An Introduction to English Morphology Words and Their Structure

160 Pages·2007·1.62 MB·English

An Introduction to
English Morphology:
Words and Their
Structure
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Edinburgh University Press
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page i
An Introduction to English Morphology
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page ii
Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language
General Editor
Heinz Giegerich, Professor ofEnglish Linguistics (University ofEdinburgh)
Editorial Board
Laurie Bauer (University ofWellington)
Derek Britton (University ofEdinburgh)
Olga Fischer (University ofAmsterdam)
Norman Macleod (University ofEdinburgh)
Donka Minkova (UCLA)
Katie Wales (University ofLeeds)
Anthony Warner (University ofYork)
    
An Introduction to English Syntax
Jim Miller
An Introduction to English Phonology
April McMahon
An Introduction to English Morphology
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page iii
An Introduction to
English Morphology
Words and Their Structure
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Edinburgh University Press
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page iv
To Jeremy
© Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in Janson
by Norman Tilley Graphics and
printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7486 1327 7 (hardback)
ISBN 0 7486 1326 9 (paperback)
The right ofAndrew Carstairs-McCarthy
to be identified as author ofthis work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction 1
Recommendations for reading 3
2 Words, sentences and dictionaries 4
2.1 Words as meaningful building-blocks oflanguage 4
2.2 Words as types and words as tokens 5
2.3 Words with predictable meanings 6
2.4 Non-words with unpredictable meanings 9
2.5 Conclusion: words versus lexical items 12
Exercises 13
Recommendations for reading 14
3 A word and its parts: roots, affixes and their shapes 16
3.1 Taking words apart 16
3.2 Kinds ofmorpheme: bound versus free 18
3.3 Kinds ofmorpheme: root, affix, combining form 20
3.4 Morphemes and their allomorphs 21
3.5 Identifying morphemes independently ofmeaning 23
3.6 Conclusion: ways ofclassifying word-parts 26
Exercises 27
Recommendations for reading 27
4 A word and its forms: inflection 28
4.1 Words and grammar: lexemes, word forms and
grammatical words 28
4.2 Regular and irregular inflection 31
4.3 Forms ofnouns 34
4.4 Forms ofpronouns and determiners 38
4.5 Forms ofverbs 39
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page vi
vi AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY
4.6 Forms ofadjectives 40
4.7 Conclusion and summary 42
Exercises 42
Recommendations for reading 43
5 A word and its relatives: derivation 44
5.1 Relationships between lexemes 44
5.2 Word classes and conversion 45
5.3 Adverbs derived from adjectives 48
5.4 Nouns derived from nouns 49
5.5 Nouns derived from members ofother word classes 50
5.6 Adjectives derived from adjectives 52
5.7 Adjectives derived from members ofother word classes 53
5.8 Verbs derived from verbs 54
5.9 Verbs derived from member ofother word classes 55
5.10 Conclusion: generality and idiosyncrasy 56
Exercises 57
Recommendations for reading 58
6 Compound words, blends and phrasal words 59
6.1 Compounds versus phrases 59
6.2 Compound verbs 60
6.3 Compound adjectives 61
6.4 Compound nouns 61
6.5 Headed and headless compounds 64
6.6 Blends and acronyms 65
6.7 Compounds containing bound combining forms 66
6.8 Phrasal words 67
6.9 Conclusion 68
Exercises 68
Recommendations for reading 69
7 A word and its structure 71
7.1 Meaning and structure 71
7.2 Affixes as heads 71
7.3 More elaborate word forms: multiple affixation 72
7.4 More elaborate word forms: compounds within
compounds 76
7.5 Apparent mismatches between meaning and structure 79
7.6 Conclusion: structure as guide but not straitjacket 82
Exercises 83
Recommendations for reading 84
01 pages i-viii prelims 18/10/01 3:42 pm Page vii
CONTENTS vii
8 Productivity 85
8.1 Introduction: kinds ofproductivity 85
8.2 Productivity in shape: formal generality and regularity 85
8.3 Productivity in meaning: semantic regularity 88
8.4 Semantic blocking 91
8.5 Productivity in compounding 93
8.6 Measuring productivity: the significance ofneologisms 95
8.7 Conclusion: ‘productivity’ in syntax 97
Exercises 98
Recommendations for reading 99
9 The historical sources ofEnglish word formation 100
9.1 Introduction 100
9.2 Germanic, Romance and Greek vocabulary 100
9.3 The rarity ofborrowed inflectional morphology 102
9.4 The reduction in inflectional morphology 104
9.5 Characteristics ofGermanic and non-Germanic
derivation 106
9.6 Fashions in morphology 108
9.7 Conclusion: history and structure 110
Exercises 111
Recommendations for reading 113
10 Conclusion: words in English and in languages generally 114
10.1 A puzzle: disentangling lexemes, word forms and
lexical items 114
10.2 Lexemes and lexical items: possible reasons for their
overlap in English 115
10.3 Lexemes and lexical items: the situation outside
English 116
10.4 Lexemes and word forms: the situation outside
English 118
Recommendations for reading 119
Discussion of the exercises 120
Glossary 141
References 148
Index 150
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Heinz Giegerich for inviting me to write this book,
and him and Laurie Bauer for useful comments on a draft version. I must
admit that, when I set out to write what is intended as an introductory
text on an extremely well-described language, I did not expect to learn
anything new myself; but I have enjoyed discovering and rediscovering
both new and old questions that arise from the study ofmorphology and
its interaction with syntax and the lexicon, even ifI cannot claim to have
provided any conclusive new answers.
The Library of the University of Canterbury has, as always, been
efficient in supplying research material. I would also like to thank my
partner Jeremy Carstairs-McCarthy for constant support and help.
viii
02 pages 001-152 18/10/01 3:43 pm Page 1
1
Introduction
The term ‘word’ is part of everyone’s vocabulary. We all think we
understand what words are. What’s more, we are right to think this, at
some level. In this book I will not suggest that our ordinary notion ofthe
word needs to be replaced with something radically different. Rather, I
want to show how our ordinary notion can be made more precise. This
will involve teasing apart the bundle of ingredients that go to make up
the notion, showing how these ingredients interact, and introducing
ways of talking about each one separately. After reading this book, you
will still go on using the term ‘word’ in talking about language, both in
everyday conversation and in more formal contexts, such as literary
criticism or English language study; but I hope that, in these more formal
contexts, you will talk about words more confidently, knowing exactly
which ingredients of the notion you have in mind at any one time, and
able where necessary to use appropriate terminology in order to make
your meaning absolutely clear.
This is a textbook for students of the English language or of English
literature, not primarily for students of linguistics. Nevertheless, what
I say will be consistent with mainstream linguistic views on word-
structure, so any readers who go on to more advanced linguistics will
not encounter too many inconsistencies.
A good way of teasing apart the ingredients in the notion ‘word’ is
by explicitly contrasting them. Here are the contrasts that we will be
looking at, and the chapters where they will be discussed:
• words as units of meaning versusunits of sentence structure (Chapters 2,
6, 7)
• words as pronounceable entities (‘word forms’) versus more abstract
entities (sets ofword forms) (Chapters 3, 4, 5)
• inflectionally relatedword forms (forms ofthe same‘word’) versus deriva-
tionally related words (different ‘words’ with a shared base) (Chapters
4, 5)
1