Questions tagged [morphology]
The study of the structure and formation of words and their component parts, "morphemes".
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Did the word "until" come to exist by prothesis?
According to Wikipedia, prothesis is "the addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure".
In its entry for the ...
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1answer
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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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3answers
710 views
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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1answer
64 views
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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45 views
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 ...
2
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3answers
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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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115 views
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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114 views
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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4answers
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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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1answer
129 views
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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1answer
62 views
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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1answer
34 views
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
40 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? [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 ...
2
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1answer
75 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
57 views
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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2answers
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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
199 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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25 views
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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1answer
91 views
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
56 views
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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66 views
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
87 views
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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221 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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2answers
82 views
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
92 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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2answers
233 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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0answers
91 views
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
168 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
165 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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209 views
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
81 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
160 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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38 views
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
220 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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2answers
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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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64 views
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.
