position class morphology - university of washingtoncourses.washington.edu/lingclas/481/position...
Post on 29-Apr-2018
229 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
Position class morphology
LING 481/581
Winter 2011
Complex affixation in English
• nation • national ‘pertaining to a/the nation’ • nationalize ‘cause to become national’ • nationalization ‘act/process of becoming
national’ • nationalizational ‘pertaining to nationalization’ • nationalizationalize ‘cause to become
nationalizational’ • Affixes sensitive to local/contiguous properties of
base
Order of adjectives
• Restrictions on sequencing
– the big blue car, *the blue big car
– the big hot cup of coffee, ?the hot big cup of coffee
– the cute little phone, ?the little cute phone
– the yucky old lettuce, the old yucky lettuce
– big leftmost? colors rightmost?
Complex affixation
• Some languages have “position class”, “templatic”, “slot-filler” morphology
– “a recurrent cross-linguistic phenomenon”
– “morphemes or morpheme classes are organized into a total linear ordering that has no apparent connection to syntactic, semantic, or even phonological representation” (Inkelas 1993)
Some language families with position class morphology
• Nimboran family (verbs)
– Nimboran
• Ural-Altaic languages (nouns, verbs)
– Uralic family
• Finnish
• Niger-Congo family (verbs)
– Kujamaat Jóola
– Kimatuumbi
Nimboran position classes
suffixes within position classes are mutually exclusive note numbers : 8 position classes
position classes sometimes but don’t always form semantic natural classes
Some Nimboran verbs
numbers above in glosses refer to person, not position classes numbers below show positions: d. root-7-8 c. root-5-7-8 b. root-2-5-7-8 a. root-2-3-5-7-8
position of morphemes not connected to semantic contribution
Nimboran root + particle root + particle (position 3) = lexical meaning
root-2-3-7-8
Finnish nominal position classes
• “nominals” = noun, adj, pronoun, numeral – nouns: auto ‘car’, katu ‘street’, nainen ‘woman’, hinta ‘price’ – adjs: iso ‘big’, kallis ‘expensive’, pitkä ‘long’, vanha ‘old’ – pronouns: minä ‘I’, he ‘they’, tämä ‘this’, se ‘it’ – numerals: yksi ‘one’, kymmenen ‘ten’, toinen ‘second’, seitsemäs ‘seventh’
• nominals exhibit “position class morphology” – positions for mutually exclusive classes of morphemes can be
identified
• root + (derivational suffixes + ) number + case + possessive + particle – ‘A Finnish nominal can have endings from all of the above four groups,
but the order in which the endings occur is fixed.’ – ‘if a word contains derivational suffixes these occur between the root
and the number ending’
Finnish number
Finnish case
Finnish possessive suffixes
Finnish enclitic particles
• “most common” are
– -kin ‘also’, -kaan~kään ‘(not...)either’, -ko~kö (interrogative), -han~hän (emphasis), -pa~pä (emphasis)
– (HS analyze these as clitics, not nominal suffixes)
Finnish verbs
• more position class morphology
• root + passive + tense/mood + person + particle
• passive: -tta~-ttä~-ta~-tä
• tense/mood:
– past: -i
– conditional: -isi
– potential (‘possible’ or ‘likely’): -ne
Language families of Africa
Austronesian
Niger-Congo family
Kujamaat Jóola verbal position classes
note prefixes + suffixes note position class numbers “How similar are the morphemes within a given position class with respect to the type of information they convey?”
Niger-Congo (family), Atlantic (family), Jóola (lg), Kujamaat Jóola
Stem = root + derivational affixes
Kimatuumbi
• Niger-Congo (family)
– Benue-Congo (family)
• Bantoid (family) – Bantu (family)
» Kimatuumbi (lg)
» Chichewa (lg)
» Swahili (lg)
...
Kimatuumbi position classes
“a disjunctive block of optional prefixes preceding already well-formed verbs; thus niteleka ‘I am cooking’ is morphologically well-formed, and the relative clause form ya-níteléká ‘which I am cooking’ derives from that unprefixed form*?+ by adding the relative clause head agreement marker.”
“the subject prefix, the only pre-root morpheme which is obligatory in inflected verbs”
“The third column contains tense and aspect prefixes.”
“The fourth column may be filled by a single optional object prefix.”
“The core of the verb in Kimatuumbi and generally in all Bantu languages is constructed around a root with any number of optional affixes (referred to as ‘extensions’), such as the causative, passive, or beneficiary, which modify the valence of the verb, or the intensive or ‘pointless’...Such a combination of root and extensions defines the derivational stem, which is the domain for application of vowel harmony...”
Most productive extensions:
“The productive extensions can be combined.”
“The combination of a derivational stem plus an appropriate ‘final vowel’ morpheme defines the inflectional stem. In verbs there are three final morphemes. The most general is –a; -e is used in the subjunctive; -ite and variants are used in the perfective.”
Position class summary
• Nimboran verbs—suffixing
• Finnish nominals, verbs—suffixing
• Kujamaat Jóola—prefixing, suffixing
• Kimatuumbi—prefixing, suffixing
• Position classes sometimes form semantic natural classes (Finnish, Kimatuumbi), not always (Nimboran, Kujamaat Jóola)
top related