Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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Question about alphabetical order [migrated]
The Wikipedia entry about "Alphabetical order", says:
To determine which of two strings of characters comes first when arranging in alphabetical order, their first letters are compared. If ...
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1answer
51 views
A question about connotation meaning and denotation meaning
Here is a word, "flightless" which means "(of a bird or an insect) naturally unable to fly". So should we say it refers to the word's denotation meaning or connotation meaning?
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1answer
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Are rhyming words in the same phrase considered a form of reduplication?
Reduplication is rare in English AFAIK. However, we do have phrasal terms that consist of rhyming words: hanky-panky, hokey-pokey, hotsy-totsy, hoity-toity, itty-bitty, teenie-weenie, and itsy-bitsy ...
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Morphology of 'order' and 'supervisor'
I wonder how many morphemes are at work in words 'order' and 'supervisor', used in the structure 'the unbearable orders of her supervisor'. The source of this issue counts "6 bound morphemes, 3 ...
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How can I calculate the morphological similarity between sentences?
For my bachelor thesis i am probing various text similarity metrics for how much they incorporate different aspects of sentences.
To get those aspects I use datasets that are annotated for semantic ...
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1answer
46 views
Morphological Difference
I'm challenging with this question:
Which word is morphologically different from others?
fishy
dirty
pinky (answer)
sneaky
Could anyone, kindly, give me some instruction on why choice 3 is ...
2
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0answers
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Historical development from adjective to concrete noun to more abstract noun
I'd really appreciate any knowledge or advice on further reading about the following. Excuse my naivete- I am at the start of this investigation.
I'm studying an historical corpus and I have found a ...
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1answer
76 views
How to determine if a word contains an infix?
Here is a question from the past exam.
Which of the following words contains an infix?
a. pedicure
b. intangible
c. temptation
d. biology
e. all of the above
An infix is an affix that is inserted into ...
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What is the phenomenon that each word variation is regarded equally, not a variation of the root?
This is a thing that I remember that I read in a cognitive psychology book, but I can't find it out. For example, the word cats has two morphemes: cat + s. So we usually regard cats as a morphological ...
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1answer
89 views
Where are the letters Ē½ and Ē£ used ( U+01E3 and U+01FD)?
I tried to find examples but while Ʀ is widely used (Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Old English at least) I can't find anything about their accented versions.
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What are the main types of inflection that can be found in the languages of the world? [closed]
What are the main types of inflection that can be found in the languages of the world? If you can, define them and give an example for each of them please. Thank you!
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Terminology for this kind of affixes
I was solving an IOL sample exercise (which can be found here) about the Aymara language. I did it, it was kinda hard but I did it. One of the words in it was challwampiwa.
The first part (challwa) ...
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According to the Elsewhere Principle, can a syntactic rule block a morphological one, or a morphological rule a phonological one?
I read up on the Elsewhere Principle. In the linked article two examples are given:
The syntactic comparative "more + adjective" can be overruled by the morphological comparative "adjective+er" for (...
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3answers
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Is there a name for when a 'c' becomes an [s] sound in words like rusticity, when originally it was a 'c' in rustiC?
I know it's a sound change, but is there a specific name for it? It's for an assignment I'm writing on the phonological transparency of the suffix -ity.
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2answers
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What is the difference between compound words and derivational words?
I know that compound words are made up with two small words, but is "tax-free" or "timeless" compound word? How about "thought-free"?
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1answer
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Is there an adposition type that occurs before both the modified noun and the object?
From what I've read, there are four attested types of adpositions. Prepositions and postpositions are the most common, but circumpositions (discontinuous morphemes that occur around their objects) ...
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2answers
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What linguistic category would informal contractions fall under?
I'm sure this question has an extremely simple answer, but I'm comparing the dialects from two movies, one being a typical Hollywood movie, and one being a documentary. I am listing any linguistic ...
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1answer
37 views
How did this soft mutation happened?
The mutations in the Welsh language were originated from elements that came before words and affected them etc.
How does the fact that a certain noun is the direct object of a sentence trigger a soft ...
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Is it correct for the rules of this voice alternations?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. I'm doing some practice about assimilation but I don't know if it is correct.
Here is the question:
"cat" and "cats"
"dog" and "dogs"
"hen" and "hens"
And this is ...
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1answer
80 views
Are there natural languages that tolerate ambiguity between abilitive and possibilitive modalities?
In other words, is there any language that uses the same mood to convey ability and possibility? For example, is there a language in which a sentence meaning "He'll be able to do that" and "He might ...
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1answer
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What should the phonological rules be for this alternation?
I'm a graduate student from Korea. :) May I ask you guys a question about phonology?
In the data, divinity and divine, what are the phonological rule and phonological mechanisms for the alternation ...
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1answer
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Question about the concept of free morpheme
Studying Understanding Morphology, by Haspelmath, couldn't find a reference to the concept of "free morpheme".
Is that concept standard among linguists? What would be a better alternative, in any ...
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1answer
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How should this type of variation in the root be treated?
It's a bit of a silly question that popped out in my mind as a (quasi-)linguist with a great experience with portuguese (it is also my mother tongue). How should one treat the following alternation in ...
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3answers
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Learning linguistics from scratch
I am a student of mathematics and physics but have been inspired to learn more about linguistics after having learned a new language this year. I found the subject deeply fascinating. As of now I am a ...
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Case in German Nouns
German has an interesting situation in its noun phrases - articles and adjectives reflect case, but the noun itself does not.
Der groĆe Mann sieht das Haus. ("The big man sees the house," ...
