Lecture 1: Introduction

G2 Basics of Morphological Analysis, SS09

Sandhya Sundaresan
April 22, 2009

1 Course Logistics
• This is a G2 Übungskurs

• Title: Basics of morphological analysis

• Instructor: Sandhya Sundaresan

Course times, dates, location

• This class meets every Wednesday from 14.00 - 15.30pm

• The location for this class is: Room: 7.102 (H7)

Course structure
There will be weekly readings, homeworks, a midterm and a final exam at the end of the semester.
Grading The final grade for the course will be divided as follows:

• Final exam

• Midterm

• Attendance/Participation

Office hours and contacting me

There are two ways to contact me.

• Office hours: t.b.a, Room 620 (IfLA)

• If you need to set up a meeting at a different time, talk to me at the end of class or email me:
sandhya@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de

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1.1 Readings, References, and Webpage
Course Webpage

• http://ifla.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/mitarbeiter/sandhya/Morph/morph_index.html

• Look here for everything: up-to-date syllabus (will be changed during the course of the
semester!), lecture notes, homework exercises, weekly reading, etc.

Course reading
There are two types of reading for the course: lecture handouts and the course textbook
Lecture handouts

• I make handouts for every lecture (like the one you’re reading now)

• The handouts will contain practically everything I talk about in the lecture, so you should
use them (along with the course textbook) to follow what I’m saying in class, look up what
you forget later, do your homework exercises, and to prepare for the exams.

• The handouts for every week will be available on the course webpage by the Monday of
that week.

• Starting next week, I won’t pass out copies of the handouts like I did today, so print them
out from the website and bring them with you to class every week.

Course textbook

• There is also a textbook for this course: I will assign readings from this book every week.

• The book is: Harley, Heidi. 2006. English words: A linguistic introduction. Oxford: Black-
well Publishing.

• Availability: Kopiervorlagen are available at the IfLA Sekratariat (Heilbronnerstraße 7).

(A previous edition of this book is also available online, here:
http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~hharley/PDFs/WordsBook/index.html )

2 Introduction: what is morphology?

Before we go into the nitty gritty details of this course, let’s quickly look at what the term mor-
phology means.

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What is morphology?

• Etymology:

Greek morphe ‘form’ + logos ‘word’

• morphology = the study of forms

• It has applications in geology, biology and also in linguistics

• In linguistics, which is what we’re interested in, the term morphology refers to the study of
word forms.

OED definition: (Linguistic) morphology refers to “that branch of grammar which is

concerned with word-formation and inflexion.”

So in this course we’ll be looking at words a whole lot:

• we’ll look inside a word and see what it’s made of and what structure it has

• we’ll see how sound and meaning combine inside a word

• we’ll study how new words are created

• we’ll also see what types of words are out there.

But before we do all that, we’ll first have to answer a very simple question:

What is a word?

Exercise 1: As accurately as possible, answer the following question:

What is a word?

3 Wordhood: What is a word?

Definition 1: A word is a sequence of letters written consecutively, with no spaces

between them.

According to this definition:

In the sentence: the tall girl in my house Words = the, tall, girl, in, my, house

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This seems intuitively correct. But what about the following examples?

th (from the), ta (from talk), and rl (from girl)

According to Definition 1, these should be words too - since they are a series of consecutive letters
with no spaces between them!
Oops. OK, let’s try again.

Definition 2: A word is a sequence of letters written consecutively, with spaces on

either side of these letters.

This definition seems a bit better because it correctly predicts that the strings ‘th’, ‘ta’, and ‘rl’ are
not words - since these do not have spaces on either side of them.
But there’s another problem! That is, Definition 2 relies crucially on a word being something that
is written, with spaces.

Problem with Definition 2: Words are not just written, they are also spoken.

So we still need a better definition for what a word is. Let’s try once more.

Definition 3: A word is a sequence of sounds that we pronounce consecutively, with

no pauses.

This seems alright, but if we think about it a bit more, we can immediately spot another problem
with it.

Can you think what it is?

An immediate problem with Definition 3 is that, in a normal conversation, we don’t always:

pronounce . . . words . . . like . . . this.

In other words, we pronounce several words together, without any pauses between them.

