of the REFERENTIAL (or COGNITIVE MEANING) of a sentence. This roughly means that they name individuals and predicate of them certain properties. They tell us, for instance, what happened or who did what to whom, and in what circumstances. An example will make the point clear. In the old days, when people sent telegrams, it was content words that were mainly (or exclusively) used. A proud parent could send a message like Baby girl arrived yesterday which contained two nouns, a verb and an adverb. Obviously, this is not a well-formed, grammatical sentence. But its meaning would be clear enough. Function words are the rest—prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles and so on. They have a predominantly grammatical role. A telegram containing only the words She it and for us would convey little idea of what the intended interpretation was. This is not to say that function words are superfluous. Without them sentences are usually ungrammatical. A sentence like *Nelly went town which lacks the preposition to is not permitted. We have to say Nelly went to town. In English, content words have this property: one of their syllables is more prominent than the rest because it receives MAIN STRESS. This is seen in the words below where the syllable with main stress is preceded by ‘`’: [2.5] Initial stress
Medial stress
Final stress
10
WHAT IS A WORD?
`acrobat `kingfisher `patriarchate
a`nnoying de`molish Chau`cerian
ca`hoots gaber`dine hullaba`loo
Main stress can fall on only one syllable in a word. The location of main stress is part of the make-up of a word and is not changed capriciously by individual speakers. You cannot decide to stress hullabaloo on the penultimate syllable on a Monday (hulla`baloo), on the antepenultimate syllable on a Tuesday (hu`llabaloo), on the initial syllable on a Wednesday (`hullabaloo) and on the final syllable for the rest of the week (hullaba`loo). However, in some cases, if we wish to contrast two related words, we can shift stress from its normal position to a new position. This can be seen in `vendor and ven`dee which normally are stressed on the first and second syllable respectively. But if the speaker wants to contrast these two words both words might be stressed on the final syllable as I heard an estate agent do in a radio interview. [2.6] It is ven`dor, not the ven`dee who pays that tax.
This example illustrates well the point that a word is allowed just one stress. Stress can be shifted from one syllable to another, but a word cannot have two main stresses. We could not have *`ven`dor and *`ven`dee where the two syllables received equal stress. Stress has to do with relative prominence. The syllable that receives main stress is somewhat more prominent than the rest, some of which may be unstressed or weakly stressed. By contrast, function words are normally unstressed. We can say Nelly went to town with no stress on to unless we wish to highlight to for contrastive purposes, e.g. Nelly went to town and not far away from town). It is easy to see how stress can function as a valuable clue in determining whether two content words are a single compound word or two separate words. The nouns street and lamp are both stressed when they occur in isolation. But if they appear in the compound `street-lamp, only the first is stressed. The stress on lamp is suppressed. Stress is not the only phonological clue. In addition to stress, there are rules regulating the positions in which various sounds may occur in a word and the combinations of sounds that are permissible. These rules are called PHONOTACTIC RULES. They can help us to know whether we are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. A phonological word must satisfy the requirements for words of the spoken language. For instance, while any vowel can begin a word, and most consonants can appear alone at the beginning of a word, the consonant [ ] is subject to certain restrictions. (This consonant is spelled ng as in long (see the Key to symbols used on p. xix). In English words [ ] is not allowed to occur initially although it can occur in other positions. Thus, [ ] is allowed internally and at the end of a word as in [l I ] longing and [l ge] longer. But you could not have an English word like ngether, *[ ee] with [ ] as its first sound. However, in other languages this sound may be found word-initially as in the Chinese name Nga [ a] and the Zimbabwean name Nkomo [ komo]. There are also phonotactic restrictions on the combination of consonants in various positions in a word in the spoken language. As everyone knows, English spelling is not always a perfect mirror of pronunciation. So when considering words in the spoken language it is important to separate spelling from pronunciation (cf. Chapter 7). You know that He is knock-kneed is pronounced /hI Iz nk ni:d/ and not */he Is knk kni:d/. A particular combination of letters can be associated with very different pronunciations in different words or
ENGLISH WORDS
11
in different positions in the same word. The spelling kn is pronounced /kn/ at the end of a word, as in / beIkn/, but at the beginning of a word as in knee and knock the /k/ is dropped and only the n is sounded. Similarly, other stop-plus-nasal combinations like tm /tm/ and dn /dn/ are allowed at the end of a word (e.g. bottom /btm/ and burden /b :dn/) but these consonant clusters are not permitted at the beginning of a word. Putative words like */tmIs/ (*tmiss) and */dnel/ (*dnell) are just impermissible. In the spoken language we recognise as English words only those forms that have the right combination of sounds for the position in the word where they occur. Moreover, even when a sound or combination of sounds is allowed, often a somewhat different pronunciation is used depending on the position in which it occurs in a word. This can be seen in the pronunciation of the l sound in standard British English (RP) in different positions in a word. Compare the initial l with the final l in the following: [2.7] Word-initial clear l [] labour lead loft lend let lick leaf
Word-final dark l [] spill smell fulfil cool bull sprawl
Pre-consonantal dark l [] milk salt belt quilt spoilt colt wild
The l sound is always made with the blade of the tongue against the teeth-ridge, with the sides lowered to allow air to escape. But there is a subtle difference. When l is in word-final position or when it is followed by another consonant (as it is in the last two columns), besides the articulatory gestures mentioned above, the back of the tongue is also simultaneously raised towards the soft palate (or velum). This type of l is called dark or velarised l (). But when l is at the beginning of a word, no velarisation takes place. This latter type of l is called clear or non-velarised l ([]). Thus, the kind of l we hear gives an indication of where in a word it appears. Do not fail to note the use of square brackets. They are used to enclose ALLOPHONES, i.e. variants of a phoneme. Allophones are different sounds, e.g. [] and [], that occur in different contexts which all represent the same phoneme /l/. With regard to spelling too, the situation is not chaotic, although admittedly the relationship between letters and phonemes is not always straightforward, as knee being pronounced /ni:/ demonstrates. We recognise as English words only those orthographic words that conform to the spelling conventions of English. If, for example, you saw the word zvroglen you would treat it as a foreign word. The letter combination zvr is not English. There is no way a word in English could start with those letters. Let me summarise. One sense in which we use the term ‘word’ is to refer to WORD-FORMS. If we are thinking of the written language, our word-forms are ORTHOGRAPHIC words. These are easily recognised. They normally have a space before and after them. By contrast, in normal spoken language our word-forms are PHONOLOGICAL words. These are more difficult to identify because they are not discrete entities that can be neatly picked off one by one. None the less, phonological words can be identified on the basis of their phonological characteristics such as stress and phonotactic properties. 2.2.2 Words as vocabulary items We need to distinguish between words in the sense of word-form as opposed to words as vocabulary items. Let us revisit the examples in [2.2.1] on pp. 11–12. If we are considering wordforms, we can see that the
12
WHAT IS A WORD?
hyphenated word-form street-lamp occurs three times. So if we were counting different word-forms, we would count street-lamp three times. However, if we were counting distinct words, in the sense of distinct VOCABULARY ITEMS we would only count it once. The distinction between word-forms and vocabulary items is important. Very often, when we talk about words what we have in mind is not word-forms, but something more abstract—what we will refer to here as LEXEMES (i.e. vocabulary items). Anyone compiling a dictionary lists words in this sense. So, although the word-forms in each of the columns in [2.8] below are different, we do not find each one of them given a separate entry in an English dictionary. The first word in each column is listed under a heading of its own. The rest may be mentioned under that heading, if they do not follow a regular pattern of the language—e.g. write, written (past participle), wrote (past tense). But if they do follow the general pattern (e.g. washes, washing, washed; smile, smiling, smiled) they will be left out of the dictionary altogether. Instead, the grammar will be expected to provide a general statement to the effect that verbs take an -ing suffix, which marks progressive aspect, and an -ed suffix that marks both the past tense and the past participle, and so on. [2.8] WASH
TAKE
BRING
WRITE
wash washes washing washed washed
take takes taking took taken
bring brings bringing brought brought
write writes writing wrote written
In [2.8] each lexeme (i.e. vocabulary item) that would be entered in a dictionary is shown in capital letters and all the different word-forms belonging to it are shown in lower-case letters. The examples in [2.8] are all verbs. But, of course, lexemes can be nouns, adjectives or adverbs as well. In [2.9] you will find examples from these other word classes. [2.9] a.
b.
Noun
Adjective
Adverb
MATCH match matches GOOSE goose geese
KIND kind kinder BAD bad worse
SOON soon sooner WELL well better
In [2.9] we have three pairs of lexemes: the nouns, match and goose; the adjectives kind and bad; and adverbs soon and well. In each case the word-forms belonging to each lexeme in [2.9a] follow a general pattern for words of their type and need not be listed in the dictionary. But all the ones in [2.9b] are irregular and must be listed in the dictionary. The lexeme is an abstract entity that is found in the dictionary and that has a certain meaning. Wordforms are the concrete objects that we put down on paper (orthographic words) or utter (phonological words) when we use language. The relationship between a lexeme and the word-forms belonging to it is one
ENGLISH WORDS
13
[2.10]
of REALISATION or REPRESENTATION or MANIFESTATION. If we take the lexeme write which is entered in the dictionary, for example, we can see that it may be realised by any one of the word-forms write, writes, writing, wrote and written which belong to it. These are the actual forms that are used in speech or appear on paper. When you see the orthographic words written and wrote on the page, you know that although they are spelt differently they are manifestations of the same vocabulary item WRITE. The distinction between word-forms and lexemes which I have just made is not abstruse. It is a distinction that we are intuitively aware of from an early age. It is the distinction on which word-play in puns and in intentional ambiguity in everyday life depends. At a certain period in our childhood we were fascinated by words. We loved jokes—even awful ones like [2.10] The humour, of course, lies in recognising that the word-form shrimp can belong to two separate lexemes whose very different and unrelated meanings are none the less pertinent here. It can mean either ‘an edible, long, slender crustacean’ or ‘a tiny person’ (in colloquial English). Also, the word serve has two possible interpretations. It can mean ‘to wait upon a person at table’ or ‘to dish up food’. Thus, word-play exploits the lexical ambiguity arising from the fact that the same word-form represents two distinct lexemes with very distinct meanings. In real-life communication, where potential ambiguity occurs we generally manage to come to just one interpretation without too much difficulty by selecting the most appropriate and RELEVANT interpretation in the situation. Suppose a 20-stone super heavyweight boxer went to Joe’s Vegetarian Restaurant and asked the waiter for a nice shrimp curry and the waiter said in reply, ‘We don’t serve shrimps’, it would be obvious that it was shrimps in the sense of crustaceans that was intended. If, on the other hand, a little man, barely 5 feet tall and weighing a mere 7 stone, went to a fish restaurant and saw almost everyone at the tables around him tucking into a plateful of succulent shrimps, and thought that he would quite fancy some himself, he would be rightly offended if the waiter said ‘We do not serve shrimps.’ It is obvious in this situation that shrimps are on the menu and are dished up for consumption. What is not done is serve up food to people deemed to be puny. Puns are not restricted to jokes. Many advertisements like that for Standens rely on puns for their effect. Given the context, it is obvious that sound is meant to be read in more than one sense here. Serious literature also uses this device. For instance, the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon gives the title ‘Base details’ to the poem in which he parodies cowardly generals who stay away at the base, at a safe distance from the action, and gladly speed young soldiers to their death at the front. The word-form base in the title represents two distinct lexemes here whose meanings are both relevant: (i) Base details are details of what is happening at the base (Noun) (meaning ‘military encampment’), and (ii) Base details are particulars of something that is base (Adjective) (meaning ‘reprehensibly cowardly, mean etc.’). The term HOMONYM is used to denote word-forms belonging to distinct lexemes that are written and pronounced in the same way. There are separate dictionary entries for such words. Shrimp and base are examples of homonyms. But perhaps they are not so obvious. Better examples of homonyms are shown in [2.11]. [2.11] a. b.
