Notes on computational linguistics.pdf - UCLA Department of ...

Stabler - Lx 185/209 2003
17 Morphology, phonology, orthography
17.1 Morphology subsumed
In common usage, “word” refers to some kind of linguistic unit. We have a rough, common sense idea of what
a word is, but it would not be a big surprise if this notion did not correspond exactly to what we need for a
scientific account of language.
(1) The commonsense notion of “word” comes close to the idea of a morpheme by which we will mean the
simplest meaningful units of language, the “semantic atoms.”
A different idea is that words are syntactic atoms. Syntactic atoms and semantic atoms are most clearly
different in the case of idioms.
I actually think that common usage of the term “morpheme” in linguistics is closer to the notion of
“syntactic atom,” as has been argued, for example, by Di Sciullo and Williams (1987).
(2) A distinction is often drawn between elements which can occur independently, free morphemes, and
those that can only appear attached to or inside of another element, bound morphemes or affixes. Affixes
that are attached at the end of a word are called suffixes; at the beginning of the word, prefixes, inside
the word, infixes; at the beginning and end circumfixes. This looks like a phonological fact.
(3) What we ordinarily call “words” can have more than one syntactic and semantic atom in them. For
example, English can express the idea that we are talking about a plurality of objects by adding the
sound [s] or [z] at the end of certain words:
book book-s
table table-s
friend friend-s
The variation in pronunciation here looks like a phonological fact, but the fact that this is a mark of
pluralization, one that apples to nouns (including demonstratives, etc.), looks syntactic and semantic.
(4) The same suffix can mark a different distinction too, as we see in the 3rd singular present marking on
regular verbs. English can modify the way in which a verb describes the timing of an action by adding
affixes:
He dance -s present tense (meaning habitually, or at least sometimes)
He danc -ed past tense
He be -s danc -ing present am progressive -ing (meaning he is dancing now)
In English, only verbs can have the past tense or progressive affixes. That is, if a word has a past or
progressive affix, it is a verb. Again, the reverse does not always hold. Although even the most irregular
verbs of English have -ing forms (being, having, doing), some verbs sound very odd in progressive
constructions:
?He is liking you a lot
And again, it is important to notice that there are some other -ing affixes, such as the one that lets a
verb phrase become a subject or object of a sentence:
Dancing is unusual
Clearly, in this last example, the -ing does not mean that the dancing going on now, as we speak, is
unusual.
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