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in search of nouns with a mismatch between morphological and semantic gender [duplicate]
I am currently trying to identify nouns whose morphological gender differs from their semantic gender. Here are three examples I could identify so far:
French: Le laideron - masculine morpho-...
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1answer
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“Romanticism” in different languages
I noticed that "Romanticism" in French is "romantisme," contrary to my guess of "romanticisme." I was curious how other the word was spelled in other European languages.
Similar to English ("icism")
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1answer
80 views
Is the use of the present participle verb form as adjectives or subjects or objects an example of conversion (a.k.a. zero-derivation)?
This is a pretty straight forward question. But here are some examples:
Baking is my hobby. (used as a subject thing, or as some would call it, a gerund or verbal noun)
I will be a contestant in the ...
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1answer
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What is the name for a placename that contains what the thing is in a different language?
For example Mount Maunganui. In MÄori maunganui means "large mountain" and thus when literally translated into English it means "Mount Large Mountain". Another example would be the river Avon. In ...
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3answers
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How can we call a word that matches a few criteria in the question?
What fits the criteria:
ah, okay, good, better, best, green, child, children, student, to study, slow
What does not fit the criteria:
greener, greenest, students, studying, studied, slow down
Why:
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How definitive are “patterns” in grammar across languages?
So when you learn a new language from English like Spanish in school, they make it seem like "hey there's these clear patterns and rules once learned you'll master spanish". So you learn the verb ...
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3answers
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Is there a database of literal linguistic glosses across languages or per language?
I would like to compare different sentence structures and would like to look up sentence glosses quickly. Are there any databases out there, either for all languages or for individual languages?
In ...
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0answers
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How do languages express multiple simultaneous applicatives?
Some languages use an applicative voice construction exclusively for certain meanings.
Applicatives may also be the only way of expressing such roles, as in
the Bantu Chaga languages, where ...
2
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2answers
111 views
Can I form a morphological condition like this?
I am pretty new to this site. I have a question about setting up a morphological condition. eg.
In a language, we see a pattern that consonant-ending as well as É-ending words are pluralized with a ...
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0answers
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What's the difference between lexeme and lexical item?
While studying An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, came across this fragment.
Section 2.1 pointed out that we tend to think of words as possessing two ...
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3answers
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Is the concept of grammatical function related to inflexion?
Studying the book Understanding Morphology by Martin Haspelmath, arrived at this fragment.
The importance of the latter part of the definition is seen in paradigms like insula. Although there are ...
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1answer
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Lexeme phonological form
I am self-studying morphology and came across this paragraph in Martin Haspelmath book "Understanding Morphology".
Although we must assign names to lexemes to be able to talk about them, lexemes ...
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3answers
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Why is the word “idiot” so similar between multiple languages?
Weird question, granted, but I was just looking around on Google Translate and I noticed that the word "idiot" is basically the same across quite a few languages, here are a few examples:
Italian: ...
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2answers
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Grammatical category definition
Can anyone provide a good formal definition of the notion of grammatical category?
I am primarily referring to morphological categories, such as case, tense, gender etc., rather than to syntactical ...
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1answer
244 views
Grammatical case vs semantic case
I'm not sure what these terms mean. In my lecture notes I wrote that grammatical case is used to show the syntactic functions of a nominal syntagm, depending on its relation to the verb. Semantic case,...
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1answer
167 views
morphology and ill-formed sentences
Can we say that ungrammatical strings are still part of the English language? Like for example Joe sleep not last night.
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1answer
170 views
Is there such thing as a 'half-plural'?
If yes, does any language have this feature?
By 'half-plural' I mean, somewhere between singular and plural, but not dual, trial, or quadral.
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1answer
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At what point did the feminine ending fall silent in Semitic languages?
Hebrew and Arabic both mark feminine nouns with a final consonant in writing, which is pronounced /t/ in certain sandhi-conditioned environments (and is otherwise silent). From what little I know of ...
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2answers
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What natural symbolic representations could be used for Mathematical constants?
We know mathematics is a language by itself.
But to evoke any constants or any arbitrary values as such to solve anything, prior knowledge of a particular symbol and its usage must be understood.
...
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1answer
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Do reborrowings and neologisms statistically help the communicative function of the languages or do the cause more confusion?
Rephrasing do reborrowings and neologisms help or bedim the communications?
I am making the distinction of instantaneous or contemporary communications(especialy for scientific use and social) and ...
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1answer
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Do other languages have an “irreversible aspect”?
Like many languages, LingƔla combines tense, aspect, and mood into a single TAM marking. Three of these TAMs pertain to the past:
a-kÉnd-Ć”kĆ "he left earlier today" (hodiernal/recent past)
a-kÉnd-Ć”kĆ” ...
5
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1answer
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Does Jespersen's Cycle apply to languages without negative concord?
In this comment, Rethliopuks mentioned something I'd never really connected in my head before.
[Negative concord] is standard in plenty of languages around the world, incl[uding] most Romance ...
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1answer
391 views
Criteria for judging allomorphs and different morphemes?
I read in Crystal, D. (2008) that āSome morphemes...are realized by more than one morph according to their position in a word or sentence, such alternative morphs [are] called allomorphsā (p.313), and ...
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2answers
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Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension
Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones. But what happened to 3rd declension nouns?
It looks like for the majority ...
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3answers
583 views
Dissatisfaction
I am having a difficult time drawing the chart for the word "dissatisfaction". "Action" is not a suffix, so if you would combine satisf(y) + action to get "satisfaction", you would have two roots. ...