Problem with Definition 3: We often utter several words at once without pauses
between them.

So Definition 3 isn’t fully correct either.

However, it is true that if we did want to put pauses in-between words, we could.
It is also true that we would never put pauses inside of a word, like this:

th . . . is . . . lec . . . ture . . . i . . . s . . . bor . . . ing.

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OK, so maybe we’re finally getting somewhere. Let’s try one more time.

Definition 4: A word is a sequence of sounds that could be pronounced by itself, with

pauses on either side.

This definition correctly predicts that in the following example:

big . . . blue . . . sky

each of the letter sequences - big, blue, and sky - are words because they have pauses on either
side.
However, unlike Definition 3, this new definition doesn’t say that every word has to be surrounded
by pauses on either side.

That is, big, blue, and sky - could still be words in the following example, where they do not have
pauses on either side:

big blue sky

But sadly, even this definition is not fully correct and makes the wrong predictions!

Exercise 2: Definition 4 is still not completely correct. Think of at least one problem with this
definition and give examples.

There are two problems with Definition 4:

• It wrongly predicts that any sequence of letters at all that can have a pause on either side is a
word.

a. This is clearly not the case

b. E.g. nonsense sequences like: crinch, drimble, and flodge are not words even if said with
pauses between them.

• It wrongly predicts that a phrase like: how are you? which can be uttered all together, with
a pause on each side - is a single word.

Problem with Definition 4:

⇒ It doesn’t account for the fact that words have meaning.

⇒ It also doesn’t differentiate between a word and groups of words, i.e. it doesn’t
account for the size of a word.

OK, so we need to return to the blackboard and come up with a better definition for word. One,
crucially, that doesn’t predict wrong things about a word.
Our new definition should try to avoid the problems of the previous ones:

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 • It should take into account the fact that words carry meaning.

• It should take into account the size of a word, i.e. somehow show that it is smaller than a
phrase (like: how are you?).

Here is another definition, one that is also found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

Definition 5: word: a combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a lan-
guage to express an idea (e.g. to denote a thing, attribute, or relation), and constituting
an ultimate minimal element of speech having a meaning as such: a vocable.

Definition 5 correctly predicts that:

• Nonsense letter-sequences like: crinch, drimble, and flodge are not words because, even
though they are minimal units, they don’t ‘express an idea’.

• A phrase like How are you? - is not a word because, even though it conveys an idea, it is not
an ‘ultimate minimal unit’. That is, it contains smaller items like how and are and you that
can be written with pauses and convey meaning.

4 More problems: when speech-unit 6= meaning-unit

Definition 5 above is the most successful definition we have so far because it accounts for two
fundamental properties of a word:

• the inherent meaning of a word: the idea(s) it expresses

• the size of a word: i.e. as the ultimate minimal unit of speech

But problems arise because these two concepts - meaning and speech-size - don’t always refer to
the same thing.
That is:

• a minimal unit of speech might not have a meaning

• the minimal unit of meaning might be smaller than the minimal unit of speech.

This all sounds very complicated! But it gets easier if we look at some examples.

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4.1 Minimal speech units with no meaning
Consider the underlined items in the following sentences:
Susie walked to and fro.
The poems ran the gamut from terrible to terrific.
(In this context, consider also German: Hack und Sack.) Most English speakers know what the
phrases: to and fro and ran the gamut mean; to and fro means something like ‘back and forth’.
And run the gamut means something like: ‘vary as much as possible’.

But what does fro mean by itself? And what does gamut mean by itself?
Maybe you can guess and say fro means something like forth. But this is only a guess and doesn’t
seem quite right either because:
• fro can’t be replaced with forth: to and forth; this is nonsensical
• forth can’t be replaced with fro: you couldn’t ever say something like: I started fro on my
journey.
Similarly with gamut. You might guess and say that gamut means something similar to range or
variety. But you could never replace any of these expressions with gamut.
⇒ Ultimately, strings like gamut and fro only really make sense inside the phrases:
ran the gamut and to and fro, respectively.

⇒ As items without meaning, they are not words - since we have said that all words
must carry a meaning. But as items that can be spoken by themselves - as ‘ultimate
minimal units of speech’ - they do seem to be words.

