Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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What is Double Zero Grade?
The double zero grade *ǵʰi-m- is preserved in the compounds with numerals.
(de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin 2013: hiems)
E.g. *dwi-ǵʰim-os “two years old”, literally “of two winters” (en....
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Are there any examples of morphology changes when combining two "word parts", which changes more than prefixes/suffixes/infixes/circumfixes do?
In learning about the Hunspell dictionary format, I came across the paper Implementation of infixes and circumfixes in the spellcheckers, where they describe an extension to Hunspell for better ...
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Can the Hunspell dictionary format capture things beyond prefixes and suffixes?
I know this is mostly a technical / data question, but it is majorly about linguistics too and I don't think this is really up the alley of a lot of software engineers, so I am asking here.
So the ...
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What's the gender of "nice" in "Mary is a nice person"?
I just read this rule in Greek Essential Grammar:
This passage says that, in the Greek sentence for "Mary is a nice person", the adjective nice is masculine because it must agree with the ...
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Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?
I will attempt to illustrate my question via example. Let's say we have two verbs which are homonyms of eachother: "fleeber" and "fleeber". The first means "to create a soft ...
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Are there any languages where inflectional processes apply before word formation processes?
I just read that usually word formation processes occur before any inflectional processes. Are there any languages in the world where the opposite happens?
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
For example, agglutinative/fusional languages where case or possessive suffixes/endings must be attached both to a noun and all adjectives that modify it. Or any other kind of noun-adjective agreement....
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Are there languages with free argument order that lack a passive voice? If not, why not?
Consider German, with its four cases and relatively free argument-order.
Now consider the following German sentence, courtesy of Google Translate.
Johan schenkte dem Mädchen eine Katze. (Johan gave ...
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How can the morphology of a language be formally represented i.e. computerized? [closed]
Languages can have very different morphologies. For instance, Sanskrit has a morphology that is heavily based on the root, and the combination of roots with other roots results in new words (it is ...
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Distinction between allomorphy and homophony
My understanding of allomorphy, is that it is the case where a single
functional morpheme is realized with many different Vocabulary Items.
But homophony (that is accidental) is also found with Roots, ...
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Is morphology of English mostly done by its etymology?
I have the following observations and not sure if they are correct.
Whenever I want to learn about the morphology of a word in English, e.g. the affixes and root of the word, my search on the ...
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Multiple plurals per inflectional paradigm slot (Arabic)
Lexemes are generally associated with inflectional paradigms; let us take a nominal for the purpose of this discussion, and more specifically an Arabic nominal. Let's say that we are dealing with a ...
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How do I determine the underlying form of allomorphs when the word stem is also alternating?
Full disclosure: this is a course assignment so I'd just like some guidance on how to untangle things rather than straight answers! I'm really struggling to wrap my head around this and the course ...
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Are there any natural languages that have one or more morphemes that each stand for both "other(s)" and "more"?
I've been working on the quantifiers for a conlang of mine and noticed that the concepts "other" and "more" are each related to the notion of additional quantities. So, we have ...
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What is the leipzig convention for glossing nonce words?
How do you gloss nonce words (words which are created for a single occasion and have no meaning on their own) in interlinear glossing?
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How to "properly" name a "reduced" form of a word when it's used in a compound word?
I am trying to find a proper name for forms, that do not exist by themselves, but kinda happen when this word is combined with another to form a compound word, example in Estonian:
ratsionaliseerimine ...
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is "together" a monomorphemic word or can it be broken into "to" (derivational prefix) "geth" (bound root) "er" (inflectional suffix)
is "together" a monomorphemic word or can it be broken into "to" (derivational prefix) "geth" (bound root) "er" (inflectional suffix). or could it be I a free ...
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How common is it for languages in contact to exchange inflectional morphemes?
So languages in contact will of course borrow vocabulary from each other. And languages in contact for a really long time might converge on a common sentence structure or other morphological typology -...
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Does the morphological analysis of complex words acknowledge/allow multiple derivations?
I have been watching videos in Youtube concerning the morphological composition of complex words, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQKJNBAbYqM. Phrase structure (as opposed to dependency structure)...
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Where can I find all of the consonant/vowel word formation formulas for a given language? And what is the name of this?
I'm new to linguistics. I've seen that there are CVC or VVC or similar structures presented in online resources (for example Wikipedia) to denote the possible combinations of sounds.
I want to find a ...
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Do some languages use lexical stress to differentiate words with unrelated meanings?
In English, lexical stress is occasionally used to differentiate words with the same consonant and vowel phonemes and that have related meanings. (Please forgive the incomplete definitions.)
re ˈpeat ...
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How to create a generic model for terms that works cross-linguistically?
I am thinking how to create a "dictionary term" data model, and notice I don't have a real clear definition of a "term" which works across languages. Focusing on a "term" ...
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What do Georgian thematic suffixes even do, and where do they come from?
