PowerPoint Presentation 323 Morphology

3.3 The form of Morphological Rules

3.3.1 Pattern Loss
Pattern loss is one (or more) inflectional categories. For example, H mentions Ancient Greek and its evolution into New Testament Greek. The nominative case forms for Ancient Greek adelphós ‘brother’:
adelphós (singular), adelphó: (dual), adelphoí (plural)
By the time of NT Greek, the dual had disappeared completely without a trace leaving two grammatical categories: Sg. and Pl.
3.3.2 Coalescence (Merger)
Coalescence is a diachronic change where two syntactically separate word-forms (related grammatically) coalesce or merge into one complex word-form. In Old Russian, the reflexive of a verb was formed with a reflexive functional word. By Modern Russian the reflexive had been phonologically reduced so that it could not bear independent stress. The form had become inseparably conjoined to the end of any-word form of a particular verb. Not all verbs form the reflexive in this way. :
E.g. OR ‘mytɩ sebja’ to wash oneself.
MR ‘mytsja’ to wash oneself.
In MR some verbs still take the modern form of the reflexive to form the reflexive. The reflexive suffix has other functions and can change the meaning of the stem. This form seems to be more of weak clitic that must adjoined on to a verb. This is somewhat similar to H’s hypothesis that ‘walk did’ (roughly) -> ‘walked’. In pre-English, the past t. suffix became adjoined to the verb stem.
3.3.3 Analogical Change
Analogical change is a when an inflectional pattern is modified to be another pattern.
There are verbs in English which were regular (weak) at one time but became irregular (strong) following the pattern of another verb class.
E.g. the past tense of dive is dived in standard English.

3.3 The form of Morphological Rules

Over time the substandard form dove came into existence due to the pattern of strive - strove. Arrive follows the same pattern. The interesting item here is that the analogical change applies to the past tense, but not the non-progressive participle (in my dialect, at least; based on for some verbs; based strive, strove, striven:
E.g. dive, dove, dived (*diven); arrive, arrove, arrived (*arriven),
But for other verbs, the non-progressive participle as well; based on sting, stung, stung:
E.g. dig, dug, dug; drag, drug, drug (this one really gets the purists going). 3.3.4 Reanalysis
Reanalysis is when a morpheme — a root — loses its function and becomes part of another morpheme. H cites the Ancient Greek example of kithára.
kithára guitar
kithar-îzo to play the guitar: -izo is adjoined to the stem, ‘to use X’
kithar-is-té:s A guitar player (who does something with X, X a noun): -tés ‘one who uses X.
later:
kithar-isté:s A guitar player (who does something with X, X a noun).
Through reanalysis, the two suffixes ‘-es-’ and ‘-tés’ became merged as ‘-istés’ single suffix: ‘one who does something with X, it is directly added to noun stems.
Secretion
Secretion is defined (roughly) as the process when a string of phonemes is reanalyzed so that the string becomes a morpheme with such-and-such a function. H cites the example of alcoholic (alcohol-ic) which influences new words ‘X’ to first form a blend workaholic. A new morpheme arose ‘aholic’, when ‘work-’ is subtracted from workaholic leaving ‘aholic’ behind as a suffix, when can then be added to some nouns with the meaning of one who indulges in X to a relatively high degree.