Page 308 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes 22.4 Summary

• Words can be divided into different kinds of morphemes such as roots and affixes, the
morphological atoms of language. These morphemes may vary in shape (allomorphy), a variation
that does not always follow from the phonological system of the language. In the case of
suppletion, different stems co-occur in the paradigm of one lexeme.
• The set of morphological operations available to human languages comprises more than
concatenation: conversion, reduplication (concatenation plus copying), different types of
phonetic modification, root-and-pattern morphology, and paradigmatic word-formation also
play a role.
• Languages do not all make the same use of the available morphological operations, and can be
classified according to the indices of synthesis and fusion. In addition to this purely classificatory
typology, morphologists make cross-linguistic comparisons of morphological systems in order
to find constraints on the degree of morphological variation of natural language.
22.5 Key-Words

1. Phone : A phone in phonology has been described as “the smallest possible segment of
sound abstracted from the continuum of speech”. Thus any objective smallest
possible segment of speech sound, considered as a physical event, and without
regard as to how it fits into the structure of any given language, is called a phone.
2. Allophone : An allophone is a speech sound that is one of a number of variants of a phoneme.
This variant can be either in complementary variationor in free variation. We can
classify allophone by way of an example. The k-sound in keel, calm and cool differs;
in keel it is at the front in the mouth, in calm it is a little in the centre and in cool
further back in the mouth. The absence of the above mentioned features do not
distort the message for the native speaker. He does not differentiate between these
sounds in everyday speech in the sense that he is not aware of the physical
differences. He thinks these sounds to be the members of the k-class or to be all k. In
other words, for the phoneme /k/, retracted-k, and fronted-k are all allophones.
22.6 Review Questions

1. Identify the bound constituents of the following English words: disagreeable, acceptability,
ungrammaticality, discriminatory, permafrost, fascination, protolanguage, versification, intolerance,
productivity, unidirectionality.
2. Consider the sets of morphologically related words in French in the table that exhibit variation
in the underlined vowel of their base word (Dell and Selkirk 1978).
Base word Derived words

[ ] [ ] []]
oe
oe
fleur “flower” fleurette “small floral “floral”
flower”
seul “alone” seulement “only” solitude “popular”
peuple “ people” peuplade “tribe” populaire “popular”
[e] [e] [a]
vain “idle” vainement “in vain” vanitJ “vanity”
clair “clear” Jclairer “to light” clarifier “to clarify”
mer “sea” amerrir “to land marin “sailor”
on the sea”

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