Page 301 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

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

The reason why the term ‘morphological operation’ is more adequate than the term ‘concatenation’ Notes
is that there are also morphological processes that do not consist exclusively of the attachment of
affixes to words. In this section I present a short survey of these operations, which are dealt with in
more detail in subsequent chapters on derivation and inflection.
A special kind of affixation is the attachment of a complete or partial copy of the base as a prefix or a
suffix. This is called reduplication, illustrated by the following examples (Uhlenbeck 1978: 90) from
Javanese:

(13) a. full reduplication
baita “ship” baita-baita “various ships”
s supe “ring” s supe-s supe “various rings”
e
e
e
omaha “house” omaha-omaha “various houses”
b. partial reduplication
g ni “fire” g g ni “to warm oneself by the fire”
e
e
e
jawah “rain” j jawah “to play in the rain”
e
tamu “guest” t tamu “to visit”
e
In the examples of partial reduplication, the prefix consists of a copy of the first consonant of the base
followed by the vowel schwa [ ]. The doubling effect of full reduplication is often reflected by its
meaning contribution: for nouns it may express plurality or distributivity (as in 13a), for verbs a high
e
intensity of the action expressed, and for adjectives a higher degree of the property mentioned by the
adjective.
Reduplication is a kind of affixation (or compounding, in the case of full reduplication), and hence to
a certain extent a case of concatenative morphology. Yet, it is clear that we cannot list reduplicative
affixes with their phonological content in the lexicon since this content depends on the phonological
composition of the stem. The obvious analysis is the assumption of an abstract affix
RED(UPLICATION) that triggers a phonological operation of copying. The copy is then attached to
the copied stem.
A second type of morphological operation is the use of tone patterns. Tone patterns belong to the
suprasegmental properties of languages. In Ngiti, the plural form of kinship terms is expressed
systematically by the tone pattern Mid-High on the stem, whatever the tone pattern of the singular
(Kutsch Lojenga 1994: 135):
(14) SINGULAR PLURAL
Bba-du ab<-du “my father(s)”
adhB-du adh<-du “my co-wife(s)”
andB-du and<-du “my uncle(s)”

Thus, we may speak of a tonal morpheme Mid-High which is superimposed on the segmental material
of the stem of these nouns. This is why such a tonal morpheme is sometimes called a suprafix. This is
a case of non-concatenative morphology since this kind of affix is not linearly ordered with respect to
its base.
Many languages make use of internal modification. Standard examples are the patterns of vowel
alternation in the roots of the so-called strong verbs in Germanic languages, called ablaut, vowel
gradation, or apophony. Such vowel alternations are used in a number of Indo-European languages
for different forms of the verb:
(15) Classical Greek: leip-o “I leave”; le-loip-a “I have left”, e-lipon “I left”
The e in the first root form alternates with o in the second, and zero in the third (the second form also
exhibits partial reduplication). This pattern of vowel alternation is reflected in Germanic languages,
as the following examples from Dutch illustrate:

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 295