bat: bat (Noun) ‘a small flying mammal’ bat (Noun) ‘a wooden implement for hitting a ball in cricket’ bar: bar (Noun) ‘the profession of barrister’ bar (Noun) ‘a vertical line across a stave used to mark metrical accent in music’ bar (Verb) ‘to obstruct’
14
WHAT IS A WORD?
c.
fair: fair (Adjective) ‘beautiful, attractive’ fair (Noun) ‘holiday’
By contrast, word-forms may have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings. Such forms are called HOMOPHONES. See this example from a joke book: [2.12] Why does the pony cough? Because he’s a little hoarse. (Young and Young 1981:57)
The joke is a pun on /h:s/, the pronunciation of the two lexemes represented in writing by horse and hoarse. Other examples of homophones include tail ~ tale, sail ~ sale, weather ~ whether, see ~ sea, read ~ reed, reel ~ real, seen ~ scene, need ~ knead. Conversely, it is also possible to have several closely related meanings that are realised by the same wordform. The name for this is POLYSEMY. Often you find several senses listed under a single heading in a dictionary. For instance, under the entry for the noun force, the OED lists over ten senses. I have reproduced the first six below: [2.13] 1. 2. 3.
Physical strength. Rarely in pl. (= Fr. forces—1818.) Strength, impetus, violence, or intensity of effect ME. Power or might; esp. military power ME. b. In early use, the strength (of a defensive work etc.). Subseq., the fighting strength of a ship. 1577. 4. A body of armed men, an army. In pl. the troops or soldiers composing the fighting strength of a kingdom or a commander ME. b. A body of police; often absol. the force=policemen collectively. 1851. 5. Physical strength or power exerted on an object; esp. violence or physical coercion. ME. 6. Mental or moral strength. Now only, power of effective action, or of overcoming resistance. ME.
The line that separates polysemy from homonymy is somewhat blurred because it is not altogether clear how far meanings need to diverge before we should treat words representing them as belonging to distinct lexemes. In [2.13], it is not entirely clear that the sixth sense of the noun force is not sufficiently removed from the other meanings to merit an entry of its own. The other meanings all show a reasonably strong family resemblance. But mental or moral strength shows a somewhat weaker relationship. In the OED, there is a separate entry for the lexeme force, the verb. It is considered a different lexeme because it has a different meaning and belongs to a different word-class, being a verb and not a noun. Belonging to different word-classes is an important consideration in determining whether separate dictionary entries are needed. In real-life communication, the lack of a one-to-one match between lexemes and word-forms does not necessarily cause ambiguity. In context, the relevant meaning is normally easy to determine. But there are cases where it is not. For instance, the homonymy of bat in [2.14] can cause semantic confusion: [2.14] I saw a bat under the tree.
ENGLISH WORDS
15
It could be a bat with which you play cricket or a small, flying mammal. This is a case of LEXICAL AMBIGUITY. We have in this sentence a word-form that represents more than one lexeme with a meaning that is quite plausible. It is not possible to determine the right interpretation of the sentence without looking at the wider context in which it appears. We have established that the relationship between a word-form and the meaning that it represents is a complex one. This is exploited not only in literature and word-play as we saw above but also in the language of advertising. For instance, a recent British Gas newspaper advertisement for gas heating said: [2.15] You will warm to our credit. It’s free.
This advertisement exploits the lexical ambiguity that is due to the fact that warm (to) can mean ‘become enthusiastic’ or ‘experience a rise in temperature’. Next time you look at an advertisement, see whether it exploits any of the relationships between lexemes and word-forms that we have examined. 2.2.3 Grammatical words Finally, let us consider the word from a grammatical perspective. Words play a key role in syntax. So, some of their properties are assigned taking into account syntactic factors. Often words are required to have certain properties if they serve certain syntactic purposes. Thus, although in [2.16a] we have the same sense of the same lexeme (play) realised by the same word-form (played), we know that this word does at least two quite different grammatical jobs in the sentence of which it is a part: [2.16] a. She played the flute. She has played the flute.
b. She took the flute. She has taken the flute.
If you compare the sentences in [2.16] above, you will see that in [2.16a] the verb play is realised by the word-form played regardless of whether it simply indicates that the action happened in the past as in the first example or that an action was (recently) completed as in the second example. Contrast this with the situation in [2.16b] where these two grammatical meanings are signalled by two different forms. Took indicates that the action happened in the past while taken (after has/had) indicates that the action is complete. In She played the flute and She took the flute the words played and took are described grammatically as the ‘past tense forms of the verbs play and take’. By contrast, in She has played the flute and She has taken the flute we describe played and taken as the ‘past participle’ of play and take. Linguists use the term SYNCRETISM to describe situations such as that exemplified by played where the same word-form of a lexeme is used to realise two (or more) distinct grammatical words that are represented separately in the grammatical representations of words belonging to some other comparable lexemes. The phenomenon of syncretism is one good reason for distinguishing between word-forms and grammatical words. It enables us to show that words belonging to the same lexeme and having the same form in speech and writing can still differ. A further example should make the ideas of grammatical words and syncretism even clearer. Consider the verbs in the following sentences:
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WHAT IS A WORD?
[2.17] a. You hit me.
b. You cut it.
(=you hit me some time in the past) or (=you hit me habitually) (=you cut it some time in the past) or (=you cut it habitually)
As the paraphrases show, the word-form hit belonging to the lexeme hit can represent either the present tense or the past tense form of the verb. In other words, there is syncretism. We have two different grammatical words hit [+verb, +present] and hit [+verb, +past] but a single word-form. The same analysis also applies to cut. It can represent either the present or past tense of the verb cut. Syncretism is not limited to verbs. It can apply to other word classes (e.g. nouns) as well: [2.18] (a) The wolf killed a sheep and one deer. (b) The wolf killed two sheep and three deer.
In these two sentences, although the word-form sheep belongs to the same lexeme and is unchanged in form, we know that its grammatical value is not the same. In [2.18a] it realises the word with the grammatical properties of noun and singular, but in [2.18b] it represents a plural form. Likewise, the same word-form deer represents a singular noun in [2.18a] and a plural noun in [2.18b]. What can we say about the word as an entity that functions as a grammatical unit in the syntax of a language? As mentioned already, the (grammatical) word is normally defined as the MINIMAL FREE FORM that is used in the grammar of a language. Let us now put some flesh on this terse and somewhat cryptic statement. By free form we mean an entity that can stand on its own and act as a free agent; it is an element whose position in a sentence is not totally dictated by other items. In order to explain what ‘freedom’ means in this context, we need to take on board two ancillary ideas: POSITIONAL MOBILITY and STABILITY. Although words are not the smallest grammatical units used to construct sentences (see the discussion of morphemes in the next chapter), at the level of sentence organisation the rules of sentence formation treat words as unanalysable units. Often it is possible to change the order in which words appear in a sentence and still produce a well-formed sentence. Words enjoy considerable positional mobility. However, the elements inside a word do not enjoy such mobility. While syntactic rules can transport words to new places in a sentence, they cannot shift in the same way elements that are found inside words. Moving words around in the following produces grammatical sentences with basically the same meaning, but with somewhat different emphasis: [2.19] a. b. c. d.
This old industrialist revisited Lancaster, fortunately, Fortunately, this old industrialist revisited Lancaster, Lancaster, this old industrialist revisited, fortunately, Fortunately, Lancaster was revisited by this old industrialist.
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17
Evidently, the position of words in a sentence is not rigidly fixed. They can, and often do, get moved around if the communicative needs of the speaker or writer require it. However, the interior of a word is a no-go area for syntactic rules. They are strictly barred from manipulating elements found inside a word. As far as syntax is concerned, words are indivisible units that cannot be split and whose internal units are inaccessible (cf. Bauer 1988, Matthews 1991, Lyons 1968, Di Sciullo and Williams 1987). The word as a grammatical unit shows stability (or INTERNAL COHESION). The order of elements inside a word is rigidly fixed. If the elements of a sentence are shifted, certain meaningful units (in this case re-visit-ed and fortun-ate-ly) all move en bloc, and their order always remains unchanged. The internal structure of the word cannot be tampered with. We are not allowed to perform operations that would yield words like *ed-visit-re, *ate-fortune-ly etc. We will return to this point on p. 33 below. The definition of the word includes the term ‘minimal’ for a good reason. This is intended to separate words from phrases like this old industrialist. Like words, phrases can occur in isolation and they can be moved from one position to another (as we have seen in [2.19]). But the expression this old industrialist is not a minimal form since it contains smaller forms capable of occurring independently namely, this, old and industrialist. Furthermore, the sequence this old industrialist does not have the kind of internal cohesion found in words. It can be interrupted by other words e.g. this wealthy old industrialist; this very wealthy, old, benevolent industrialist. The assumption that the grammatical word is ‘a minimum free form’ works well as a rule of thumb. But it encounters difficulties when confronted by a COMPOUND WORD like wheelbarrow which contains the words wheel and barrow which can stand alone. In such cases it is clear that the word is not the smallest meaningful unit that can be used on its own. It is for this reason that the definition of the word as the unit on which purely syntactic operations can be performed is preferable. In the case of compounds this definition works. The interior of a compound is a syntactic no-go area. Syntactic rules are not allowed to apply separately to words that make up a compound. Thus, for example although the nouns wheel and barrow can be modified by the adjective big ([big barrow], [big wheel]), and although we can talk of [big wheelbarrow], in which case big modifies the entire compound, there is no possibility of saying wheel [big barrow], with the adjective only modifying the second element of the compound word. 2.3 SUMMARY In this chapter we have established that normally, the term ‘word’ is used ambiguously. To avoid the ambiguity, we need to distinguish between three different types of word: (i) a word-form (i.e. a particular physical manifestation of one or more lexemes in speech or writing); (ii) a vocabulary item (i.e. lexeme); and (iii) a unit of grammatical structure that has certain morphological and syntactic properties. We will revisit the distinction between lexemes, grammatical words and word-forms mainly in Chapters 7 and 11. In Chapter 7 our main concern will be the realisation of words in speech and in writing. In Chapter 11 we will show that this distinction is not an artefact of the linguist’s analysis. Rather, it is a distinction that is well supported by studies in the way in which we store words in the mind and retrieve them for use in communication in real life. In the coming chapters, in cases where the relevant sense of the term ‘word’ is clear from the context I will not spell out whether it is the word as a vocabulary item, grammatical word, phonological or orthographic form that is being dealt with. But where it is not clear, I will indicate the sense in which I am using this term. We are now in a position to consider in detail the internal structure of words. That is the task of the next chapter.
