Linguistics 2

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Đề cương chi tiết học phần Ngôn ngữ học 2 (Linguistics 2) cung cấp một cái nhìn sâu sắc về hai lĩnh vực quan trọng của ngôn ngữ học: hình thái học và ngữ nghĩa học. Phần một tập trung vào hình thái học, phân tích cấu trúc của từ và các thành tố cấu thành. Phần hai đi sâu vào ngữ nghĩa học, nghiên cứu ý nghĩa của từ và câu, cũng như cách chúng được hiểu trong ngữ cảnh khác nhau. Học phần này cung cấp cho sinh viên kiến thức nền tảng vững chắc về cấu trúc và ý nghĩa của ngôn ngữ. Đây là một học phần quan trọng cho bất kỳ ai muốn theo đuổi sự nghiệp trong lĩnh vực ngôn ngữ học.

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Nội dung Text: Linguistics 2

DALAT UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES LINGUISTICS 2 Áp dụng cho sinh viên từ K45 Selected and compiled by Hồ Thị Giáng Châu FOR DLU STUDENTS ONLY, NOT FOR SALE Lam Dong - 2023
PART ONE: MORPHOLOGY – THE ANALYSIS OF WORD STRUCTURE I. WORDS AND THEIR PARTS For most people, the most basic and most tangible elements of a language are certainly its words. “There’s no such word”, you’ve heard people say. Or, “What does the word futharc mean?” Or, from someone doing a crossword puzzle, “What’s a three-letter word for excessively?” We say that one person always uses “two-bit” words, while someone else exhibits a preference for “four-letter” words. Intuitively, people seem to have clear notions of what a word is. When it comes to identifying meaningful units smaller than a word, our intuitions are not so clear. Though we readily intuit that car, walk, sing, and tall have a single meaningful element each and that bookstore, sunrise, and sidestep have two each, our intuitions are less certain about the number of meaningful elements in words such as bookkeeper, sneakers, women’s, impracticality, fenced, resumed, and presumption. This part of the book examines the segmentation of words into their meaningful elements, the principles that govern the composition of words from meaningful elements, and the functions of words and word parts in sentences. We describe what it means to know a word and the ways in which a language can expand its stock of words. What it means to know a word Consider what a child must know when it knows a word in its language. A child able to utter a sentence like My new doll can cry knows much more about the word doll than the kind of toy it refers to. The child knows what sounds make up doll and in what sequence they occur, as well as how to use doll in a sentence. The child also knows that doll is a common noun (and hence can be preceded by the possessive pronoun my, as here, or by an article like a plus an adjective); that doll is a count noun (that is, it can be followed by a plural marker -s, in contrast to mass nouns like milk and sugar, which do not take -s); and that the plural of doll is formed regularly and is not an irregular like teeth or deer.
Thus, knowing a word requires having at least four kinds of information: 1. Phonological: what sounds the word contains and their sequencing (we discussed this in the previous course) 2. Semantic: the meanings of the word (to be discussed in part 2 of the book) 3. Syntactic: what category (noun, verb, etc.) the word belongs to and how to use it in a sentence 4. Morphological: how related words, including plurals (for nouns) and past tenses (for verbs), are formed (a topic of this course) Knowing even the simplest word requires that phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic information be stored in the mind’s dictionary (the lexicon) as part of that word’s mental representation. There are certain parallels between the kinds of information stored in the lexicon and the information that can be found in an ordinary desk dictionary. In a desk dictionary, basic phonological, semantic, morphological, and syntactic information is found along with information that neither children nor adult speakers need to possess in order to speak a language – information, for example, about a word’s orthographic representation or about its etymology (the history of its phonological development and of the semantic path it followed in getting to its current meaning). In addition, dictionaries sometimes provide illustrative sentences for words or actual citations from well-known sources. Obviously, children will not normally have any orthographic, etymological, or illustrative information in their lexicon. II. MORPHEMES: THE MEANING –BEARING CONSTITUENTS OF WORDS We now turn to the smallest units of language that can be associated with meaning or grammatical categories. As it happens, those units need not be words. 2
