The Science of Language

Readings

• Bastard Tongues, chapts. 7 & 8.

Linguistic Concepts

Verbs in different languages have different possible forms. In English, there are three main forms of most verbs: e.g. walk, walked, walking. These three forms can combine with verb endings (walk-s) and auxiliary verbs (has/had walked, is/was walking, has been seeing/seen, etc.) to produce a variety of meanings. Verbal meanings give information about actions or events; for example, they can give information about:

1. the time of occurrence
2. the duration of occurrence
3. the relation of one occurrence to another
4. whether or not the point of time of the occurrence is specified
5. whether or not the subject of the verb is the agent of the action, or affected by it
6. whether or not the action is repetitive
7. whether or not the action has been completed.

In other words, a small number of forms combine to produce a large number of potential meanings.

The grammars of different languages describe verbal meanings in different ways. In English, for example, the choices (or systems) of tense and aspect are often distinguished. English has a two-part formal system of tense, indicating past or present only: walk, walked. Here the form of the verb changes. To indicate futurity, however, English speakers do not change the form of the verb. Instead, they might use an auxiliary verb like 'will' or ''ll' – I'll go there tomorrow. Because a modal auxiliary is used, we can say that the future in English is expressed through the system of modality rather than the system of tense – because will go uses an auxiliary verb like can go, should go, and must go rather an inflexion such as -ed.

There are six systems of the English verb:

• tense (past/present)
• aspect (simple/progressive or continuous/perfect)
• voice (active/passive)
• finiteness (finite/non-finite)
• modality (modalised/non-modalised)
• mood (indicative/imperative/subjunctive).

Each system is described in detail under its own heading.

It is difficult to relate the systems of the verb in one language directly to those in another. Different languages use their grammatical resources in rather different ways. For example, while English expresses futurity by using a modal auxiliary (or even a special verb like 'going to'), another language might express a similar concept by using an inflexion. In other words, other languages might have a properly grammatical 'future tense', that is a specific form of the verb itself that is used to indicate futurity. The exploration of the ways in which different languages express concepts relating to actions and events is therefore complex and fascinating.

Grammarians (within and across languages) are not always full or consistent in the way they describe the systems of the verb. For example, the sentences She plays the recorder, She is playing the recorder and She has played here before are all present tense. The –s inflexion in plays and the auxiliary verbs is/has all indicate present tense. The difference between these sentences is actually one of aspect: the first sentence expresses a plain fact (simple aspect), the second expresses something that is happening at this moment (progressive aspect), and the third expresses something that has happened at some unspecified time in the past (perfect aspect). The sentences exploit different forms of the verb combined with different auxiliary verbs to express these notions. All these aspects have past tense equivalents: She played the recorder, She was playing the recorder, She had played here before. Since the aspect of the verb is always combined with either the present or past tense, some grammarians and textbooks categorise them under the umbrella of 'tense', and so it is not unusual to see 'present or past simple tense', 'present or past progressive tense', and 'present or past perfect tense'. This is not necessarily a problem so long as we remember that the present perfect 'tense' (for example) represents, in English, two sets of choices (from the options present/past and simple/progressive/perfect).

Morphology

In linguistics, “morphology” means “the study of word structure.” We’re interested in the structure of individual words, as well as the grammatical principles whereby words are formed.

Some of the terminology used here is probably familiar to you. The stem of a word is its core, the part that bears its central meaning. Thus in undeniable, the stem is deny; and in insincerity the stem is sincere.

Material that is added to the stem, thus modifying its meaning in some way, consists principally of prefixes and suffixes. The suffix -able is prefixed to deny to form deniable2; and the prefix un- is added to the result to obtain undeniable. Often, multiple prefixes and suffixes can be added to the same stem, producing ever longer and more elaborate words: undeniability,
hyperundeniability.

Stem, prefixes, and suffixes are the building blocks from which words are assembled. The term used for such building blocks by linguists is morpheme, often defined as follows:

• A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that bears a meaning.
Thus, un-, deny, and -able are morphemes; deniable is not a morpheme because it can be split; de and ny are not morphemes because they are meaningless.

We can start with a bit of notation. Words are shown broken into their morphemes with hyphens: un-deni-abil-ity. And prefixes and suffixes are shown with hyphens to identify them as such: prefixes like un-, suffixes like -ity. You can think of the hyphen as the bit of imaginary "glue" with which a morpheme attaches to the stem.

Two Kinds of Morphology

Most linguists acknowledge at least a rough distinction between two kinds of morphology: word formation vs. inflectional morphology. We'll start with inflectional morphology.

Inflectional morphology is grammatical morphology. Here are some examples to start, from English:

• tense on verbs (present tense jumps, past tense jumped)
• number on nouns (singular cow, plural cows)
• a small amount of person and number agreement in verbs (She sings. vs. They sing.)

English is actually not a very good language for studying inflectional morphology, because it doesn't have all that much of it (Mandarin is a similar case). But other languages, such as Swahili, Russian, or Turkish, have a great deal, and students of these languages can spend years getting through it all.

Morphological Analysis

When they encounter an unfamiliar language, linguists usually begin their work by carrying out a morphological analysis. This involves gathering data, determining what morphemes are present in the data, and writing the rules that form the words from the morphemes.

There are no fancy methods for doing this; basically one must scan a collection of morphologically similar words and determine which phoneme sequences remain the same whenever the meaning remains the same.

Exercises

1. Identify the component morpheme(s) of each word. How many morphemes does each word contain?

1. student
2. deforms
3. island
4. stupidity
5. unreliable
6. classroom
7. unfair
8. trial
9. paper
10. excellent
11. disinfectant
12. inversion
13. sleeping
14. unfairly
15. magazine
16. unemployed
17. husbands
18. ugly
19. sandwich
20. crinkly

2) Isolate the affixes in each of these words and state whether each is prefix or suffix.

1. depose
2. action
3. readily
4. repackage
5. active
6. -unchanged
7. behead
8. forcefully

3) For the following words, identify all roots (base words).

1. dragged
2. deactivated
3. unassuming
4. redness
5. impossible
6. racketeers
7. thumbtack
8. cloudiness
9. hopefully
10. exceptionally

Refer to the following data to solve the problem below it.

List #1: taller, shorter, greener, higher, lower, sweeter, smarter
List #2: mower, teacher, sailor, farmer, caller, operator
List #3: never, cover, finger, either, river, candor, other, valor

Problem I: Use (a) your own knowledge of English and (b) the notion 'consistent match between meaning and form' to construct an argument in which you agree or disagree with the following statement, supporting your position with evidence from the data.

Statement: The item spelled 'er'/'or' is the same item in all of the words, in all three lists.

Problem II: Do the same, using the following data:

List #1: soften, harden, sweeten, whiten, strengthen, lengthen, widen, deepen, redden, blacken, weaken
List #2: given, taken, eaten, broken
List #3: oven, open, coven, leaven, ramen, even, often, sudden

Statement:The item spelled 'en' is the same item in all of the words, in all three lists.