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WHAT IS A WORD?
EXERCISES 1. Comment on the problems you encounter in determining the number of words in the following nursery rhyme. Relate your answer to the different senses in which the term ‘word’ is used. The grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill, Then he marched them down again. When they were up, they were up, And when they were down, they were down, And when they were only half way up They were neither up nor down. 2. Find and analyse at least three examples of advertisements that exploit the homonymy, polysemy or homophony of words. 3. Which ones of the italicised word-forms in the following sentences belong to the same lexeme? What difficulties, if any, have you come across in determining whether word-forms belong to the same lexeme? a. She saw him saw through that plank of wood. b. Bill will pay the bill. c. I saw Farmer near your farm again this morning. d. Jan looked pale when she walked towards the pail. e. I am sick of your claiming to be sick all the time. f. I was looking at the book when she booked the ticket. 4. Using at least two fresh examples, show how syncretism can be used to support the distinction between word-forms and grammatical words. 5. This is the beginning of W.H.Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters… These lines can be paraphrased as ‘The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering.’ Referring to the definition of the word given in this chapter, explain why it is correct to regard suffering as a word but incorrect to treat about suffering also as a word.
Chapter 3 Close encounters of a morphemic kind
3.1 THE QUEST FOR VERBAL ATOMS We saw in the last chapter that the word is the smallest meaningful unit of language that can function independently in the grammar. A word can be used on its own, without appending it to some other unit. Thus, in the word childish we can isolate child and use it on its own because it is a word in its own right. But we cannot use -ish as a stand-alone unit, for -ish is not a word. While recognising that words are the smallest meaningful units which function independently in the grammar, we also need to recognise that words can be decomposed into smaller units that are also meaningful. Our task in this chapter is to explore the internal structure of words in order to gain some understanding of the basic units which are used to form words. 3.2 CLOSE MORPHOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS: ZOOMING IN ON MORPHEMES Originally ‘morphology’ meant the study of biological forms. But nineteenth-century students of language borrowed the term and applied it to the study of word-structure. In linguistics MORPHOLOGY is the study of the formation and internal organisation of words. Let us begin our morphological analysis by considering half a dozen words (not altogether randomly chosen): [3.1] hope soon mend boil safe leaf word elephant
Obviously all the words in [3.1] have a meaning, but lack internal structure. We cannot identify any smaller units that are themselves meaningful which occur inside them. If a Martian stopped you in a street near the local zoo and enquired what phant in elephant or ho in hope means, you would think she was asking a most bizarre question that did not merit an answer. Or you might condescendingly explain that, of course, in each case the whole word means something, but its parts cannot be said to mean anything on their own. Though somewhat puzzled, the Martian might accept your explanation. But, being the persistent type, let us suppose she enquired further whether the words in [3.2] were also indivisible into smaller meaningful units:
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[3.2] childish hopeless sooner mended elephants re-boil unsafe ex-wife
You would have to give a different answer. You would need to tell your interrogator, who by now would be getting increasingly bewildered, that the words in [3.2] can be divided into smaller units of meaning as shown in [3.3]: [3.3] child-ish hope-less soon-er mend-ed elephant-s re-boil un-safe ex-wife
The part of the word that is not italicised can function as an independent word in the grammar. Indeed, each of the nonitalicised chunks is a word (i.e. vocabulary item) that is listed as such in the dictionary. By contrast, the italicised bits, though meaningful (and their meanings can be indicated as shown in [3.4]), cannot function on their own in the grammar. [3.4] -ish -less -er -ed -s re un ex
‘having the (objectionable) qualities of’ ‘without X’ ‘more X’ ‘past’ ‘plural’ ‘again’ ‘not X’ ‘former’
child-ish= ‘having the qualities of a child’ hopeless= ‘without hope’ sooner= ‘more soon’ mended= ‘mend in the past’ elephants= ‘more than one elephant’ re-boil= ‘boil again’ unsagfe= ‘not safe’ ex-wife= ‘former wife’
What we have done to the words in [3.4] can be done to thousands of other words in English. They can be decomposed into smaller units of meaning (e.g. re- ‘again’) or grammatical function (e.g. -ed ‘past’). The term MORPHEME is used to refer to the smallest unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built. It is not possible to find submorphemic units that are themselves meaningful or have a grammatical function. Thus, given -less or un-, it would make no sense to try to assign some identifiable meaning to any part of these forms. Of course, it is possible to isolate the individual sounds /l-I-s/ or / -n/, but those sounds in themselves do not mean anything. We have now established that words are made up of morphemes. But how do we recognise a morpheme when we see one? Our definition of the morpheme as the smallest unit of meaning (or grammatical function) will be the guiding principle. Any chunk of a word with a particular meaning will be said to represent a morpheme. That is how we proceeded in [3.3] and [3.4] above. Morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any word in which they appear. If we take re- and un-, for example, they mean ‘again’ and ‘not’ respectively—not just in the words we have listed above, but also in thousands of other words. Usually morphemes are used again and again to form different words. Thus re- meaning ‘re-do whatever the verb means’ can be attached before most verbs to yield a new word with a predictable meaning (e.g. re-run, re-take, re-build etc.). In like manner, unmeaning ‘not X’ (where X stands for whatever the adjective means) can be attached to various adjectives (e.g. un-real, un-clean, un-happy etc.) to yield a new word with a predictable negative meaning.
ENGLISH WORDS
21
The segmentation of words into morphemes is not a trivial and arcane pastime indulged in by linguists to while away the time on a wet Bank Holiday afternoon. It is something that is important for all users of language. During your lifetime, you will probably encounter hundreds of thousands of different words. Many of these words will be new to you. For no matter how extensive your vocabulary is, you will inevitably come across words that are unfamiliar. It is impossible for anyone to know all the words that are found in English. So, what do you do when faced with an unfamiliar word? Reach for a good dictionary? Perhaps. But this is not always feasible. Nor is it always necessary. Very often you just figure out what the strange word means using the context, together with your knowledge of the meaning of the morphemes which the word contains. You normally do this subconsciously. What we are doing here is making explicit your tacit knowledge of word-structure. Imagine this scenario. In 1992, a newspaper report on the war in the Bosnian republic states that what we are witnessing is the Lebanonisation of Bosnia. Suppose you have not encountered the word Lebanonisation before. Would you understand what the writer is saying? Probably you would—without looking it up in any dictionary. How would you do it? The answer is simple. By using your knowledge of the world—in particular history (Balkanisation) —and your knowledge of current affairs (the civil war in Lebanon) plus your knowledge of the principles of word-formation you are able to work out the meaning of Lebanonisation. Let us focus on principles of word-formation. You know that -ize/-ise is used when talking about nations to mean ‘to make X’, e.g. from America we get Americanise, from Korea we get Koreanise, from Kenya we get Kenyanise etc. By attaching -(an)ise we turn a noun into a verb. So, given the noun Lebanon we can form the verb Lebanonise. Next, from the verb Lebanonise, we can create a new noun by adding -ation (which forms nouns of action). If you know that various warlords created warring fiefdoms that destroyed the Lebanese state during the civil war that raged in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, you will know that the Croats, Muslims and Serbs engaged in the Bosnian conflict risk doing the same to the Bosnian state in the 1990s. Lebanonisation is the act of ‘turning a country into another Lebanon’. Thus, our knowledge of word-structure contributes to our understanding of the meaning of unfamiliar words. We have demonstrated that words can be decomposed into morphemes. Now we are going to see that words have INTERNAL STRUCTURE. A simple way of showing this is to analyse words like uncanny and unhappy. From these words we can derive uncannier and unhappier. If you analyse unhappier, you will see that extracting the correct meaning ‘more [not happy]’ (i.e. sadder) rather than the incorrect one ‘not [more happy]’ (i.e. not happier) depends on the way we group together the morphemes. In the first analysis where unhappier is interpreted as sadder, the meaning ‘not’ conveyed by un- is bracketed together with happy [unhappy] as one unit and this is intensified by the -er suffix. In the alternative second analysis, happy and er are bracketed together as a unit [happier] (i.e. more happy) which then is negated by [un-] to give ‘not more happy’, which is incorrect. When someone is unhappier, it does not mean they are simply less happy, it means rather that they are not happy at all. They are sad. This shows that morphemes in a word with several morphemes may be grouped together in different ways for semantic purposes. The way in which this is done has semantic consequences. Conceivably, morphemes could be thrown together higgledypiggledy to form a word. So long as you had the right morphemes, a well-formed word would pop out. But that is definitely not the case. Words have internal structural groupings, as we have seen. Furthermore, the sequencing of morphemes in a word may be subject to restrictions. Take a word like ungovernability which contains four morphemes, namely un-, govern, abil, ity. Everyone who knows this
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word knows that these four morphemes must appear in the order in [3.5a]. Any other order is strictly forbidden: [3.5] a. b. c. d. e.
un-govern-abil-ity *govern-abil-un-ity *ity-un-abil-govern *abil-un-ity-govern *un-govern-ity-abil etc.