English speakers are aware that words like girl, ask, tall, father, uncle, and orange cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units. Orange, for example, is not made up of o + range or or + ange or ora + nge. Nor is father made up of, say, fath and er. Such words are said to be simple words. But many words (which are called complex words) do have more than one meaningful part. Oranges, fathers, grandmother, asks, asked, asking, homemade, taller, and tallest have two elements each. Other words having more than one element that contributes to their overall meaning include beautiful, churches, supermarkets, bookshelves, and television. A set of words can be built up by adding certain elements to a core element. For example, built up around the core element true is the following set of words: truer untrue truthfully truest truth untruthfully truly truthful untruthfulness Speakers of English recognize that these words share a stem whose meaning or lexical category has been modified or changed by the addition of other elements. The meaningful elements of a word are called morphemes. In other words, a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function. Thus, true is a single morpheme; untrue and truly contain two morphemes each; and untruthfulness contains five (UN + TRUE + TH + FUL + NESS). Truer, with the two elements TRUE and –ER (“more”), means “more true”. The morphemes in truest are TRUE and –EST (“most”); in truly, TRUE and – LY; in untrue, TRUE and UN-; in truthful, TRUE + - TH + -FUL. We have been using the word “meaningful” somewhat loosely, for it is only by stretching the use of that word a bit that we can call –er in truer and –ed in looked meaningful elements. Morphemes can indeed have meaning, as with true and look, but they can also represent a grammatical category, such as comparative degree or past tense. Morphemes cannot be equated with syllables. On the one hand, a single morpheme can have two or more syllables, as in harvest, grammar, river, gorilla, hippopotamus, and Connecticut. On the other hand, there are sometimes two or more morphemes in a single syllable, 3
as in judged (JUDGE + ‘PAST TENSE’), dogs (DOG + ‘PLURAL’), and men (MAN + ‘PLURAL’), with two morphemes each, and men’s with three morphemes (MAN + ‘PLURAL’ + ‘POSSESSIVE’). Table 1 Words consisting of one or more morphemes One Two Three More than three and boy boys hunt hunter hunters act active act-iv-ate re-act-iv-ate Summary Morphemes are the building blocks of words. A word may contain only one morpheme, making it a simple word, or a word may contain more than one morpheme, making it a complex word. Below are some hints for determining the number of morphemes that a word contains.  A morpheme can carry information about meaning or function. For example, the word haunt cannot be divided into the morphemes h and aunt, since only aunt has meaning. However, the word bats has two morphemes, since both bat and –s have meaning. The –s, of course, means that there is more than one.  The meanings of individual morphemes should contribute to the overall meaning of the word. For example, pumpkin cannot be divided into pump and kin, since the meaning of pumpkin has nothing to do with the meaning of either pump or kin.  A morpheme is not the same as a syllable. Morphemes do not have to be a syllable, or morphemes can consist of one or more syllables. For example, the morpheme treat has one syllable, the morpheme dracula has three syllables, but the morpheme –s (meaning ‘plural’) is not a syllable.  Often during word formation, changes in pronunciation and/or spelling occur. These do not affect a morpheme’s status as a morpheme. For example, when –y is attached to a the 4
word scare, it becomes scary, when –er is attached to scary, it becomes scarier. The root, however, is still scare, not scar. III. FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES Some morphemes like TRUE, MOTHER, and ORANGE can stand alone as words. Other cannot stand alone: UN-, TELE-, NESS, and –ER, for example, function only as parts of words (e.g. they must be attached to another element). Morphemes that can stand alone as words are called free morphemes; those that function only as parts of words are called bound morphemes. III.1 Derivational Morphemes Certain bound morphemes (like the underscored parts of the following words) have the effect of changing the lexical category of the word to which they are affixed: truthful, establishment, darken, frighten, and teacher. When added to the noun truth, -FUL yields the adjective truthful; -MENT added to the verb establish yields the noun establishment; dark