Page 297 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 22: Morphological Analysis (Identification of Morphemes and Allomorph)

correspond to word forms. Notes
Stems can be either simplex or complex. If they are simplex they are called roots. Roots may be
turned into stems by the addition of a morpheme, as the following examples from Polish (Szymanek
1989: 87) illustrate:
(3) a. butelk-a “bottle” b. butelk-owa-ƒ “to bottle”
filtr “filter” filtr-owa-ƒ “to filter”
bial-y “white” biel-i-ƒ “to whiten”
gluch-y “deaf gluch-na-ƒ “to become deaf”
The verbs in (3b) are given here in their citation form, the infinitive. The citation form is the form in
which a word is mentioned when we talk about it, and the form in which it is listed in a dictionary.
In many languages, the infinitive is the citation form of a verb. In languages with case, the NOM.SG
form is the citation form of nouns. Each of these Polish infinitives consists of a root, followed by a
verbalizing morpheme that turns the root into a stem, and is followed by the infinitival ending - ć . It
is the stem-forms that are used when new words are derived from these verbs.
Stem-forming suffixes play an important role in many Indo-European languages. Italian verbs, for
instance, have a thematic vowel after the root morpheme, and this thematic vowel recurs in words
derived from these verbs:
(4) larg-o “wide al-larg-a-re “to widen”
profond-o “deep” ap-profond-i-re “to deepen”
al-larg-a-ment-o “widening”
ap-profond-i-ment-o “deepening”
The thematic vowel is not a part of the root, as it does not occur in the roots larg- and profond-. On the
other hand, it cannot be seen as part of the infinitival suffix, because we do not want to miss the
generalization that all infinitives end in -re. Hence, the vowels preceding the ending -re must be
assigned a morphological status of their own. Consequently, the noun allargamento contains five
morphemes: a prefix al-, a root larg, a thematic vowel -a-, the derivational morpheme -ment, and the
inflectional ending -o. So this word has five morphological atoms, which cannot be decomposed
further into smaller morphological constituents. Each of these five atoms has a different name because
they have different functions in the make-up of this word.
The general term for bound morphemes that are added to roots and stems is affix. If an affix appears
before the root/stem, it is a prefix, if it appears after the root/stem, it is a suffix. So al- and ap- are
prefixes, whereas -a, -ment, and -o are suffixes. Two other types of affixation are illustrated in (5):

(5) infix (within a root): Khmu (Laos) s-m-ka: t “roughen” < ska: t “rough”; Alabama (Stump 2001: 131)
ho-chi-fna “smell, 2SG” < hofna “to smell”, chifip-as-ka “poke, 2PL” < chifipka “to poke”;
circumfix (combination of prefix and suffix): Dutch ge-fiets-t “cycled, PAST PARTICIPLE” <
fiets “to cycle”; German Ge-sing-e “singing” < sing “to sing”.

Infixation and circumfixation are much rarer than prefixation and suffixation.
Affixes are bound morphemes, but not all bound morphemes are affixes. There are many roots from
Greek and Latin that are used in so called neo-classical compounds but do not occur as words by
themselves. These compounds are called ‘neo-classical’ because they consist of constituents from the
classical languages Greek and Latin that were combined into compounds long after these languages
ceased to be ‘living languages’. In such compounds either one or both constituents are not lexemes:
(6) micro-: micro-scope, micro-phone, micro-gram, micro-wave tele-: tele-phone, tele-vision, tele-
communication
-graph: di-graph, sono-graph. photo-graph, tele-graph
-scope: micro-scope, tele-scope, cine-scope, spectro-scope

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