Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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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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68 views
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
63 views
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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100 views
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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1answer
84 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
58 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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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
100 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
129 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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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
52 views
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
47 views
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
42 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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33 views
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
99 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
201 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
126 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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1answer
132 views
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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227 views
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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3answers
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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 ...
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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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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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1answer
83 views
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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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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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 ...
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2answers
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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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217 views
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
539 views
Is the concept of grammatical function related to inflexion?
Studying the book Understanding Morphology by Martin Haspelmath, I 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
55 views
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: ...