Clearly, knowing a word means not just knowing the morphemes it contains, but also the rigid order in which they are allowed to appear. We will return to this point in section (4.4). To sum up the discussion so far, words are built using morphemes. If we know how morphemes are used to form words, we do not need to be unduly flustered when we come across a strange word. Usually it is possible to work out the meaning of a strange word if it contains familiar morphemes. 3.3 MORPHEMES AND THEIR DISGUISES The identification of morphemes is not altogether straightforward. This is because there is no simple one-toone correspondence between morphemes and the speech sounds that represent them. In this section we will attempt to unravel the complexities of the relationship between morphemes and the actual forms (sounds of groups of sounds) by which they are manifested in speech. 3.3.1 Allomorphs: morph families Any physical form that represents a morpheme is called a MORPH. The forms -ish, -less, -er, -ed, -s, re-, un- and ex- in [3.4] on p. 31 are all morphs. Morphological analysis begins with the identification of morphs, i.e. forms that carry some meaning or are associated with some grammatical function. In asparagus there is just one morph but in all the words in [3.4] there are two. It is important not to confuse morphs with SYLLABLES. When we talk of morphs we have in mind sounds that can be related to a particular meaning or grammatical function (e.g. plural or past tense). However, when we talk of syllables all we have in mind are chunks into which words can be divided for the purposes of pronunciation. This is not an abstruse distinction. We are not being pedantic. It is a distinction that matters to ordinary people because human languages are organised in such a way that the construction of units that are meaningful is normally in principle separate from the construction of strings that are pronounceable. Thus, for rhythmical effect, nursery rhymes often use nonsense syllables like ‘Deedle, deedle’ in ‘Deedle deedle dumpling my son John’ which do not represent anything meaningful. Alternatively, a sound representing a morpheme may not be a syllable in its own right, e.g. by itself, the s which represents the plural morpheme is not a syllable. The word cats has two morphemes, cat and -s, but it is all just one syllable. The single syllable cats realises two morphemes. The converse situation, where
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several syllables realise a single morpheme, is equally possible. Thus, the trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic word-forms elephant and asparagus both realise just a single morpheme. The nature of the relationship between sounds and morphemes is intriguing. At first sight, it might look reasonable to assume that morphemes are made up of PHONEMES. We might be tempted to think that cat, the English morpheme with the meaning is made up of the phonemes /kæt/. But we have several kinds of evidence showing that this is not the case. First, if morphemes were made up of phonemes, a given morpheme would be uniquely associated with a given phonological representation. In reality, the same morpheme can be realised by different morphs (i.e. sounds or written forms). Morphs which realise the same morpheme are referred to as ALLOMORPHS of that morpheme. The INDEFINITE ARTICLE is a good example of a morpheme with more than one allomorph. It is realised by the two forms a and an. The sound at the beginning of the following word determines the allomorph that is selected. If the word following the indefinite article begins with a consonant, the allomorph a is selected, but if it begins with a vowel the allomorph an is used instead: [3.6] a.
a dictionary a boat a pineapple a leg a big (mat) a dull (song)
b.
an island an evening an opinion an eye an old (mat) an exciting (finish)
Hence the incorrectness of the sentence marked with an asterisk in [3.7]: [3.7] a. b.
I spent an evening with them. *I spent a evening with them. I spent the evening with them.
Allomorphs of the same morpheme are said to be in COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION. This means that they do not occur in identical contexts and therefore they cannot be used to distinguish meanings. In other words, it is impossible to have two otherwise identical utterances that differ in their meanings depending on the allomorph of a morpheme that is selected. So, because a and an both realise the same indefinite article morpheme, it is impossible to have two sentences like those in [3.7a] above which are identical in all ways, except in the choice of a or an, but mean different things. Complementary distribution presupposes the more basic notion of DISTRIBUTION. Distribution is to do with establishing facts about the occurrence of allomorphs of a particular morpheme. It is concerned with establishing the contexts in which the morpheme which we are investigating occurs and the allomorphs by which it is realised in those different contexts. In other words, by distribution we mean the total set of distinct linguistic contexts in which a given form appears, perhaps in different guises. For instance, the indefinite article has the distribution: a before consonants (e.g. a tree) and an before vowels (e.g. an eagle). As mentioned already, such functionally related forms which all represent the same morpheme in different environments are called allomorphs of that morpheme. Another way of putting it is
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that allomorphs are forms that are phonologically distinguishable which, none the less, are not functionally distinct. In other words, although they are physically distinct morphs with different pronunciations, allomorphs do share the same function in the language. An analogy might help to clarify this point. Let us compare allomorphs to workers who share the same job. Imagine a jobshare situation where Mrs Jones teaches maths to form 2DY on Monday afternoons, Mr Kato on Thursday mornings and Ms Smith on Tuesdays and Fridays. Obviously, these teachers are different individuals. But they all share the role of ‘maths teacher’ for the class and each teacher only performs that role on particular days. Likewise, all allomorphs share the same function but one allomorph cannot occupy a position that is already occupied by another allomorph of the same morpheme. To summarise, we say that allomorphs of a morpheme are in complementary distribution. This means that they cannot substitute for each other. Hence, we cannot replace one allomorph of a morpheme by another allomorph of that morpheme and change meaning. For our next example of allomorphs we will turn to the plural morpheme. The idea of ‘more than one’ is expressed by the plural morpheme using a variety of allomorphs including the following: [3.8] a. b. c. d.
Singular
Plural
rad-ius cactus dat-um strat-um analys-is ax-is skirt road branch
radi-i cact-i dat-a strat-a analys-es ax-es skirt-s road-s branch-es
Going by the orthography, we can identify the allomorphs -i, -a, -es and -s. The last is by far the commonest: see section (7.3). Try and say the batch of words in [3.8d] aloud. You will observe that the pronunciation of the plural allomorph in these words is variable. It is [s] in skirts, [z] in roads and [Iz] (or for some speakers [ez]) in branches. What is interesting about these words is that the selection of the allomorph that represents the plural is determined by the last sound in the noun to which the plural morpheme is appended. We will return to this in more depth in section (5.2). We have already seen, that because allomorphs cannot substitute for each other, we never have two sentences with different meanings which solely differ in that one sentence has allomorph X in a slot where another sentence has allomorph Y. Compare the two sentences in [3.9]: [3.9] a.
They have two cats [eI hæv tu: kæt-s] *[eI hæv tu: kæt-z]
b.
They have two dogs [eI hæv tu: dg-z] *[eI hæv tu: dg-s]
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We cannot find two otherwise identical sentences which differ in meaning simply because the word cats is pronounced as [kæt-s] and *[kæt-z] respectively. Likewise, it is not possible to have two otherwise identical sentences with different meanings where the word dogs is pronounced as [dgz] and *[dgs]. In other words, the difference between the allomorphs [s] and [z] of the plural morpheme cannot be used to distinguish meanings. 3.3.2 Contrast Different morphemes CONTRAST meanings but different allomorphs do not. If a difference in meaning is attributable to the fact that one minimal meaningful unit has been replaced by another, we identify the morphs involved as manifestations of distinct morphemes. So, in [3.7] on p. 36 the indefinite article realised by a or an is a distinct morpheme from the definite article realised by the since a semantic difference is detectable when a or an is replaced with the. A further example of contrast is given in [3.10]: [3.10] a.
I unlocked the door. I re-locked the door
b.
She is untidy.
The two sentences in [3.10a] mean very different things. Since they are identical except for the fact that where one has un- the other has re-, the difference in meaning between these two sentences is due to the difference in meaning between the morphemes realised by re- (meaning ‘do again’) and un- (meaning ‘reverse the action’). Now, contrast the un- of unlocked with the un- of untidy. In both cases we have the same morph un(which is spelt and pronounced in exactly the same way). But it is obvious that un- represents different morphemes in these two word-forms. In I unlocked the door the morph un- found in unlocked realises a reversive morpheme which is attached to verbs—it reverses the action of locking. But in untidy it realises a negative morpheme attached to adjectives— untidy means ‘not tidy’. (If a person is untidy, it does not mean that at some earlier point they were tidy and someone has reversed or undone their tidiness.) If morphemes were made up of phonemes a simple correlation of morphs with morphemes is what we would find. But, in fact, it is quite common for the same phonological form (i.e. morph) to represent more than one morpheme. It is from the context that we can tell which morpheme it represents. This is the second piece of evidence against the assumption that morphemes are composed of phonemes. The complex relationship between morphemes and the allomorphs that represent them gives us a window through which we can glimpse one of the most fascinating aspects of language: the relationship between FORM and FUNCTION. In linguistics we explore the form of various elements of language structure, e.g. words and sentences, because it is important to know how they are constructed. However, form is not everything. We are also interested in knowing what linguistic elements are used for, what function they serve. Just consider for a moment this non-linguistic analogy. Imagine a friend returns from a foreign vacation with two beautiful ornamental glass containers with a globular shape and gives one to you as a present and keeps the other for herself. She does not tell you what your present is used for. She uses hers as a vessel for containing wine at the table—she got the idea of buying these containers when she was served wine in a similar container in a fancy restaurant. You do not know this. You look at your present and decide to put it on the
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table as a container for cut fresh flowers. She calls hers a flagon, for that is what she is using it as. You call yours a vase. Here are the questions now: are these objects ‘flagons’ or ‘vases’? Which one of you is right? I am not being evasive if I say that both of you are right. For, although the two objects are identical as far as their form, their physical properties, is concerned, they are very different with regard to the functions that they serve in your two households. There are numerous linguistic parallels. What is physically the same linguistic form can be used to represent distinct morphemes. In order for forms to be regarded as allomorphs belonging to the same morpheme, it is not sufficient for them to have the same form —to be pronounced or written in the same way. They must also have the same grammatical or semantic function. The significance of this point was hinted at in the discussion of un- in unlocked and untidy when we showed that the same morph can represent different morphemes. It should become even more obvious when you consider the form -er in the following: [3.11] a.
b.
c.
think ~ thinker write ~ writer sweep ~ sweeper cook ~ cooker receive ~ receiver propel ~ propeller London ~ Londoner Iceland ~ Icelander New York ~ New Yorker
drive ~ driver sing ~ singer sell ~ seller strain ~ strainer compute ~ computer erase ~ eraser north ~ northerner east ~ easterner Highlands ~ Highlander
The same form, -er, represents three different meanings and hence has to be assigned to three distinct morphemes. In [3.11a] it forms an agentive noun from a verb, with the meaning ‘someone who does X’ (i.e. whatever the verb means). In [3.11b] the same -er forms an instrumental noun from a verb, with the meaning ‘something used to X’ (i.e. to do whatever the verb means). Finally, in [3.11c] the same -er form is attached to a noun referring to a place to mean ‘an inhabitant of’. Clearly, the same form does serve different functions here. So, it realises different morphemes. This is further evidence that should quickly disabuse us of the assumption that morphemes are made up of morphs. Not only can a single morpheme have several allomorphs (as in the case of the plural morpheme), the same morph (e.g. -er) can represent different morphemes. There is no simple one-to-one matching of morphemes with morphs. 3.4 FREEDOM AND BONDAGE When we classify morphemes in terms of where they are allowed to appear, we find that they fall into two major groupings. Some morphemes are capable of occurring on their own as words, while other morphemes are only allowed to occur in combination with some other morpheme(s) but they cannot be used by themselves as independent words.