is an adjective, darken a verb; fright a noun, frighten a verb; teach a verb, teacher a noun. In English (though not in all languages) such morphemes tend to be added to the end of words as suffixes. We can represent these relationships as in the following rules: Noun + -FUL  Adjective (doubtful, beautiful) Adjective + -LY  Adverb (beautifully, truly) Verb + -MENT  Noun (establishment, amazement) Verb + -ER  Noun (teacher, rider, thriller) Adjective + -EN  Verb (sweeten, brighten, harden) Noun + -EN  Verb (frighten, hasten, christen) Not all bound morphemes serve to change the lexical category of words. Adding other bound morphemes like English DIS-, RE-, and UN- (disappear, repaint, unfavorable) to a word changes its meaning without altering its lexical category. For example, appear and disappear are both verbs, as are paint and repaint; favorable and unfavorable are both adjectives. There is a 5
notable tendency in English for morphemes that change meaning without altering lexical category to be added to the front of words as prefixes, though this is not universal across all languages (and in fact some languages lack prefixes altogether, as Turkish does). The two types of morphemes we have just examined are called derivational morphemes. To recapitulate, derivational morphemes can produce new words from existing words in two ways. First, they can change the meaning of a word: true and untrue have opposite meanings: paint and repaint have different meanings. Second, they can change the lexical category of a word, thereby permitting it to function differently in a sentence: true is an adjective, truly an adverb, and truth a noun. III.2 Inflectional Morphemes Another type of bound morpheme is illustrated in the underscored parts of the words cats, collected, sleeps, and louder. These morphemes behave differently from derivational morphemes: they alter the form of a word without changing either its lexical category or its central meaning. These inflectional morphemes create variant forms of a word to conform to different functional roles in a sentence or in discourse. On nouns and pronouns, for example, inflectional morphemes serve to mark grammatical categories like gender and case or semantic notions like number. On verbs, they can mark such things as tense or number, while on adjectives they serve to indicate degree or, as in Old English, gender, number, and case. Sometimes inflectional morphemes serve merely to integrate a word into its sentence, redundantly indicating on a verb, for example, that the subject to the sentence is third person, as in She sleeps to dream. Only in a very limited sense can inflectional morphemes be said to change meaning. To be sure, cigar and cigars don’t mean exactly the same thing, but cigars means simply ‘more than one cigar.’ Collect and collected can be thought of as meaning the same thing but orienting listeners (or readers) to different time frames. Many languages have large inventories of inflectional morphemes, as did older forms of English. Russian and German have maintained fairly elaborate inflectional systems over the centuries, while English has shed inflections until today it has only eight remaining: two on nouns, four on verbs, and two on adjectives, as shown in Table 2. 6
Table 2 Inflectional Morphemes of English Lexical Category Grammatical Examples Noun Plural cars, churches Possessive car’s, children’s Verb Third person (she) swims, (it) seems Past tense wanted, showed Past participle wanted, shown (or showed) Present participle wanting, showing Adjective Comparative taller, sweeter Superlative tallest, sweetest Although most inflection in English involves regular affixation, some words mark inflectional contrasts in less regular ways. This is most obvious in the case of verbs, a number of which indicate past tense by internal changes of various sorts and even by suppletion: come-came, see-saw, fall-fell, eat-ate, drink-drank, lose-lost, think-thought, is-was, go-went, and so on. Regular and irregular inflection appear to operate in fundamentally different ways: whereas regular inflected forms are constructed as needed in accordance with a general morphological rule (such as “Add –ed to mark the past tense”), irregular forms must be stored permanently in the language user’s memory. The eight inflectional morphemes of English are fully productive. That is, when new nouns, verbs, and adjectives are added to the language they are extremely likely to be inflected like the examples just listed. A child hearing a noun (like pool or tooth) or verb (like talk or speak) for the first time will automatically inflect it for plural and past tense in the regular, rule- 7
