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

The emergence of the verb to babysit can be reconstructed as follows. The word babysitter is a regular Notes
compound consisting of two nouns, baby and the deverbal noun sitter. However, there is no general
process of N + V compounding in English. The exceptional NV compound babysit could therefore
only arise through back formation. In the same way, the Dutch NV compound stofzuig “to vacuum-
clean” arose through back formation from the regular NN compound stofzuiger “lit. dust sucker,
vacuum cleaner”. In the cases of to babysit and stofzuig, the structure [N][V -er] ] has been reinterpreted
N N
as [[N V] -er] , and subsequent back formation led to the rise of these N + V compounds.
V N
22.3 Morphological Typology

The catalogue of morphological operations presented in section 2.2 raises the question to what extent
the languages of the world make use of these possibilities. First, we can locate each language on a
scale of degree of synthesis, the average number of morphemes in a word. On one end of the scale we
find isolating languages that do not make use of morphology at all. A classical example of such a
language is Vietnamese (which, however, is said to have compounds). At the other end of the scale
we find polysynthetic languages such as Greenlandic and Alaskan Yup’ik, languages in which words
may contain a considerable number of suffixes after the root.
Before we have a look at some relevant examples, I will first give a short clarification of the notational
conventions used in interlinear morphemic translation. These conventions are of considerable
importance for our understanding of the structure of sentences and words. A space marks the boundary
between two words, and a hyphen represents a boundary between two morphemes within one word.
Lexical morphemes are represented by lower case letters, and grammatical categories by small capitals.
If one morpheme on the first line represents more than one piece of lexical or grammatical information
in the morphemic gloss, the categories are separated by a dot, as in the following Latin example
(Lehmann 1982: 205):

(23) Manu-s manu-m lava-t
hand-NOM.SG hand-ACC.SG wash-3sG
“One hand washes the other”

The only exception to this use of the dot is its absence in combinations of the category PERSON and
the category NUMBER, as in 3sG.
Let us now have a look at some examples of polysynthetic words in which the conventions just
discussed are also exemplified—first Green-landic (Fortescue 1984: 273) and then Alaska Yup’ik
(Mithun 1999: 28):

In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages
according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are
isolating, and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words
tend to have lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or
fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are “fused” together. This leads to
one bound morpheme conveying multiple pieces of information.

(24) tuqu-riikatap-puq
die-long.ago-3SG.INDIC
“He died long ago”
anglani-tu-llru-u-nga caknek
enjoy-customarily-PAST-IND.INTR-ISG very.much
“I used to enjoy myself very much”

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