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27
Those morphemes that are allowed to occur on their own in sentences as words are called FREE MORPHEMES while those morphemes that must occur in the company of some other morphemes are called BOUND MORPHEMES. In [3.12] the bound morphemes are italicised. [3.12] pest modern child pack laugh
pest(i)-cide post-modern-ist child-ish pre-pack-ed laugh-ing
The free morphemes in [3.12] can all be manipulated by syntactic rules; they can stand on their own as words. By contrast, it is impossible to use the forms -cide, post-, -ist, -ish, pre-, -ed or -ing, independently. So far, all the examples of free morphemes that function as roots that we have encountered have been content words (see p. 14). However, not all free morphemes are content words. Some are employed to indicate grammatical functions and logical relationship rather than to convey lexical or cognitive meaning in a sentence. Hence such words are called FUNCTION WORDS. They include words such as the following: [3.13] articles: demonstratives: pronouns: prepositions: conjunctions:
a/an, the e.g. this, that, these and those e.g. I, you, we, they, my, your, his, hers, who etc. e.g. in, into, on to, at, on etc. e.g. and, or, but, because, if etc.
In ordinary language use such words are extremely common. But on their own they would not convey a lot of information. If you received a telegram like But it my on to the in you might suspect that the sender either had a strange sense of humour or was not mentally sound. 3.5 SOUND SYMBOLISM: PHONAESTHEMES AND ONOMATOPOEIA In the vast majority of words, the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary (see p. 2). There is no reason why a particular sound, or group of sounds, should be used to represent a particular word, with a particular meaning. If someone asked you what [b] in bed or [str] in strange meant, you would think they were asking a very odd question. As a rule, sounds qua sounds do not mean anything. However, the general principle that says that the link between sound and meaning in words is arbitrary is occasionally dented. This happens in two sets of circumstances. First, certain individual sounds, or groups of sounds, which do not represent a specific enough meaning to be called morphs nevertheless appear to be vaguely associated with some kind of meaning. Such sounds are Called PHONAESTHEMES. As our first example of a phonaestheme, let us take the RP vowel [ ] (which is historically descended from [U], the vowel that is still used in words like dull and hut in the north of England). This phonaestheme is found in words associated with various kinds of dullness or indistinctness, e.g. dull, thud, thunder, dusk,
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blunt, mud, slush, sludge, slump etc. Obviously, the vowel [ ] per se does not mean ‘dull’. If it did, dim which contains the vowel [I] would not be a virtual synonym for dull. Many words which mean ‘to talk indistinctly’ contain one or more occurrences of the labial consonant [m], which is made with the lips firmly closed, preventing clear articulation. That way, the very act of pronouncing the word iconically mimics a key aspect of its meaning. You can see this if you watch yourself in a mirror saying words like mumble, murmur, mutter, muted, grumble etc. It is probably not an accident that these words also contain the phonaestheme [ ]. Similarly, the sound [ mp] (spelled -ump) as in clump, dump, bump, lump and hump is often found at the end of words which are associated with heaviness and clumsiness although no one would wish to suggest that -ump in itself represents the ideas of heaviness and clumsiness. Interestingly, here again we have the vowel [ ] followed by the labial consonants [mp]. Observe also that whereas [ ] tends to have associations of heaviness or dullness, the high front vowels [i:] and [I] frequently occur as phonaesthemes in words associated with smallness, as in wee, teeny-weeny, lean, meagre, mini, thin and little. (The fact that big has the opposite meaning just goes to show that phonaesthemes only represent a tendency.) Second, and more importantly, in addition to phonaesthemes, there are onomatopoeic words in which a direct association is made between the sounds of a word-form and the meaning that it represents. In cases of ONOMATOPOEIA, the sounds (qua sounds and not as morphs) symbolise or reflect some aspect of the meaning of the word that they represent. So, if speakers of any language want an onomatopoeic word for the noise a cat makes, they will not choose a noise like bimbobam—except, perhaps, in the land of the Ning Nang Nong. The words for sounds made by various animals e.g. neigh, miaow, moo etc. are the most obvious examples of onomatopoeia. But there are others such as roar, crack, clang, bang, splash, swish, whoosh, buzz, hiss, cheep, bleep, gurgle, plop and plod. In the case of onomatopoeic words, the relationship between sound and meaning is to some extent ICONIC. The sounds mimic an aspect of the meaning of the linguistic sign much in the same way that this iconic sign for a restaurant represents, more or less directly, the meaning ‘restaurant’. This symbol is still conventional to some degree. To people who eat with chopsticks, it might not be immediately obvious why this sign represents a restaurant (rather than a cutlery shop), but once it is pointed out the link can be seen quite easily. Onomatopoeic words are iconic in so far as they directly reflect some aspect of the meaning of what they stand for. So, conventionally in English cows go ‘moo’ and horses go ‘neigh’ and bees go ‘buzz’. That is why Spike Milligan’s nonsense poem ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’ is bizarre. To be onomatopoeic, the sound must imitate to some degree an aspect of the noise made by the bird or animal. But exactly what is imitated will vary from language to language. An English cock will say cockadoodledoo, a Russian cock kukuriku and in Uganda it may say kookolilookoo. (These differences are not attributable to dialectical variation among the males of the Gallus domesticus species.) Onomatopoeic words are not purely and simply formed by mimicking precisely the meanings that they convey. To some extent onomatopoeic words are also moulded by linguistic convention. That is why in different places in the world different onomatopoeic words may be used for the same animal or bird noise. 3.6 VERBAL BLUEPRINTS Linguistic theory incorporates the hypothesis that there are universal principles of grammar that regulate the amount of variation in linguistic structure across languages. In the last section we saw the marginal role played by sound symbolism in word-formation. This does not obscure the fact that normally languages form
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29
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words by using sounds in a non-imitative way. There is an overriding tendency for the relationship between sounds and meanings to be arbitrary. Normally there is no reason why a particular morpheme is realised by any particular sounds. The choice of the allomorph or allomorphs that represent a particular morpheme is arbitrary. Obviously, as everyone knows, all languages do not have the same words. Since virtually any arbitrary match of sound and meaning can produce a word, it is not surprising that words vary greatly in their structure across languages. But this does not mean that chaos reigns. The ways in which morphs are used to form words is regulated by general principles. So, the amount of crosslinguistic variation in word-formation falls within certain broad parameters. It is as if there is a menu of blueprints for word-formation from which all languages make their selections: [3.14] (i) ISOLATING (or analytic) languages (ii) AGGLUTINATING languages (iii) INFLECTING (or synthetic) languages (iv) POLYSYNTHETIC languages
No language makes all its choices from just one part of the menu. To varying degrees all languages make mixed choices. The idea of this menu is to indicate the predominant word-formation tendencies, if they exist. In the subsections below we shall consider in turn examples of the different morphological types. 3.6.1 Tiny words (isolating languages) In an archetypical isolating language the word is virtually indistinguishable from the morpheme, for every word contains just one morpheme. Every morpheme is a free morpheme. There are no bound morphemes. Vietnamese comes close to this ideal: [3.15] Vietnamese a. Tôi á ã qua’ I kick past class. ‘I kicked the ball and he punched me.’ b. Chúng tôi mua ã Pl. I buy past ‘We bought the rice.’
bóng ball
vã and
hn he
â punch
dã past
tôi me
g o rice
Typically, the words are short and contain just one morpheme each. Almost every concept is expressed by a separate word. Look again, for example, at the treatment of past tense in verbs (e.g. punched, bought) and the plurality of we (plural plus first person).
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31
3.6.2 Get the glue (agglutinating languages) In an ideal agglutinating language most words contain more than one morpheme and the morphemes are realised by morphs arranged in rows like corn on the cob. The morphs can be neatly picked off, one by one. Swahili is a good example of an agglutinating language as you can see: [3.16] a.
ni-ta-pik-a I-future-cook-BVS ‘I will cook’ b. a-li-tu-pik-i-a s/he-pase-us-cook-for-BVS ‘s/he cooked for us’ c. tu-li-wa-lim-ish-a we-past-them-cultivate-cause-BVS ‘we made them cultivate’ Note: BVS = basic verbal suffix which is normally -a
In a Swahili word, it is normally possible to say which morph represents which morpheme. Most morphs only represent one morpheme at a time and do not FUSE with adjacent morphemes, as say, plural marking does in leaves where it is partly signalled by the suffix -es /-Iz/ and partly by the change of the /f/ of leaf to / v/. It is as if the word is contructed by gluing together separable, discrete morphs. 3.6.3 Labyrinthine words (synthetic languages) In a SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE a word normally contains more than one morpheme. In this respect synthetic languages resemble agglutinating languages. However, whereas in an agglutinating language the morphemes and the morphs that realise them are arranged in a row one after the other, the morphs of a synthetic language are to a considerable extent fused together and cannot be separated neatly one from the other. Furthermore, the morphemes themselves are not arranged in a row. Rather, they are all thrown together in a big pot like pot-pourri. It is impossible to separate the different strands. Latin is a classic example of an inflecting language. Any attempt to segment Latin words into morphs in such a way that each morph is associated uniquely with a particular morpheme very soon runs into trouble. You can see this for yourself if you attempt to segment the various word-forms of the nouns m nsa ‘table’ and fl s ‘flower’ into their constituent morphs and try to match those morphs with the corresponding morphemes: [3.17] a.
Case
Singular
Plural
Nominative Accusative Genitive
m nsa m nsam m nsae
m nsae m nsas m nsarum
b.
Singular
Plural
fl s fl rem fl ris
fl r s fl r s fl rum
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a.