governed way. Children at first produce not only the correct pools and talked but the incorrect * tooths and *speaked. The system of English pronouns gives some hint of an earlier inflectional morphology that also affected nouns. Except for you, English pronouns, like nouns, have distinct singular and plural forms (I and we; he/she/it and they). Unlike nouns, however, pronouns exhibit distinct forms for use in other than subject functions (I and me; we and us; he and him; she and her; they and them); you and it are exceptions. He saw Luke. * Him saw Luke. Luke saw him. *Luke saw he Luke saw it. It saw Luke. Luke saw you. You saw Luke. We have mentioned the category of person in incidental ways above; person refers simply to the person or persons speaking (the first person: I or we), the person(s) spoken to (the second person: you), or the person(s) or other entities spoken about (the third person: he, she, it, they). III.3 Inflection versus Derivation Because inflection and derivation are both marked by affixation, the distinction between the two can be a subtle one and it is sometimes unclear which function a particular affix has. Three criteria are commonly used to help distinguish between inflectional and derivational affixes. Category change First, inflection does not change either the grammatical category or the type of meaning found in the word to which it applies. The word books produced by adding the plural suffix –s is still a noun and has the same type of meaning as the base book. Even though books differs from book in referring to several things rather than just one, the type of thing(s) to which it refers 8
remains the same. Similarly, a past tense suffix –ed in worked indicates that the action took place in the past, but the word remains a verb and it continues to denote the same action. In contrast, derivational suffixes characteristically change the category and/or the type of meaning of the form to which they apply and are therefore said to create a new word. As in the case of the word modernize, the suffix –ize makes a verb (modernize) out of an adjective (modern), changing the type of meaning it expresses from a property (modern) to an action (modernize). Let’s consider the word government. Parallel changes in category and type of meaning are brought about by –ment (V to N). In the case of the word kingdom, there is no category change when –dom is attached to king (e.g. both king and kingdom are nouns). However, -dom does modify the type of meaning from ‘person’ (for king) to ‘place’ (for kingdom). Order A second property of inflectional affixes has to do with the order in which they are combined with a base relative to derivational affixes. In the word neighborhoods, for example, the derivational suffix –hood must combine with the base neighbor before the inflectional affix –s does. The positioning of inflectional affixes outside derivational affixes in this example reflects the fact that inflection takes place after derivation. Productivity A third criterion for distinguishing between inflectional and derivational affixes has to do with productivity – the relative freedom with which they can combine with bases of the appropriate category. Inflectional affixes typically have relatively few exceptions. The suffix –s, for example, can combine with virtually any noun that allows a plural form (aside from a few exceptions such as oxen and feet). In contrast, derivational affixes characteristically apply to restricted classes of bases. Thus, -ize can combine with only certain adjectives to from a verb. modern-ize *new-ize legal-ize *lawful-ize 9
In the case of verbs, matters are somewhat more complicated, since many English verbs have irregular past tense forms (saw, left, went, and so on). Nonetheless, the distribution of the inflectional affix –ed is still considerably freer than that of a derivational affix such as –ment. In Table 3, for example, all the verbs can take the regular past tense ending, but only those in the first three rows are able to take the –ment suffix. Table 3 Compatibility of verb bases with inflectional –ed and derivational -ment Verb With -ed With -ment confine confined confinement align aligned alignment treat treated treatment arrest arrested *arrestment straighten straightened *straightenment cure cured *curement IV. LINEAR AND HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION OF MORPHEMES IN WORDS IV.1 Linear Order of Morphemes The morphemes in a word are not arranged randomly, as all readers of this book know implicitly. Rather, they have a strict linear sequence. When we talk about the linear order of morphemes, we usually talk about affixes which will be discussed below. Some morphemes, called suffixes, always follow the stems they attach to, like “PLURAL” in boys and –MENT in commitment: both *sboy and *mentcommit are ill formed. Languages can also have prefixes, which attach to the front of another morpheme, as in the words untrue, disappear, and repaint. (Compare *true + un, *appear + dis, and *paint + re; and of course, English does not permit *NESS + FUL + TRUTH + UN or any arrangement other than untruthfulness). 10