⇒ So strings like fro and gamut seem to be both words and not words at the same
time!
What do we do about this dilemma?

Idioms
Now consider the underlined parts in the following examples:
[i] Sally finally kicked the bucket
[ii] This scholarship is a real feather in her cap
Sentence [i] above doesn’t mean that Sally actually went and kicked a bucket (although it could,
of course, have this meaning in a certain context - but this isn’t what we’re interested in). It means
that Sally died because kick the bucket means ‘die’.

Similarly [ii] is not saying that a scholarship is actually a real physical feather in someone’s cap;
feather in the cap means ‘achievement’.

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 Both these phrases are idioms.

Idioms are problematic to our definition of word because they are all several individual words that
share a single meaning.
That is:

⇒ Each idiom is a minimal unit of meaning that is composed of many ‘speech units’
or ‘words’.
⇒ So here again we have a clash between a minimal unit of meaning and a minimal
unit of sound.

4.2 Minimal meaning units that are not speech units

Now consider the following strings:

cows, photographic, gardener, kissing, lockable, unhappy

What is special about these examples?

Each of them can be represented as follows:

cows → cow + s
photographic → photograph + ic
gardener → garden + er
kissing → kiss + ing
lockable → lock + able
unhappy → un + happy

Of course, we know the meanings of cow, photograph, garden, kiss, lock and happy.
But what about the other strings in our list: s, ic, er, ing, able, and un?
These have meanings too.

• s means something like ‘more than one’; it makes a plural noun out of a singular noun.

• un means something like ‘not’ or ‘opposite of’.

• ing means something like ‘in the present continuous tense’. And so on.

The problem with these types of letter-sequences is that they have a meaning but can’t be pro-
nounced by themselves. For instance, if someone asked you how many brothers you have, you
would never respond with “s” meaning ‘more than one’!

In other words:

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 ⇒ These are minimal units of meanings but are not minimal units of speech.

⇒ So, in terms of carrying meaning, they seem to be words but because they are not
independent speech units, they are not words.

⇒ So again we have the same dilemma where a minimal meaning unit 6= minimal
speech unit.

Exercise 3: Give 2 more examples of a meaning-unit that is not a speech-unit.

Give one more example of a speech unit that is not a meaning-unit.
Examples can be in English or German.

4.3 A solution to the dilemma: two types of words

The clashes we have seen so far have all involved examples where:

meaning-unit 6= speech-unit

• In the case of idioms (like kick the bucket), we have a single meaning unit that is larger than
a single speech unit.

• In the case of strings (also called affixes) like -s, -ic, -er, -able, and un-), we again have a
single meaning-unit that is smaller than a single speech-unit.

• In the case of strings like fro and gamut, we have a single speech-unit that is smaller than a
single meaning unit.

What is the solution to this problem?

An easy way out of this dilemma is to say that there are two types of word: phonological word
and listeme (meaning word):

• Phonological word: This is a minimal speech unit: a sequence of letters that can be pro-
nounced by itself, with pauses on either side. This is the normal, everyday interpretation of
‘word’.

• Listeme (meaning word): This is a minimal unit of meaning (i.e.) the smallest unit that
can independently carry meaning. It is called a listeme because, as language-speakers, we
contain a memorized list of sound-meaning combinations in our head.

By defining two completely different types of word, we avoid the dilemma that arises from:

speech-unit 6= meaning-unit.

In this new system, both are words - just different types of words.

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Relationship between phonological word and listeme

• In the simplest, and most common case, a phonological word also happens to be a meaning-
word/listeme. We can represent this as follows:

phonological word ↔ listeme

A lot of the words we use everyday (for example: cow, cloud, of, the and thousands of others)
belong to this group: each word is both a phonological word and a listeme.

• In the difficult cases, we have two possibilities:

1. a phonological word that is not a listeme (e.g. phonological words like fro and gamut)
2. A listeme that is not a phonological word (e.g. all affixes like -s, -ic, -able and possibly
also contractions like -m in I’m and n’t in don’t, isn’t, can’t etc. and idioms like: kick the
bucket)

In this course, we’ll study both types of words in detail.

So, we’ll look at the phonological word and see what it is made of, how new phonological words
are formed etc.

And we’ll also look at listemes and study this in some detail.

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