Case
Singular
Plural
Dative Ablative
m nsae m nsa
m ns s m ns s
b.
Singular
Plural
fl ri fl re
fl ribus fl ribus
We could say that mens means ‘table’ and that fl s- and fl r- mean ‘flower’ and the rest marks case and number of the noun. There is a general and historical rule in Latin that gets /s/ pronounced as [r] when it occurs between vowels. That is why instead of fl s we get fl r everywhere except in the nominative singular. But what of the rest? In each case the ending realises two morphemes simultaneously: number and case. For instance, -as in m nsas marks both accusative and plural and -em in fl rem marks accusative case and singular number. The same kind of analysis applies to the other endings. That it would be futile to try and separate the morphs representing different morphemes is even clearer in the Latin verb. Take mon re ‘to advise’, for example, which has forms that include: [3.18] a.
mone ‘I advise’ mon s ‘you advise’ mon mus ‘we advise’
b.
moneor ‘I am being advised’ mon ris ‘you are being advised’ mon mur ‘we are being advised’
Let us attempt to isolate morphs and morphemes. Having separated out mon as the part representing the morpheme ‘advise’ we might identify the underlined part of the word, -o, -s, -mus, -or, -mur etc. as representing number, person (I, you etc.) as well as voice, i.e. active in [3.18a] and passive in [3.18b]. Segmentation would not work. The mapping of morphemes on to morphs is not one-to-one as in Swahili. We have in each case just one form -o, -s etc. representing several morphemes all at once. Morphs which simultaneously realise two or more morphemes are called PORTMANTEAU MORPHS (i.e. ‘suitcase morphs’). For example, -mur in mon mur is a portmanteau morph since it signals first person, plural, present tense and passive. [3.19] Portmanteau morph: Morphemes:
first person
-mur plural
present tense
passive
In a language of this type the superior analysis, and one that is traditionally preferred, is one where no attempt is made to chop up the word into morphemes and line them up one-to-one with morphs. Instead all the morphological and syntactic properties of the grammatical word should be noted and a statement should be made along these lines: mon mur is the first person, plural, present tense, passive verb form of the lexical item mon re. In modern linguistics this model is called WORD-AND-PARADIGM or WP for short (cf. Matthews 1991).
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33
3.6.4 Verbal juggernauts (polysynthetic languages) Finally, there are the so-called polysynthetic languages (or incorporating languages) which have very complex words that are built not only by combining morphemes, but also by implanting words within words. Eskimo is a very good example of a polysynthetic language. For instance, in this language the transitive verb incorporates within it the direct object noun. Consequently, words can be very big: [3.20] a.
b.
c.
kissartumik kavvisurput ‘They drank hot coffee’ kissartu-mik kavvi-sur-put hot instr. coffee drink 3p-indic. nutaamik piilisiurpunga ‘I am looking for a new car’ nutaa-mik piili-siur-punga new-instr. car look for ls-indic. Atuagalliutituqaanngitsunik atuagassa aliqinartaqaaq ‘There was really nothing to read apart from old copies of Atuagalliutit’ Atuagalliuti -tuqa -a -nngit -su -nik Atuagalliutit -old be not intr.-part. instr.-pl. atua-ga-ssa read -pass.-part.
aliqi-nar-ta-qa-aq lack (-future) be-such-as-to habit.very 3s-indic Notes: instr.=instrumental case; indic.=indicative mood, 1s=1st person singular; 3p=3rd person; pl.= plural; habit.=habitual; pass.=passive; part.= participial mood; intr.=intransitive. (from Fortescue 1984:83)
The last Eskimo sentence, which has just three word-forms, is translated in English as ‘There was really nothing to read apart from old copies of Atuagalliutit’. For the sake of clarity each word is re-written as a grammatical word on a line of its own, complete with a gloss, to show the complexity. 3.6.5 No thoroughbreds There are no morphological thoroughbreds. There is no pure isolating, agglutinating, inflecting or polysynthetic language. All languages are to varying degrees mixtures. If we classify a language as belonging to this or that type, all we are claiming is that it shows a strong tendency to have words formed in a certain way. Although we classified Swahili as agglutinating, for instance, there is not always a one-to-one matching of morphemes with morphs. In our Swahili data, there are a number of portmanteau morphs. Thus, morph tu- simultaneously represents second person, subject and plural in tu-li-wa-lim-ish-a ‘we made them cultivate’. The same form -tu- is again found in a-li-tu-pik-i-a ‘s/he cooked for us’. Once more it is a portmanteau. But in this case it realises different morphemes, namely second person, plural and (indirect)
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object. Similarly, wa is a portmanteau morph. It can represent either the first person, plural subject (as in wata-pik-a ‘they will cook’) or the first person plural, object (as in a-li-wa-lim-ish-a ‘s/he made them cultivate’). We could make the same point about the other examples. For instance, although Eskimo is polysynthetic, it does have words that are formed by simple agglutination e.g., kissartu-mik ‘hot instr.’. The best we can do with labels like isolating and inflecting is to capture the dominant word-formation trends in a language. You may be wondering what we mean by dominant in this context. How agglutinating, isolating, etc. must a language be for it to be classified in a particular way? Linguists have attempted to answer this question by establishing an ISOLATING INDEX which is worked out by calculating the ratio of morphemes to grammatical words in running texts of several thousand words. A prototypical isolating language would always have one morpheme per grammatical word. The closer to this particular idealised language type a given language is, the more isolating it is said to be. At the other extreme we find the polysynthetic languages which approximate an average of four morphemes per grammatical word. Eskimo, with a ratio of 3.72 morphemes per word comes close to this. Sanskrit with a ratio of 2.59 is inflecting. The main difference between inflecting and agglutinating languages is not so much in the ratio of morphemes to grammatical words but in the one-to-one mapping of morphemes on morphs in agglutinating languages as opposed to the one-tomany mapping in inflecting languages. Let us end the chapter by determining the morphological type to which English belongs. The first thing to note is that English is not a perfect example of any one morphological type. English words can exemplify any of the four types we have described: [3.21] a. b. c. d.
The baby can walk now. Unfortunately customers wanted pre-packed cigars. We went. Potato-picking is back-breaking work.
The baby can walk now exemplifies isolating morphology. With the exception of the portmanteau morph can, which realises the morphemes meaning ‘able’, present tense, each word in this sentence contains only one morpheme. Contrast that with [3.21b] which illustrates agglutination. Here each word can be neatly divided morphemes that are arranged in a row one after the other. Un-fortun-ate-ly custom-er-s want-ed pre-packed cigar-s. There are just over 2.5 morphemes per word on average in this sentence. Likewise in We went, the ratio of morphemes to grammatical words is high. We is subject, first person and plural and went realises the lexeme ‘go’ and past tense. Again the average number of morphemes per word exceeds two. But in this case the morphemes are simultaneously realised by portmanteau morphs. This sentence exhibits an inflecting tendency. An even better example of a portmanteau morph is the verb is which represents the morphemes third person, singular, present tense and the lexeme be. It is impossible to divide up the word-form be and align these different morphemes with chunks of this verb. In the [3.21d], the key words are potato-picking and back-breaking which show English behaving like a polysynthetic language by incorporating the object of the verb into the verb itself: picking VERB potatoes backbreaking (ADJECTIVE). (Subsequently NOUN (OBJ) potato-picking NOUN; breaking VERB backs NOUN (OBJ) the verb is turned into a noun or adjective.)
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35
English has a bit of everything. However, when large samples of text are examined, it becomes clear that it is basically an isolating language. It has a ratio of 1.68 morphemes per word. Although the lexicon contains innumerable complex words, most words usually found in texts are simple. 3.7 SUMMARY In this chapter we have established that words have internal structure. They are built using morphemes which are put together following rigid principles that determine how they are arranged. While the elements of a sentence enjoy a considerable degree of mobility the morphemes in a word do not. A basic distinction was drawn between morphemes that are free and capable of occurring independently as words in their own right, and others that are bound which must always be attached to some other morphemes in words. Bound morphemes are incapable of occurring in isolation as self-standing words and so they cannot be manipulated directly by rules of the syntax. In doing morphological analysis, the principles of contrast and complementary distribution play a key role. If morphs (i.e. forms) contrast meaning, they represent distinct morphemes. But if morphs cannot contrast meaning, they are grouped together as allomorphs of the same morpheme. In principle, the relationship between morphemes and morphs is indirect. It involves representation, not composition. Hence, on the one hand the same morph may represent different morphemes and, on the other hand, the same morpheme may be represented by distinct allomorphs. Normally the relationship between a linguistic sign like a morpheme and its meaning is arbitrary. However, in a minority of cases, sound symbolism (in the shape of phonaesthemes and onomatopoeia) plays a role in word-formation. In such cases the relationship between the sign and its meaning is to some extent iconic. The structure of words in the languages of the world falls into four broad types: isolating, agglutinating, inflecting and polysynthetic. These types are determined by the patterning of morphemes in word-building. No language is morphologically ‘pure’. The classification only indicates the dominant pattern. Thus, although English is mostly an isolating type of language, it exhibits other tendencies as well. EXERCISES 1. List the meanings associated with the form -er in teach-er, Londoner, cooker, louder and chatt-er. If in doubt, consult a good dictionary. 2. Identify the morphemes in the words below and determine which ones are free, and which ones are bound. In some cases the choice will not be clear-cut. Explain the grounds for your decision. beds bedding bedrooms bedfellows unenthusiastically servility servant server
manly mannish manhood manager managers management mismanaged foothold
pedestrian pedal pedestal pedate biped tripod millipede centipede
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servitor served services servicing
footpaths footlights footman footsteps
expedition expedite impede impediment
3. Use the data below to explain the difference between syllables and morphemes. Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend; All tongues (the voice of souls) give thee that due, Utt’ring bare truth, even so as foes commend. (from Shakespeare, Sonnet 69) 4. Illustrating your answer with the italicised words below, explain the difference between lexeme and word-form; morpheme and allomorph: The boy in the green jumper is a better jumper than his brother who was the school champion last year. Each of his first two jumps so far have been higher than his brother ever jumped. 5. Study the passage below with which Henry James’s novel, The Portrait of a Lady begins and answer the questions which follow. Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country house in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. a. Identify the bound morphemes contained in the words in the above passage. Comment on any words that cannot be segmented uncontroversially. b. Identify all the portmanteau morphs and the morphemes that they represent. c. Select a word that illustrates each of the following morphological types: isolating, agglutinating and inflecting. Justify your selection. d. Identify the compound words in the text. Show the wordclass to which each one of them belongs. e. If we assumed that this passage is representative of the language, what morphological type would it indicate that English belongs to? Is it inflecting, agglutinating or isolating?