In English, all inflectional morphemes are suffixes. Derivational morphemes, on the other hand, can be either prefixes (unhappy, disappear) or suffixes (happiness, appearance). Generally, inflectional morphemes are added to the outermost parts of words; they follow derivational suffixes. Besides prefixes and suffixes, some languages have infixes. An infix is a morpheme that is inserted within another morpheme instead of being affixed to an end of it. Compared to prefixes and suffixes, infixes are relatively rare in languages of the world. In Tagalog (the most widely spoken language of the Philippines), infixing does exist. The word gulay meaning “greenish vegetables” can take the infix -IN-, creating the word ginulay, meaning “greenish blue”. The data in Table 4 from the Philippine language Tagalog contains examples of the infix –in, which is inserted after the first consonant of the base to mark a completed event. Table 4 Some Tagalog infixes Base Infixed form bili ‘buy’ b-in-ili ‘bought’ basa ‘read’ b-in-asa ‘read’ (past) sulat ‘write’ s-in-ulat ‘wrote’ Beginning students sometimes think that a morpheme such as –ish in boy-ish-ness is an infix since it occurs between two other morphemes (boy and –ness), but this is not so. To be an infix, an affix must occur inside its base (as when –in in Tagalog occurs inside sulat ‘write’). Nothing of this sort happens in the case of –ish, since its base is boy – not the impossible *boyness. English infixing has been the subject of the Linguist List, a discussion group on the Internet. The interest in infixes in English is because one can only infix full word obscenities into another word, usually into adjectives or adverbs. The most common infix in America is the word fuckin’ and all the euphemisms for it, such as friggin’, freakin’, flippin’, and fuggin’ as in in- fuggin-credible, un-fuckin-believable, or Kalama-flippin-zoo, based on the city in Michigan. In Britain, a common infix is bloody, an obscene term in British English, and its euphemisms, such 11
as bloomin’. In the movie and stage musical My Fair Lady, abso-bloomin-lutely occurs in one of the songs sung by Eliza Doolittle. Some languages also combine a prefix and a suffix in a single morpheme called circumfix – a morpheme that occurs in two parts, on both sides of another morpheme. It means that circumfixes are attached to another morpheme both initially and finally. These are sometimes called discontinuous morphemes. In Samoan, for example, the morpheme FE-/-AɁI, meaning “reciprocal,” exists. Thus the verb “to quarrel” is finau, the verb meaning “to quarrel with each other” is fe-finau-aɁi. Taken together, suffixes, prefixes, infixes, and circumfixes are called affixes. IV.2 Hierarchical Order of Morphemes In order to represent the internal structure of words, it is necessary not only to identify each of the component morphemes but also to classify them in terms of their contribution to the meaning and function of the larger word. Roots and affixes Complex words typically consist of a root morpheme and one or more affixes. The root constitutes the core of the word and carries the major component of its meaning. Roots typically belong to a lexical category, such as noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), or preposition (P). In other words, a root is a lexical content morpheme that cannot be analyzed into smaller parts. Some examples of English roots are paint in painter, and read in reread. Unlike roots, affixes do not belong to a lexical category and are always bound morphemes. For example, the affix –er is a bound morpheme that combines with a verb such as teach, giving a noun with the meaning ‘one who teaches’. The internal structure of this word can be represented in a diagram form as in Figure 1. 12
