7/27/2023 0 Comments Morphology definition linguistics![]() “Bound morphemes are usually classified into roots and affixes. In the literature, roots and affixes are instead often treated as kinds of “morphemes”, as illustrated by the quotations in (7).Īn affix is a “bound morpheme that cannot function as a word on its own” (Booij 2005: 9) Footnote 2 This is the point that is important for the current paper: We need the term morph in order to have definitions of other terms that we use all the time and that should have a consistent meaning across the discipline. I assume that the least controversial aspect of the definitions is that affixes and roots are kinds of minimal forms, i.e. My proposed definitions of root and affix may raise objections, but I will not defend them here (see Haspelmath 2012 for the definition of root). Footnote 1Ī root is a morph that denotes a thing, an action, or a property.Īn affix is a bound morph that is not a root and that cannot occur on roots of different root classes. In the examples in (2)–(4), the roots are underlined, and the affixes are not underlined. ![]() Two possible definitions are given in (5) and (6). The definitions of general terms therefore cannot make any reference to language-particular phenomena.Įxamples of technical terms that are defined in terms of ‘morph’ are root and affix. Here I am dealing with terms and concepts of general linguistics that could in principle be applied in any language, and that are indispensable for comparative purposes. Of course, many phenomena in particular languages are special and need special terms (such as “weak declension” in German, or “soft mutation” in Welsh, or “conjunct order” in Algonquian). (Consistent terminology is sometimes thought to be more difficult to achieve in morphosyntax than consistent use of symbols in segmental phonology, but there is no intrinsic reason for this see Haspelmath 2020.) Implicitly, this presupposition is widely shared, because many authors use technical terms without defining them, and this would not work satisfactorily for scientific purposes unless some basic terms were understood in the same way by everyone. I merely make the presupposition that a few basic technical terms should be used consistently, just as a set of basic sounds are rendered consistently by IPA symbols throughout the discipline. I emphasize that this paper is meant as a methodological contribution, and makes no larger claims, either about how particular morphosyntactic patterns should be described or how they could be explained. It is the basis for the definitions of affix, prefix, suffix, root and other frequently used terms, and is thus a very important basic term.Īll linguists are familiar with the term morpheme, and this term is sometimes (or even often) used in the sense of a minimal form, but it has two other prominent senses that are fairly different, so it is not suitable as an unambiguous term for a minimal form (see § 3). a minimal pairing of syntacticosemantic content and a string of phonological segments), because this is a very useful concept that needs a term, and there is no other term that would be suitable. ![]() In this short paper, I make a terminological proposal for general linguistics: The term morph should be defined as in (1), as a minimal linguistic form (i.e.
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