Chapter 4 Building words
4.1 WORDS AND JIGSAWS In this chapter we shall group morphemes into four broad categories on the basis of how they function in word-building. Just as anyone putting together a jigsaw must realise that the different pieces go in positions where their shape fits, anyone putting together words must also realise that the various morphemes available in a language can only be used in certain places where they fit. 4.2 KNOW THE PIECES OF THE JIGSAW We established in Chapter 3 that words have internal structure. What we shall do in this section is to consider in some detail the various elements used to create that structure. We will begin with a discussion of roots and affixes. This will be followed by conversion and compounding. 4.2.1 Roots are the core A ROOT is a morpheme which forms the core of a word. It is the unit to which other morphemes may be added, or looked at from another angle, it is what remains when all the affixes are peeled away. All roots belong to one of the LEXICAL CATEGORIES, i.e. they belong to the word classes of noun, verb, adverb or adjective. Here are some examples: [4.1] Noun
Adjective
Verb
Adverb
bell child
big black
bring eat
now soon
tree lamp light
good clean high
love sit speak
here then there
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BUILDING WORDS
lion
strong
think
very
We saw in the last chapter that many words contain a free morpheme which may occur on its own, with nothing appended to it. The vast majority of root morphemes that are capable of appearing on their own are CONTENT WORDS, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (see section 2.2.1). We also saw that there are very many morphemes which are always kept in bondage. These are the bound morphemes, which are totally barred from occurring independently. Many roots fall into this category. Examples of BOUND ROOTS are provided below. In each case the root is italicised and separated from the rest of the word (which may contain one or more morphemes). [4.2] santc- ‘holy’ sanct-ify sanct-um sanct-uary sanct-ity
vir- ‘man’ vir-ile vir-il-ity vir-ago trium-vir-ate
tox- ‘poison’ tox-in tox-ic non-tox-ic in-tox-ic-ate
loc- ‘place’ loc-al loc-al-ity dis-loc-ate loc-um
The data in [4.2] illustrate another important point. Some of the forms to which affixes are attached are words in their own right or bound roots which are not words. There is a need for a common term to refer to forms, be they bound roots or self-standing words, to which affixes may be attached. The term BASE is used to meet this need. Any form to which affixes are appended in wordformation is called a base. Bases to which affixes are added can be bare roots like loc- in loc-al, loc-um, loc-us or they can be independent words, e.g. govern in governor and govern-ment. They can also be forms which already contain other affixes, e.g. [[loc-al]-ity], [[loc-al]-ism]. An issue raised by the segmentation of words into morphemes is what counts as a morpheme. I suspect that sanct-, vir- and tox-do not jump at you as obvious examples of morphemes in the same way that govern does because their meanings are not immediately obvious. An etymological dictionary, or a knowledge of Latin, might help to persuade you that these are indeed recognisable morphemes. But your intuitions as a speaker of English would probably not enable you readily to reach that conclusion. So the question arises of how to treat such awkward cases. If a form was recognisable at some time in the past as a morpheme, does that mean that for ever more it should be recognised as a morpheme? Where do we draw the line between forms whose analysis is only of historical or etymological relevance and those whose analysis is well motivated in the synchronic study of the language? We will just note this tricky problem for the moment and defer tackling it until section (6.6). 4.2.2 Affixes are for appending It is clear that many words are complex. They are made up of a root together with other morphemes. Any morphemes that are appended to the root are called AFFIXES. We shall discuss affixes in a preliminary way in this section and return to them in more detail in section (4.4.1). Affixes can be attached before or after the base. For instance, using the root polite as our base, we can form the new lexical items by adding -ness to give polite-ness (‘the property of being polite’) or -ly to give
ENGLISH WORDS
39
polite-ly (‘in a polite manner’). An affix that is appended after the base (e.g. -ness and -ly) is called a SUFFIX while an affix that goes before the base, as im- does in im-polite, is called a PREFIX. In some languages affixes are not just placed before or after the base. Some are inserted inside it. Such affixes are called INFIXES. Thus, in the Ulwa language of Nicaragua, the portmanteau morph -ka representing ‘third person, singular, possessive’ is placed after the first metrical foot of the word (this roughly means it goes after the second vowel). So -ka is a suffix where the base has just two vowels as in [4. 3a] and [4.3b]. But it is an infix where the base is longer and contains more than two vowels, as in [4.3c] and [4.3d]: [4.3] Base a. kii ‘stone’ b. sana ‘deer’ c. suulu ‘dog’ d. siwanak ‘root’ (based on McCarthy and Prince 1990)
Possessed kii-ka sana-ka suu-ka-lu siwi-ka-nak
‘his/her stone’ ‘his/her deer’ ‘his/her dog’ ‘his/her root’
English has no bound infix morphemes. But this does not mean that it has no infixing whatsoever. In expressive language, whole words can be inserted into other words as infixes as in: [4.4] My ex-husband now lives in Minnebloodysota.
Several more colourful four-letter words could fill the position occupied by bloody. Can you think of some? Furthermore, there is a class of bound morphemes which are attached at the margins of words but which are not affixes. Such morphemes are called CLITICS. They co-habit with a word without getting into a deep relationship with it: clitics retain a degree of independence. For instance, they can easily move from one word to another within a phrase if the syntactic conditions are right. A good example of a clitic in English is the GENITIVE ’s as in the professor’s car. It can be attached to whatever noun precedes the last noun of a genitive noun phrase. So we can say the professor’s car and the professor of ancient history’s car. Of course, in both cases it is the professor who owns the car but the genitive ’s is not necessarily attached to professor. (See (8.3) for further discussion.) Up to now all the word-building elements we have encountered have been morphs that represent a morpheme; they have all been entities associated with some meaning. This is not always the case. Sometimes, morphological forms that do not represent any meaning are used in word-building in the same way that blank fillers are put in by a joiner to occupy space when cupboards or doors do not quite fill the entire space available. We will call such ‘blanks’ FORMATIVES. For instance, the adjective-forming suffix -al is attached directly to region to form region-al and to politic to form political. However, when -al is suffixed to some other bases a bridging formative is needed. Thus, in the case of contract we get contractual. The meaningless formative -u- must intervene between the base contract and the suffix -al. We cannot just say *contractal. Similarly, in maternal and paternal the meaningless formative -n- is interposed between the suffix -al and the bases pater and mater. An even better example of a formative is the form u in rivulet. This u is inserted after river (and the final -er (/e/ is dropped) before the suffix -let, meaning ‘small’. Elsewhere, as in-piglet, the suffix -let attaches directly to the root.
40
BUILDING WORDS
4.3 THE MAIN TYPES OF WORD-BUILDING: INFLECTION AND DERIVATION We have seen above the types of morphemes that are available. Now we will consider how they are deployed. We will see that word-building processes fall into two broad categories: INFLECTION and DERIVATION. Typically inflection contributes a morpheme that is required in order to ensure that the word has a form that is appropriate for the grammatical context in which it is used. For instance, if we have a third person subject, a present tense verb agreeing with it must take the -s ending; anything else is forbidden: [4.5] She runs her business very efficiently. *She run her business very efficiently. *She running her business very efficiently.
To take another example, a monosyllabic adjective (e.g. tall, nice, short etc.) or a disyllabic adjective with a weak second syllable (e.g. clever, thirsty, dirty etc.) must take the comparative degree of suffix -er if it is followed by than indicating comparison. Failure to use the -er ending results in ungrammaticality: [4.6] John is taller than Jane. He is dirtier than Robin. I am shorter than you.
(*John is tall/tallest than Jane.) (*He is dirty/dirtiest than Robin.) (*I am short/shortest than you.)
OBLIGATORINESS is an important feature of inflection. In [4.5] the choice of the verb form ending in s and in [4.6] the choice of the adjective ending in -er is not a matter of personal preference. It is mandatory. The application of an inflectional process is automatically triggered if the right syntactic conditions obtain. Can you diagnose what is wrong with the extract from Roald Dahl’s The BFG—beside the spelling and punctuation? (See also (4.4.1) below for further discussion of inflection.) I HAS RITTEN A BOOK AND IT IS SO EXCITING NOBODY CAN PUT IT DOWN. AS SOON AS YOU HAS RED THE FIRST LINE YOU IS SO HOOKED ON IT YOU CANNOT STOP UNTIL THE LAST PAGE. IN ALL THE CITIES PEEPLE IS WALKING IN THE STREETS BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEIR FACES IS BURIED IN MY BOOK AND DENTISTS IS READING IT AND TRYING TO FILL TEETHS AT THE SAME TIME BUT NOBODY MINDS BECAUSE THEY IS ALL READING IT TOO IN THE DENTIST’S CHAIR. DRIVERS IS READING IT WHILE DRIVING AND CARS IS CRASHING ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. BRAIN SURGEONS IS READING IT WHILE THEY IS OPERATING ON BRAINS AND AIRLINE PILOTS IS READING IT AND GOING TO TIMBUCTOO INSTEAD OF LONDON. FOOT-BALL PLAYERS IS READING IT ON THE FIELD BECAUSE THEY CAN’T PUT IT DOWN AND SO IS OLIMPICK RUNNERS WHILE THEY IS RUNNING. EVERYBODY HAS TO SEE WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT IN MY BOOK AND WHEN I WAKE UP I IS STILL TINGLING WITH EXCITEMENT AT BEING THE GREATEST RITER THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN UNTIL MY MUMMY COMES IN AND SAYS I WAS LOOKING AT YOUR ENGLISH
ENGLISH WORDS
41
EXERCISE BOOK LAST NITE AND REALLY YOUR SPELLING IS ATROSHUS SO IS YOUR PUNTULASHON.
