PowerPoint Presentation 323 Morphology

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 formation, 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 speaker probably knows a different set of lexemes, everybody’s experiences are unique to that individual. The hypothesis is that speakers normally draw from the set of word forms in forming a sentence. To form an unusual word, he must form the word-form from the lexeme using the rules of his grammar. The above diagram is incomplete, but it will suffice for now.

3.2 The form of Morphological Rules

A morpheme rule 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-form 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 -> fox-es, school + house -> school+house, build -> re-build, con-trast -> con-trast-ive-ness, sad -> sadd-est.
Word-structure (word-formation) rules:
word-form <--> stem (+ inflectional suffix)
stem <--> base + lexical meaning (bad format here)
base <--> {{(deriv. prefix +) {root, base} + (deriv. suffix)} , {stem + stem}}
inflectional suffix = -es, -est
derivational prefix = re-
derivation suffix = -ive, -ness
root = fox, school, house, build, happy, sad, down, never, do, be, and so forth.
Phrase-structure rules (top down and bottom up):
S <--> NP + VP
VP --> V + NP
NP <--> Det + Adj + N or better NP <--> Det + [Adj + N] (an intermediate phrase).
N = car, house, mouse, stupidity, delight, forever, down, …
V = run, sleep, smoke, rise, depend, forage, …
Note: The symbol ‘<-->’ means that a form on the left side of the arrow is mapped into the structure on the right and the form on the right side is mapped into the left side.