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Linguistics

Notes morphemes t- -meyŋ- -levt-p γ t- -rk n, that can be glossed l.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.l,
e
e
e
e
meaning ‘I have a fierce headache.’ The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant
e
and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the language key the usage and
understanding of each morpheme.
The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is called
morphophonology.
22.1 The Atoms of Words
Words can be chopped into smaller pieces. At the phonological level, words can be divided into
syllables or segments, and segments into” their constituent phonological features. At the morphological
level, words may consist of more than one unit as well, which we may call the morphological atoms
of a word: pieces that are no further divisible into morphological subparts. Just as there are different
kinds of atom in chemistry, there are different kinds of atom in morphology, and it is quite useful for
morphological analysis to be acquainted with their classification. A good classification is an important
analytic instrument, developed in order to get a better under-standing of the structure and formation
of words.
As we saw, the Polish lexeme KOT “cat” has a paradigm of case forms; compare this to the case forms
of the noun KOBIETA “woman” in (1). Each cell of the paradigm of Polish nouns is occupied by a
grammatical word, i.e. a form of a lexeme with a particular property for the grammatical categories
number and case. Grammatical words may share the same word form. For instance, both the GEN.SG
and the ACC.SG form of KOT have the form kot-a. The phenomenon that two or more grammatical
words have the same word form is called syncretism. The distinction between lexeme, grammatical
word, and word form shows that the general notion ‘word’ subsumes a number of different notions.
In most cases it is clear which interpretation of ‘word’ is intended, but sometimes it will be necessary
to use the more specific notions.

(1) SINGULAR PLURAL

NOMINATIVE kot kobiet-a kot-y kobiet-y
GENITIVE kot-a kobiet-y kot-ow kobiet
DATIVE kot-u kobieci-e kot-om kobiet-om
ACCUSATIVE kot-a kobiet-e kot-y kobiet-y
INSTRUMENTAL kot-em kobiet-a kot-ami kobiet-ami
LOCATIVE koci-e kobieci-e kot-ach kobiet-ach
VOCATIVE koci-e kobiet-o kot-y kobiet-y
Each of the word forms of KOT consists of a stem and an inflectional ending (or desinence). The
stem of a word is the word form minus its inflectional affixes, in this example kot-. It is the stem that
forms the basis for word-formation, not the whole word form. This might not be so clear for the
Polish noun KOT, because the NOM.SG word form kot of this word happens to have no overt ending.
However, the noun KOBIETA does have an overt ending. For that reason, one may speak of a zero-
ending for the NOM.SG. form of KOT, and likewise for the GEN.PL form of KOBIETA. The following
example from Italian also illustrates the role of the stem. The singular form of macchina “machine”
has the inflectional ending -a, and the plural ending is -e:
(2) macchin-a “machine” macchin-e “machines” macchin-ista “machinist”

It is the stem macchin- that is used as the basis for word-formation, as shown by macchinista. In English,
the form of the stem is identical to that of the SG word form, and this is why English morphology is
sometimes qualified as word-based morphology, in contrast to the stem-based morphology of, for
instance, most Romance and Slavic languages. This is a superficial difference: these languages all
have lexeme-based morphology, they only differ in that the stem-forms of lexemes do not always

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