Whereas inflection is driven by the requirement to form a word with the appropriate form in a particular grammatical context, derivation is motivated by the desire to create new lexical items using pre-existing morphemes and words. When you need a new word (in the sense of vocabulary item), you do not usually need to make it up from scratch. It is possible to create new lexical items by recycling pre-existing material. This is derivation. It takes one of three forms: AFFIXATION, CONVERSION or COMPOUNDING. Derivation enables us to add new lexical items to the OPEN WORD-CLASSES of noun, adjective, verb and adverb. These are the classes that contain the so-called content words (cf. section 2.2.1). We are extremely unlikely to create new words belonging to classes like pronouns, articles or prepositions. Hence these classes are said to be CLOSED. It is extremely unlikely that one fine morning you will wake up with the inspired idea that English needs some new articles—the same boring the, a/an have been around too long — and coin a dozen fresh articles as a public service. Not everyone would characterise derivation in the way that I have, contrasting derivation which produces new lexical items with inflection which produces grammatical words. Many linguists restrict the term derivation to the creation of new lexical items by adding affixes (including ‘zero’ ones: see below p. 94). They explicitly distinguish it from compounding which combines two bases containing root morphemes to form a new lexical item. I prefer a two-way distinction between inflection on the one hand, and a broadly defined category of derivation on the other, because it highlights clearly the fact that essentially all word-formation boils down to one of two things: either the creation of lexical items, the province of derivation, or the creation of grammatical words, the province of inflection. It should be pointed out, however, that there are other (marginal) methods of forming lexical items that fall outside derivation (cf. Chapter 9). 4.4 DERIVATION: FABRICATING WORDS Most of the words you use in a day have been part of the English language for a long time. But that does not necessarily mean that you have memorised all of them. In many cases, and to varying degrees, we can reconstitute words we encounter as the need arises, or even occasionally coin new ones. What makes this possible is our mastery of the rules of word-formation. Confronted with a complex word, you will often be able to deconstruct it using your knowledge of word structure. How can knowledge of word-structure be represented? We can represent the structure of a complex word such as teachers, Americanisation, governmental and ungovernability in two ways. We can use LABELLED BRACKETS as in [4.7] or a TREE DIAGRAM as in [4.8]. Either way, we want to show which morphemes in the word go together, and what string of morphemes forms the input to each word-formation process. Further we need to know the word-class to which the resulting word belongs. [4.7] Labelled brackets [teach]ver]Ns]N [Americ(a)]Nan]ADJ is]Vation]N [[govern]Vment]Nal]ADJ
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BUILDING WORDS
[4.8] Tree diagrams
Many complex words that contain multiple affixes have internal structure. When a base that contains one or more affixes is used as an input to a process that attaches more affixes, certain morphemes go more closely together than others and form a subgrouping. 4.4.1 Affixation: prefixes and suffixes Probably the commonest method of forming words (in the sense of lexical terms) is by AFFIXATION. Affixes have already been introduced in section (4.2.2). We will now briefly examine their characteristics and return to them in more detail in Chapter 6. The meanings of many affixes are not altogether transparent. It may be necessary sometimes to look them up in an etymological dictionary (like the OED or Skeat 1982). This of course raises questions about what we are doing when we divide words up into morphemes. To what extent is the morphological segmentation of words a historical exercise? In this chapter we will concentrate on the identification of morphemes and leave this awkward question to one side until section (6.6). It is possible to group together affixes in different ways depending on one’s purposes. For instance, we can classify affixes on the basis of their meaning. We can recognise a class of negative prefixes, e.g. im- (impossible), un- (un-necessary), dis- (dis-approve), non-(non-combatant) etc. However, that will not be our approach. We will instead group affixes together on the basis of their phonological properties. It has been found very useful to classify affixes on the basis of their phonological behaviour, in particular on the basis of their effects (if any) on stress in the base to which they are attached. It has been shown that affixes fall into two major classes: some are NEUTRAL while others are NON-NEUTRAL in their effects. Normally, prefixes are stress neutral. Thus, in [4.9] stress falls on the same syllable in the word regardless of their presence or absence. When determining which syllable is going to be the most prominent in the word, these prefixes are not taken into account. It is as though they were invisible. [4.9] Stress-neutral prefixes be- (forming derivative verbs with the general meaning of ‘around’) beset, besmear, becloud co-/con-/com- ‘together’ co-operate, co-habit, co-appear, co-opt, combine, conspire ex- ‘former’ ex-miner, ex-wife, ex-leader, ex-director, ex-pupil, ex-pilot mis- ‘wrongly, badly’ mis-understand, mis-manage, mis-read, mis-take, misinform, mis-allocate mal(e)- ‘bad(ly)’ malcontent, malpractice, maladjusted, malefactor, mal evolent
ENGLISH WORDS
43
re- ‘again’ re-think, re-take, re-play, re-examine, re-issue un- ‘negative’ unexciting, unhappy, uncomfortable, unwise, unmanageable, uncool dis- ‘negative’ (with adjectives) dishonest, dishonourable, discomfortable dis- ‘negative, reversive’ (with verbs) disallow, disagree, disapprove, dislike, disaffirm, disbelieve, disarm in- ‘negative’ (with adjectives) inarticulate, inactive, inept, inevitable, intangible, innumerable un- ‘negative’ (with adjectives) unoriginal, unusual, unseemly, unripe, unpleasant, unsavoury, unreliable un- ‘reversive’ (with verbs) undo, unblock, unpack, unravel, unpick, unseat, unroll, unsaddle
In words of two syllables the initial syllable attracts stress when the word-form realises a verb, but it repels stress when the word-form represents a noun or adjective. In the latter case stress falls on the second syllable. It so happens that in many of these words there is a prefix but the presence of a prefix is not the vital factor. It is being disyllabic that counts. Admittedly, historically words like preserve were formed using the prefix pre-. But that is no longer relevant. People generally are unaware of it. [4.10] Stress on prefix a. NOUN `conduct `contract `convert `digest `export `import `increase `permit
b.
`preserve `project `present `produce `reject `subject `survey ADJECTIVE `abstract
Stress on first syllable of the base VERB con`duct con`tract con`vert di`gest ex`port im`port in`crease per`mit pre`serve pro`ject pre`sent pro`duce re`ject sub`ject sur`vey VERB ab`stract
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BUILDING WORDS
`perfect `present
per`fect pre`sent
In some cases, in addition to the stress change, there is also a change in the vowels, e.g. record /`rek:d/ (noun) record /ri`k:d/ (verb). Here we will ignore such phonological changes, which are not important for our present purposes. What [4.10] shows is that besides having morphological consequences (creating a word belonging to a particular grammatical category), affixation also has phonological consequences. Your knowledge of English word-structure involves knowing the meaning and grammatical class of the words produced using a given affix. (You need to know the grammatical class of the words you form in order to know in what grammatical contexts you can deploy them.) But your knowledge goes further than that. It also includes knowing the pronunciation (and if you are literate, the spelling) of the words formed by attaching that affix so that you can produce the appropriate forms of the words. As you can see by looking back at the extract from The BFG, the ability to form, or find in your mental dictionary, the right lexeme is not sufficient. For competent use of the language you also need to produce correct grammatical words and word-forms realising your lexical items. Next, let us survey derivational suffixes. Coverage is not meant to be comprehensive by any means, but it should be sufficient to provide a reasonably good picture of derivational affixation. In [4.11] I have provided a representative sample of derivational suffixes together with their general meaning, the grammatical class of bases that they attach to and the grammatical class of the resulting word. Discussion of the phonological effects of suffixes will be taken up in Chapter 6. [4.11] DERIVATIONAL a. Verb -ation -ant -ant -er -er -ing -ist -ion
-ment
-ery
SUFFIXES Noun ‘derives nouns of action from verbs’: don-ation, reconcili-ation, regul-ation, confiscation, simul-ation ‘person that does whatever the verb means’: inhabit-ant, celebr-ant, protest-ant, occup-ant, attend-ant ‘instrument that is used to do whatever the verb means’: lubric-ant, stimul-ant, intoxic-ant ‘person who does whatever the verb means’: teach-er, runn-er, writ-er, build-er, paint-er ‘instrument that is used to do whatever the verb means’: cook-er, strain-er, drain-er, pok-er ‘act of doing whatever the verb indicates’: learn-ing, read-ing, writ-ing, sav-ing, rid-ing, wait-ing ‘derives agent nouns from verbs—one who does X’: cycl-ist, typ-ist, copy-ist ‘derives nouns of condition or action from verbs’: eros-ion (from erode), corros-ion (from corrode), persuas-ion (from persuade), radiat-ion, promotion ‘the result or product of the action of the verb; the instrument used to perform the action of the verb’: pave-ment, appoint-ment, accomplish-ment, govern-ment, pay-ment ‘derives nouns indicating a place where animals are kept or plants grown’: catt-ery, pigg-ery, orang-ery, shrubb-ery
ENGLISH WORDS
-ery -ee
b.
Verb -ing -ise/-ize -ive -able -ing
c.
Noun -ate -ise/-ize -ise/-ize
d.
Noun -al -ate
-ish -less
-ful -(i)an
-some e.
Adj -ate -ise
‘derives nouns indicating place where the action specified by the verb takes place’: bak-ery, cann-ery, brew-ery, fish-cry, refin-ery, tann-ery ‘(passive) person who undergoes action indicated by the verb’: employ-ee, detain-ee, pay-ee, intern-ee Adj. ‘in the process or state of doing whatever the verb indicates’: wait-ing (as in waiting car) stand-ing (as in standing passengers) ‘to bring about whatever the adjective signals’: real-ise, neutral-ise, fertil-ise, immun-ise ‘having the tendency to X; having the quality character of X; given to the action of Xing’: act-ive, pens-ive, indicat-ive, evas-ive, product-ive, representat-ive ‘able to be X-ed’: read-able, govern-able; manage-able, do-able ‘the act of doing whatever the verb signifies’: sail-ing, sing-ing, fight-ing, writ-ing Verb ‘derives verbs from nouns’: regul-ate, capacit-ate, don-ate ‘to bring about whatever the noun signals’: colon-ise, American-ise, computer-ise ‘put in the place or state indicated by the noun’: hospital-ise, terror-ise, jeopard-ise Adj. ‘pertaining to X’: autumn-al, dent-al, division-al, reacreation-al, tradition-al, medicin-al ‘derives adjectives denoting state’: intim-ate, accur-ate, obdur-ate (There is normally a corresponding noun ending in -acy, e.g. intim-acy, accur-acy, obdur-acy.) ‘having the (objectionable) nature, qualities or character of X’: lout-ish, fiend-ish, freak-ish, child-ish, mother henn-ish ‘without X’: joy-less, care-less, fear-less, child-less ‘filled with X’: joy-ful, care-ful, fear-ful, cheer-ful ‘associated with whatever the noun indicates’: Chomsky-an, Dominic-an, suburb-an, Trinidad-(i) an, Canad-(i) an, Ghana-(i) an, reptil-(i) an, mammal-(i) an ‘forms adjectives from verbs, having quality X’: quarrel-some, trouble-some, tire-some. Verb ‘cause to become, do etc. whatever the adjective indicates’: activ-ate (