Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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Can we claim that all words derived from the same root must necessarily be related in the meaning?
In many languages that I know morphology plays a role in creating words. And, as much as I know, in morphology we have a root, which is the most important part.
Now, in seimitic languages (like Arabic,...
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Is "gear down" a complex word?
I'm not sure. I would say yes since it is a particle verb. If it is could you also tell me with which morphological process it was created ?
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Can I find an Ancient Greek parsing program that dissects words into their constituent phonemes from reconstructed Proto-Greek?
For example, suppose I enter "πράσσουσα" and it outputs πραάͳοντσα or even, πρααͳ-ο-ντ-σα (root, ablaut, participle marker, feminine). Or I put in πᾶς and it outputs πάαντ-ς (root, 3rdNS)...
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Is there any solid evidence for the agglutinative->fusional->analytic->agglutinative roundabout?
I've heard it mentioned that languages tend to evolve in a kind of merry-go-round pattern where a language that's agglutinative slowly turns fusional, that fusional language's inflections slowly break ...
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Morphophonemic rules in phonology
I am wondering how the two phonological terms "morphonemic rules" and "morphophonemic rules" can be distinguished?
A morpheme might have different presentations (i.e. ...
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Are there highly analytic (isolating) languages without tone?
I know many highly analytic languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai) are tonal languages. Are there similarly analytic or isolating languages that don't use tone the way those languages do? The closest I ...
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Latin -vus/-uus and PIE -wos
What is the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, if there is one, of the Latin suffixes -tivus (many examples) and -vus/-uus/-ivus (arvus, residuus, cadivus)?
I read in a non-reliable source once that ...
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What linguistic sources discuss doubled -ed in -edly and -edness words?
Some linguists have written analyses of "double -er suffixation" in English, in formations from particle verbs such as fix up > fixer upper. For example: "Double -er suffixation in ...
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How would you classify a verb that denotes a close temporal relation to another verb?
I am looking at a Papuan language that uses a serialized verb to denote temporal proximity to the main verb's occurrence. I am translating it as "just" in English, as in "he just left&...
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Is it common for languages to incorporate hortative modality when there is one speaker present? i.e. talking to themselves?
I am an undergrad working with a papuan language. There is one sentence that was in the data that has me wondering about hortatives.
The sentence, in english, translates to “Okay, I’ll just leave.” ...
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How to count the number of unique words (lemmas) in a Russian text?
Here's the problem: I have a large deck of Anki flashcards which I memorize. I would like to know how many unique Russian words (lemmas) I have in my entire collection.
What I need is some kind of ...
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How do languages other than English deal with compound, hyphenated adjectives?
In looking at some long, hyphenated adjectives in English (or this), you find:
a twenty-one-gun salute
a five-acre farm
a five-day week
the four-colour problem
the low milk-and-cream-yielding dam
the ...
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Examples of languages where noun have higher morphological complexity than verbs
Impressionistically, verbs seems to be as complex or more morphologically complex than nouns.
What are some good examples of languages, if there are any, where A) there are good diagnostics for ...
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Distinguish morph vs. morpheme to a 16 year old?
My 16 year old is reading linguistics books from public library. Please simplify the distinction between Morph vs. Morpheme?
Lieber doesn't even define Morph. Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology ...
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Do the Turkic languages have "-ia" suffix/ending to denote countries or abstract notions?
Both the Indo-European and Semitic languages have a combination of suffix+ending -i-a, which can be applied to form country names. It also conducts the feminine gender.
The IE and Semitic suffixes are ...
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Understanding "inflection" and "grammatical category"
The Wikipedia article Morphology says:
A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's grammatical category whereas in the process of inflection ...
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What is the specific sound law that describes the change from Proto-Indo-European "*h₂éǵros" to Latin "ager"?
Is there a rule for the movement of the "r" to the end of the word? Or is it moreso that there was some kind of intrusive "e" that separated the "-gr-" to form "-ger&...
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Perfect and Preterite
How can one communicate subtle differences in meaning that in other languages would be signaled only by the distinction of Preterite/Perfect when in fact in the language spoken there is no distinction ...
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Why do languages almost never have negative comparatives or superlatives
Many languages have comparative and superlative suffixes or other morphological forms such as English ‘-er’ and ‘-est’, Latin ‘-or’ and ‘-issimus’, and Arabic ‘afʕal’ template, but I couldn’t find ...
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Is the way words are used the biggest obstacle in understanding science and technology? [closed]
Do I have a point to say that, in the area of science, people have difficulties understanding it mostly due to the way words are used to describe whatever it may be? One may understand the words ...
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Are there generative theories of grammar with privative features outside of phonology?
By "generative grammar", I take the widest interpretation and do not mean "Chomsky's theory of syntax today", thus HPSG and LFG would be instances of GG(broad). Phonology has a ...
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What's a grammatical feature?
This is not a naif question asked by a layman just out of curiosity. I am presently editing a book by a colleague which is devoted to the notion of grammatical feature (with a special focus on ...
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Linear A morphology
Linear A's lexicon is undeciphered, but I assume we know some things about it's morphology and phonology. I've only found
this theory that the language of Linear A had a lot of prefixes. Where can I ...
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Terms for abbreviations
Is there a specific distinguishing word for abbreviations that have evolved to be spoken words in their own right, like potus or Nato, sometimes even an "abbreviation word" with a clear ...
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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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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? [closed]
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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