N V Af teach -er Figure 1 The internal structure of the word teacher Figure 2 provides some additional examples of word structure. a Adj b N Af Adj N Af un- kind book “plural”/(-s) c V d V Adj Af V Af modern -ize destroy “past tense”/(“past participle”/-ed) Figure 2 Some other words with an internal structure consisting of a root and an affix The structural diagrams in Figure 1 and 2 are often called tree structures or tree diagrams. The information they depict can also be represented by using labeled bracketing – [[un- Af] [kind Adj] Adj] for unkind and [[book N] [–s Af] N] for books. (This is somewhat harder to read, though, and we generally use tree structures in this book.) Bases A base is the form to which an affix is added. In many cases, the base is also the root. In books, for example, the element to which the affix –s is added corresponds to the word’s root. In other cases, however, the base can be larger than a root. This happens in words such as blackened, in which the past tense affix –ed is added to the verbal base blacken – a unit consisting of the root morpheme black and the suffix –en (see Figure 3). 13
V Base for -ed V Root and base for -en Adj Af Af black -en “past tense”/(“past participle”/-ed) Figure 3 A word illustrating the difference between a root and a base. In this case, black is not only the root for the entire word but also the base for –en. The unit blacken, on the other hand, is simply the base for –ed. Hierarchical order of the morphemes As with all other aspects of language, morphemes are organized within words in patterned ways, as speakers know implicitly. Besides being arranged in a linear order, the morphemes in words also have a hierarchical (or layered) structure. Untrue, for example, is TRUE with UN- prefixed to it (not UN- with TRUE added). Truthful is composed of a base TRUTH with -FUL suffixed to it (and truth is itself TRUE with –TH added). Examining more complex words, it is easy to see that untruthful would be incorrectly analyzed if we claimed that it was composed of untrue with -thful suffixed. How is the word uncontrollably organized? Is it controllably with UN- prefixed? Or uncontrol with –ably suffixed? It may be helpful to picture the sequence of morpheme structuring as follows: control (V) controllable (Adj) Verb +- ABLE Adjective uncontrollable (Adj) UN- + Adjective Adjective uncontrollably (Adv) Adjective + -LY  Adverb 14
In looking at a sequence like this, it is clear that the root of uncontrollably is CONTROL. We say that CONTROL functions as the base for –ABLE, that controllable functions as the base for uncontrollable, and that uncontrollable functions as the base for uncontrollably. A representation using labeled brackets would be as follows: [[[un- Af] [[control verb] [-able Af] Adj] Adj] [-ly Af]Adv] It could also be represented using a tree diagram like the one in Figure 4. Adv Adj Adj Af V Af Af un- control -able -ly Figure 4 Hierarchical Structure of UNCONTROLLABLY Table 5 lists some English derivational affixes, along with information about the category of their usual base and of the resulting new word. The first entry states that the affix –able applies to a verb base and converts it into an adjective. Thus, if we add the affix –able to the verb fix, we get an adjective (with the meaning ‘able to be fixed’). It is sometimes difficult to determine the category of the base to which an affix is added. N the case of worker, for instance, the base (work) is sometimes used as a verb (as in they work hard) and sometimes as a noun (as in the work is sometimes consuming). How can we know which of these forms serves as the base for –er? The key is to find words such as teacher and writer, in which the category of the base can be unequivocally determined. Because teach and write can only be verbs, we can infer that the base with which –er combines in the word worker is also a verb. 15
Affix Change Examples Affix Change Examples -able V A fix-able, do-able -ate A V activ-ate, captiv-ate -al V N refus-al, dispos-al, recit-al -en A V dead-en, hard-en, black-en -ant V N claim-ant, defend-ant -ity A N stupid-ity, prior-ity -(at)ion V N realiz-ation, assert-ion -ize2 A V modern-ize, national-ize -er V N teach-er, work-er -ly A Adv quiet-ly, slow-ly -ing1 V N the shoot-ing, the danc-ing -ness A N happi-ness, sad-ness -ing2 V A the sleep-ing giant -atic N A system-atic, problem-atic -ive V A assert-ive, restrict-ive de- V V de-actvate, de-mystify -ment V N adjourn-ment, treat-ment dis- V V dis-continue, dis-obey -ful N A faith-ful, hope-ful mis- V V mis-identify, mis-place -(i)al N A president-ial,nation-al re- V V re-think, re-do, re-state -(i)an N A Arab-ian, Einstein-ian un1- V V un-tie, un-lock, un-do -ic N A cub-ic, optimist-ic anti- N N anti-abortion -ize1 N V hospital-ize, crystal-ize ex- N N ex-president, ex-friend -less N A penni-less, brain-less in- A A in-competent, in-complete -ous N A poison-ous, danger-ous un2- A A un-happy, un-fair Table 5 Some English derivational affixes 16
V. MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES V.1 Open and Closed Classes of Morphemes and Words The need for new nouns, adjectives, and verbs arises frequently in some cultures, and additions to these lexical categories occur freely. For this reason, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs are called open classes. Other lexical categories are relatively closed, and additions are made rarely. Adpositions and pronouns are closed classes, and new words are very seldom added to a language in either of these categories. Century after century, English has added thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of new words, many borrowed from other languages, many more constructed from elements already existing in the English word stock. Nearly all the additions have been nouns, verbs, or adjectives. A language has basically three ways of extending its word stock. First, entirely new words can be created, although this is not very common. Alternatively, words that already exist in another language can be borrowed, and this often happens. Most commonly, however, a language forms new words from existing words and morphemes in its own words stock. In order to create new words from existing morphemes and words, several morphological processes can be exploited, and we examine some of them in detail. V.2 Types of word formation V.2.1 Affixation (Derivation) Adding affixes to an existing word is a very common way of creating new words. English exploits this possibility by adding the agentive suffix -er to the prepositions up and down to create the nouns upper and downer, which were invented in connection with drugs but have extended their meaning to anything that lifts or dampens one’s spirits. More commonly, -er is suffixed to verbs (V) and means ‘one who Vs’ as in runner ‘one who runs’, campaigner and designer. English takes advantage of two kinds of affixation: prefixing and suffixing. Prefixes like un-, pre-, and dis- serve to change the meaning of words, though not usually their lexical category. Thus the prefix un- added to an adjective creates a new adjective with the opposite 17
meaning, as in untrue, unpopular, unsuccessful, and unfavorable. The prefix dis- added to a verb derives a verb with the opposite meaning, as in disobey, disappear, dishonor, 6 displace. Pre- serves as a prefix to several categories of words. It can be prefixed to verbs (preaffirm, preallot, preplan, prewash and premix), adjectives (pre-Copernican, precollegiate, precultural, presurgical), or nouns (preantiquity, preaffirmation, preplacement). The prefix pre- has roughly the same sense in each of these words, and in each of them it creates from an existing word a new word in the same lexical category. Suffixes in English usually operate differently from prefixes. More often than not, they change a word’s lexical category. The suffix -ment, for example, when added to a verb, makes a noun of it, as in displacement, arrangement, agreement, and consignment. The suffix -ation does the same thing: resignation, organization, implementation, observation, and reformation. Discrimination and alienation, which may look like the result of the same affix, are more accurately analyzed as coming from the verbs discriminate and alienate, the latter itself derived by suffixing –ate to the noun alien. V.2.2 Reduplication Reduplication is the morphological process by which the base or part of the base is repeated, thereby creating a word with a different meaning or a different lexical category. Repetition of the entire base yields full reduplication, as in the data in Table 6 from Turkish and Indonesian. 18
Table 6 Some examples of full reduplication Base Reduplicated form Turkish tʃabuk ‘quickly’ tʃabuk tʃabuk ‘very quickly’ javaʃ ‘slowly’ javaʃ javaʃ ‘very slowly’ Indonesian oraŋ ‘man’ oraŋ oraŋ ‘all sorts of men’ anak ‘child’ anak anak ‘all sorts of children’ In contrast, partial reduplication copies only part of the base. In the data from Tagalog in Table 7, for instance, reduplication affects only the first consonant-vowel sequence. Table 7 Reduplication in Tagalog Base Reduplicated form takbuh ‘run’ tatakbuh ‘will run’ lakad ‘walk’ lalakad ‘will walk’ piliɁ ‘choose’ pipiliɁ ‘will choose’ The Mandarin Chinese word sànsànbu “to take a leisurely walk” is formed by reduplicating the first syllable of sànbu ‘to walk’ (itself a compound of sàn “to tread” and bù “a step”) and hónghón “bright red” is formed by reduplicating hóng “red”. Reduplication is not to be confused with repetition, which does not create new words but simply reiterates the same word, as in English very, very (tired) and night – night. 19