Page 307 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

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

Table 22.1 Distribution of Number morphemes Notes

Absence of SG morpheme Presence of SG morpheme
Presence of PL morpheme English, Dutch Latvian, Italian

Absence of PL morpheme Chinese, Maori

Source: Croft 1990: 69.
This generalization concerning the expression of number has to be amended slightly, however. There
are languages where, for those entities that always occur in pairs or in groups, the plural form of the
noun has no overt suffix, and the singular form ends in a singulative suffix. This is the case for
Turkana (Dimmendaal 1983: 224-8), a language of Kenya with the singulative suffixes -a and -it (the
prefixes are gender markers):

Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes
paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word
forms, to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations
that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms.

(29) singulative plural
e-sxkxn-a “breast” ŋ-sxkxn “breasts”
e-turkBna-xt “Turkana person” ŋ-tjrkanB “Turkana people”
This reversal of the markedness pattern concerning singular-plural in a special domain is called local
markedness (Tiersma 1982).
The use of hierarchies in morphological typology is illustrated by the following hierarchy for the
different values for the category number:

(30) singular > plural > dual

This hierarchy ranks singular above plural, and plural above dual. It expresses that singular forms
are less marked than plurals, and plurals are less marked than duals. This means that if a language
has a dual (that is, a word form with 2 as the value for the category number), it has also a plural, and
if a language has a plural, it also has a singular. Hence, this hierarchy restricts the variation space of
natural language: certain types of logically possible languages are excluded, such as a language with
singular and dual only.
Not all the typological universals are absolute ones; some are statistical tendencies only. For instance,
there are many more languages that only use suffixes (Turkish is an example) than there are languages
that only use prefixes. Hence, there is a suffixing preference in natural languages. Yet, there are
languages that are exclusively prefixing, so there is no absolute universal involved here. Many of the
universals discussed in Greenberg (1963) are of this statistical nature.
Self-Assessment

1. Form words of the following affixes:
(i) bell (ii) bene (iii)bi (iv) bio

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