Georgian has two sets of verb affixes that don't really mark a specific tense or aspect themselves, but the combination of them narrows down which TAM-indicating conjugation you're looking at - the ...
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Is compounding a universal word-formation strategy?
From what I've read, compounding is one of a number of word-formation processes. By word-formation, I mean "the process of creating new lexemes in a language."
One common process is the ...
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Are inflectional morphemes considered affixes in English?
From what I remember to have learned in SPANISH, which is my mother tongue, affixes just refer to derivational morphemes such as suffixes and prefixes which can change the meaning of words when added ...
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Nominal umlaut alteration in German
I am trying to understand how umlaut came to be as a marker for various inflectional forms in Germanic. The obvious answer is that there was i-umlaut, a-umlaut, u-umlaut, R-umlaut, breaking and ...
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Can someone explain the ambiguity of the vowel [ø] and null segment [∅]?
Typically the IPA avoids using the same glyph in different scales to represent similar ideas however it seems to me that the representation of the Close-mid Front Rounded Vowel [ø] and the null marker ...
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Are there specified names for categories of morphemes (or words that can combine with morphemes) in morphotactics?
Morphotactics is the study of the rules in a language by which morphemes are allowed to combine.
So at least in how I think of if, morphotactics is like grammar, but at the level of morphemes instead ...
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Derivation of Morpheme for "Raising" in NACLO Problem
The Problem
The Solution
Partial Explanation
chak appears in both (11) and (12), both of which are about catching. It doesn't appear anywhere else, so we can assume it is some form of "catching&...
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How do theories of inflection account for syntactic expressions of a grammatical category?
If an inflectional paradigm is as Gregory Stump describes in his 2015 book Inflectional Paradigms: a complete set of a lexeme L's cells, where a cell is a "pairing [of] the lexical content of L ...
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Origin of Latin Non-Finite Verbal Endings
I'm wondering about the origins of the various non-finite verbal endings in Latin.
My understanding so far of their PIE origins:
Infinitives:
Present Active: -s-ey (dative of an s-stem verbal noun)
...
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Are words such as sandwich,pumpkin and dictionary monomorphemic?
Can the above words be divided further or are they monomorphemic words?
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Is -ing a derivational suffix in leading?
If leading is used as an adjective here,is -ing a derivational suffix or is it only an inflectional suffix?
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Can you provide a cheat-sheet for turning Proto-Indo-European dictionaries from the older style into laryngeal notation?
Much of the resources I have for Proto-Indo-European itself (not etymological dictionaries for other languages) either use Laryngeal notation but are limited in scope (like Wiktionary) or are written ...
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If English adj → adv "-ly" suffix were inflectional, which grammatical category is it related to?
Wikipedia introduces inflection as
a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
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Does (latin) 'cor' count as a stem of the English word 'courage'?
Looking up the etymology of "courage" reveals that it comes from Old French corage which comes from Latin coraticum, which is the Latin word cor ("heart") + the noun-forming suffix ...
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Origin for specific letters used in Swahili for tenses
The photo above shows the conjugations for past,present,and future & positive vs. negative. To change tense/polarity, you add a specific set of letters(such as, for future positive, "ta")...
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Origin of the habitual tense in Swahili
How far back can a tense like hu, which fails to agree with its subject, be reconstructed in Swahili? Alternatively, do we know which construction it developed from?
This question is based on reading ...
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In Russian, why can a multisyllabic second declension noun stressed on the last syllable not get a plural in -а?
There are a few hundred nouns of the second declension in Russian that do not have a nominative plural in the expected -ы but rather in -а, e.g. город-города. This ending is also invariably stressed.
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In Arabic what is the difference in the usage of the perfect tense negative and imperfect tense jussive.(as their translation is same in English.) [closed]
For eg : لَمْ يَكْتُبْ and مَا کَتَبَ both means "he did not write."
So how would I know which one i should use?
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Suffix in word 'scenario'
Does -io such words like 'scenario', 'oratorio' is considered to be a suffix or a part of a root?
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Why did the Rebracketing from "Napron" to "Apron" Figuratively Stick?
I read that the cloth that painters and chefs wear, the one now called "apron", used to be called "napron". But then because of rebracketing, "a napron" became "an ...
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Are the suffixes of such ordinal numbers as fir-st, seco-nd, thi-rd and six-th derivational or inflectional?
These suffixes do not change the part of speech, so are they inflectional endings?
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How to split pronouns 'whom' and 'whose' into morphs?
Are the endings -m and -se inflectional suffixes?
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Even in writing, do bases take longer to construe when they share roots or stems?
Question 1
I ask about merely reading and writing here. Do human readers take longer to distinguish between stems (and bases) that share the same root, even if merely picoseconds?
For example, do ...
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How did Shiloah (שילוח) become Siloam and Silwan?
What sorts of changes led the Biblical Hebrew name Shiloah (שילוח) to become Siloam (in Greek) and Silwan (in Arabic)? Has this been discussed anywhere?
EDITED I removed the word morphological from my ...
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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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