323 Morphology

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323 Morphology

• The Structure of Words
• 3. Lexicon and Rules

3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon The lexicon is
in theory infinite, but in practice it is
limited. Human beings know only a certain amount
of information at any one time and it is
impossible for a human to know an infinite amount
of information. This holds in the lexicon, as
well. Comparing a lexicon to a dictionary (the
printed lexemes), a dictionary can hold only so
much information at one time. The list can grow
and grow, but it is never infinite. The
potentiality for making up new words by means of
the rules of word building is potentially
infinite, but this has never been proved.
Nevertheless, it possible to create a large
number of words, larger than what most humans
could possibly memorize. Thus we must distinguish
between actual words and potential words. A
neologism is a new word that has been created.
Neologisms that do not catch on except
occasionally are called occasionalisms. Note that
this word was probably created recently and I
doubt if it has really caught on. If true, then
the word occasionalism is itself an
occasionalism. Affixes that are readily adjoined
to words to create new words (bases and stems)
are called productive. E.g. The English suffix
-er can be added to most verbs that denote an
agent oriented action doer, fixer, baker,
worker, runner, swimmer, writer, and so forth.
The same suffix can also denote an instrument
cooker, pickle slicer, popcorn maker,
double-boiler, but it is doubtful that this verb
productive, though it may be productive if the
semantic class is known. Other affixes are
clearly not productive E.g. -ic, ion,
-ive, be-, de-, and so forth. Another
problem with unproductivity (sic) is that
unproductive affixes easily change the meaning of
the word.
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3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
E.g. head, be-head give, forgive stand,
understand woman, womanize and so forth.
There are affixes that are very productive,
rather unproductive, somewhat unproductive, very
unproductive. H lists a finer list of
productiveness (p. 42). Another problem are
complex words that are lexical, but underlying
base is not lexical. To illustrate this, consider
disgruntled. It is derived from the base
gruntle, which is not a lexeme with the
associated meaning of disgruntled. I take the
view that forming bases is productive given the
restrictions on the base, but the base is not
always a lexeme. There no way to be absolutely
sure whether a given base will or will not be a
lexeme. As a consequence, all lexemes must be
enterred in the lexicon. If a base is created,
one must check to see if it is a lexeme, or one
may occasionally determine a lexical meaning for
the new base thus creating a new word, as I did
with unproductivity above. H argues that a
word-form lexicon is not desirable. A word-form
lexicon is one in which every declined or
conjugated form of each word is listed in it.
Inflected forms are generally predictable given
the class forms of each lexeme, except the
irregular ones such oxen, children, brethren is,
are, be, was, were (being and been) are regular
(except for the pronunciation of been in the US
and in Canada whether the American pronunciation
has taken over the earlier one which is still
standard in Britain. Even so, there is
evidence that all the word forms of everyday
usage are memorized and listed in the lexicon. I
read a paper at SFU claiming that the lexicon is
divided into two parts the list of lexemes and
the list of word-forms derived from them. Each
set of word forms derived from a lexeme are
linked to that lexeme at little cost to the
grammar. Linking is another research topic of
mine, which I cannot get into here.
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3.1 Productivity and the Lexicon
H mentions that a lexicon should be elegant which
means the least number of rules that will produce
all the inflected forms. The lexical part of the
lexicon contains a list of all lexemes that a
speaker has. The word-form part of the lexicon
contains the inflected forms for each inflectable
lexeme (conjunctions, prepositions and other
functions are not inflected in English)
The lexeme PLAY is connected to the word-forms
play, plays, played, and playing by means of a
link. The links are for information transference
from the lexeme to the word-form, which we might
call production, and from the word-form to the
lexeme the latter is called interpretation. The
most common word-forms are most likely memorized.
The word-form component will differ for each
speaker just each speakers probably knows a
different set of lexemes, everybodys experiences
are unique to that individual.
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
A morpheme drule is any kind of regularity that
is noticed by speakers and is reflected in
their unconscious linguistic knowledge (H p. 44).
Though there may be several formal descriptions
that can be conjectured, H will discuss two
formalisms the morpheme based model and the
word-based model. 3.2.1 The morpheme based
model In this model morphemes are combined
together to form a new form, expressed by a set
if word-building rules. H compares these to
syntactic rules forming phrases, clauses and
sentences. Consider the following words as
examples E.g. fox -gt foxes, school house -gt
schoolhouse, build -gt rebuild, contrast -gt
contrast-ive-ness, sad -gt saddest. Word-struct
ure (word-formation) rules word-form lt--gt stem
( inflectional suffix) stem lt--gt base
lexical meaning (bad format here) base lt--gt
(deriv. prefix ) root, base (deriv.
suffix) , stem stem inflectional
suffix -es, -est derivational prefix
re- derivation suffix -ive, -ness root
fox, school, house, build, contrast,
sad. Phrase-structure rules (top down and
bottom up) S lt--gt NP VP VP --gt V NP NP
lt--gt Det Adj N N car, house, mouse,
stupidity, delight, V run, sleep, smoke,
rise, depend, forage,
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3.2 The form of Morphological Rules
D the, this, that Q a, an, one, ø, some,
few, a few, several, A happy, red, large,
petite, long, deep, fuzzy,