Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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X vs. Morpho-X (e.g. X = mora, phoneme, syntax)
In general, how do morphoX differ from X? Here are some concretizations.
Linguistics S.E. has tags for syntax vs. tag:morphosyntax.
Phonemes vs. morphophonemes
morpheme. A contrastive meaningful ...
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1answer
34 views
The affixation differentiating between nominal arithmetic and adjectival arithmetic
Since a suprafix can be the change of stress somewhere in the word (or other suprasegmental elements), and since accentuation plays a role in differentiating the noun arithmetic from the adjective ...
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What are some good books on word formation and semantics?
I have been trying to find an accessible book for the general reader that focuses particularly on questions like:
How words are created? (morphology, etymology, popular PIE roots etc.)
How words ...
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1answer
69 views
What is morphological analysis of words to estimate their meaning called?
Is there a word for this?
I'll use an example to show what I mean:
Let's say you don't know what sepsis means, which is bacterial infection of blood. So, you start thinking. You break the word up into ...
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1answer
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Head-marked possessive with gender agreement
Are there any languages that have head marking in possessive noun phrases, but that also agree that marking with gender? Essentially so that a morpheme would be on the possessee and would look at ...
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How does the nonsense word “frabjous” conform to English phonotactics?
I am aware that this question is rather more complex than I am treating it, but I am looking for a few general rules (e.g. basic phonotactic constraints) that would lead to the conclusion that the ...
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1answer
172 views
What is the difference in usage of the word “root” in PIE and its daughter languages?
Now I understand that the conceptions of "root" in PIE and its descendant languages don't fully overlap. However what is the exact difference between them? What confuses me is the ...
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What notable works are there that try to express the structures of linguistics by modelling them with Artificial Neural Networks (ANN)?
I know of a few works in Phonology and 1 recent work in Semantics but I will not list these here since what I would really be looking for in an answer would be a survey paper or a comprehensive list.
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Studies on markedness or iconicity of -ly/-less suffixes
Hello fellow linguistics lovers. I am studying on euqivelent suffixes of English -ly/-less as in Turkish -lU/sUz. They re kinda derive antonymous pairs. So i guess there must be some markedness ...
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Automating the identification of a language grammar based on samples — is this something that is done, and what is it called?
I'm trying (not very successfully) to find research papers to help with a project.
Suppose you had a relatively small sample of a target language (e.g. a bible translation) and you would like to write ...
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some basic questions about morphological aspect
According to the definition, morphological aspect presents the reported event or state of affairs as if viewed either from inside the event (‘in progress’) or outside the event (‘as a whole’).
For ...
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The various forms of the Sanskrit word 'Para'?
I came across the word 'Paratpara' and found the meaning to be 'Greatest of the Great'. This led me to try and understand it in relation with other similar words I already knew - paraspara(mutual) and ...
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How do you distinguish verbs, nouns, and adjectives in Chinese?
I am messing around with a conlang and trying to figure out how to write sentences. Man this is hard, there are so many possibilities and I don't know where to start.
But basically, I am looking at ...
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1answer
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Expressing a phonological process happening only at morpheme boundary
If some phonological process (like gemination from here) happens only at morpheme boundary (say, only in the coda of a syllable when a certain suffix is added to the stem whose final syllable is that ...
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Semantical and functional morphemes
I have this idea in my head that when it comes to morphemes, there are two divisions at the top: "semantical morphemes" and "functional morphemes". Semantical morphemes are those ...
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1answer
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Latin suffixes -or and -idus, is there a correspondence?
In Latin (and daughter languages), there seems to be a correspondence between nouns of the third declension in -or/-us, -oris denoting a quality, and adjectives of the Ist class in -idus,a,um denoting ...
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Does “this” and “these” belong to the same lexeme?
I am confused as to whether "this" and "these" belong to the same lexeme
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Do we have a term for priori knowledge in linguistics?
Broadly speaking, these terms have been introduced throughout history to categorize knowledge:
A priori, rationalism, deductive reasoning => meaning that we gain new knowledge, only by using ...
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1answer
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Morpheme breakdown of the word 'classification'
For the word classification, would it break down to 'class-ify-ation' or 'class-ify-ic-ation'. I am confused between the two because for the second one, classific isn't a word.
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Are there languages that mark mood but not tense or aspect?
Are there languages where verbs inflect for mood but don't inflect for tense and aspect?
For instance, if a language had one set of indicative forms and another set of subjunctive forms, but didn't ...
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2answers
174 views
How do Agglutinative Features/Languages develop out of Fusional Features/Languages?
Does anyone know about the development of agglutinative languages out of fusional languages, or, more precisely, agglutinative features out of fusional features? I am thinking in particular about the ...
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Does the stem of a word carry the sense information of its inflections?
From what I understand the lexeme or lemma of a word carries the sense information of the word, and hence for an inflected form like tablets, it can have a different lemma, each one for each sense of ...
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What would be the collective noun for collection of words whose affixal markers indicate the same grammatical categories?
I am working on Sanskrit, a fusional language. I am confused about what should be the collective noun that I should be used to address the set {nominals, verb, adverb, indeclinable, participle}. Could ...
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1answer
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Derivation, zero-affixation verb tenses
I'm working on a paper about derivation, denominalization, zero-affixation and so on and have the following question:
If a verb derives from a noun and it used in a past tense, for example boycott - ...
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128 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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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
71 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 ...
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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
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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
172 views
Where are the letters ǽ and ǣ used ( U+01E3 and U+01FD)?
I tried to find examples but while æ 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
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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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1answer
113 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
225 views
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
155 views
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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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 große 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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“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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In English, is the use of the -ing 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 ...
