Microsoft Word diachronic and synchronic view of word structure. Morphemes and allomorphemes

Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through different periods in history. They look at language over a period of time to make comparisons, and would be used, for example to study the development of English pronoun usage. On the other hand, synchronic linguistics is descriptive and they analyzing how the parts of a language or grammar work together, how proper syntax gives a sentence meaning. They do not consider how language has evolved over time.
For example, synchronic linguistics study of how parts of a language combine to form words and phrases whereas the study of how the development of English from the Old English period to the twentieth century occurred is a diachronic study.For example, if we consider the Моталв conquest of England in 1066 and the various words they bought with them, a diachronic look could analyse what new words were adopted, which ones fell out of use, and how long that process took for select words. А synchronic study might look at the language at different points before the Normans or after. Note how you need a longer time period for the diachronic study than the synchronic one. Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. А synchronic approach (from Ancient Greek: ouv- "together" and xpovo^ "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, often the present. In contrast, a diachronic (from 8ia- "through" and xpovo^ "time") approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history.
For example, the study of Middle English—when the subject is temporally limited to a sufficiently homogenous form—is synchronic focusing on understanding how a given stage in the history of English functions as a whole. The diachronic approach, by contrast, studies language change by comparing the different stages. The terms synchrony and diachrony are often associated with historical linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who considered the synchronic perspective as systematic but argued that language change is too unpredictable to be considered a system.
The concepts were theorized by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of general linguistics in Geneva from 1896 to 1911, and appeared in writing in his posthumous Course in General Linguistics published in 1916.
Saussure's teachers in historical-comparative and reconstructive linguistics such as Georg Curtius advocated the neo-grammarian manifesto according to which linguistic change is based on absolute laws. Thus, it was argued that ancient languages without surviving data could be reconstructed limitlessly after the discovery of such laws. In contradiction to his predecessors, Saussure demonstrated with multiple examples in his Course that such alleged laws are too unreliable to allow reconstructions far beyond the empirical data. Therefore, in Saussure's view, language change (diachrony) does not form a system. By contrast, eaeli synchronic stage is held together by a systemic equilibrium based on the interconnectedness of meaning and form. To understand why a language has the forms it has at a given stage, both the diachronic and the synchronic dimension must be considered.
Saussure likewise rejected the idea of the Darwinian linguists August Schleicher and Max Muller, who considered languages as living organisms arguing that linguistics belongs to life sciences. Saussure illustrates the historical development of languages by way of his distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic perspective employing a metaphor of moving pictures. Even though objects on film appear to be moving, at a closer inspection, this turns out to be an illusion because each picture is static ('synchronic') and there is nothing between the pictures except a lifeless frame. In a similar manner, the "life" of language— simply language change—consists of a series of static points, which are physically independent of the previous stage. In such a context, Saussure warns against the confusion of synchrony and diachrony expressing his concern that these could be not studied simultaneously.
Following the posthumous publication of Saussure's Course, the separation of synchronic and diachronic linguistics became controversial and was rejected by structural linguists including Roman Jakobson and Andre Martinet, but was well- received by the generative grammarians, who considered Saussure's statement as an overall rejection of the historical-comparative method.^[3] In American linguistics, Saussure became regarded as an opponent of historical linguistics. In 1979, Joseph Greenberg stated
"One of the major developments of the last decade or so in linguistics has been a revived and apparently still expanding interest in historical linguistics (..) As a minimum, the strict separation of synchronic and diachronic studies— envisaged by Saussure, but never absolute in practice—is now widely rejected."^[4]
By contrast, Mark Aronoff argues that Saussure rooted linguistic theory in synchronic states rather than diachrony breaking a 19th-century tradition of evolutionary explanation in linguistics.
A dualistic opposition between synchrony and diachrony has been carried over into philosophy and sociology, for instance by Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jacques Lacan also used it for psychoanalysis.^[6] Prior to de Saussure, many similar concepts were also developed independently by Polish linguists Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikolaj Kruszewski of the Kazan School, who used the terms statics and dynamics of language.
In 1970 Eugenio Coseriu, revisiting De Saussure's synchrony and diachrony distinction in the description of language, coined the terms diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic to describe linguistic variation.
CHAPTER 2 MORPHEMES AND ALLOMORPHEMES

1. 
   Morpheme
   

А morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression.The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme cat); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the -5 in cats indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality.
This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root reg- (‘king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: rex (reg-s), reg-is, reg-i, etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word.
These sample English words have the following morphological analyses:

• 
  "Unbreakable" is composed of three morphemes: un- (a bound morpheme signifying "not"), break (the root, a free morpheme), and -able (a bound morpheme signifying "an ability to be done").
  
• 
  The plural morpheme for regular nouns (-s) has three allomorphs: it is pronounced /s/ (e.g., in cats /k^ts/), /iz, 9z/ (e.g., in dishes /dijiz/), and /z/ (e.g., in dogs /dngz/), depending on the pronunciation of the root.
  

Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound:^[6]

• 
  Free morphemes can function independently as words (e.g. town, dog) and can appear within lexemes (e.g. town hall, doghouse).
  
• 
  Bound morphemes appear only as parts of words, always in conjunction with a root and sometimes with other bound morphemes. For example, un- appears only when accompanied by other morphemes to form a word. Most bound morphemes in English are affixes, specifically prefixes and suffixes. Examples of suffixes are -tion, -sion, -tive, -ation, -ible, and -ing. Bound morphemes that are not affixed are called cranberry morphemes.
  

Classification of bound morphemes
Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them is their function in relation to words.
Derivational bound morphemes

• 
  Derivational morphemes, when combined with a root, change the semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word. For example, in the word happiness, the addition of the bound morpheme -ness to the root happy changes the word from an adjective (happy) to a noun (happiness). In the word unkind, un- functions as a derivational morpheme since it inverts the meaning of the root morpheme (word) kind. Generally, morphemes that affix (i.e., affixes) to a root morpheme (word) are bound morphemes.
  

Inflectional bound morphemes

• 
  Inflectional morphemes modify the tense, aspect, mood, person, or number of a verb or the number, gender, or case of a noun, adjective, or pronoun without affecting the word's meaning or class (part of speech). Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding -s to the root dog to form dogs and adding -ed to wait to form waited. Ап inflectional morpheme changes the form of a word. English has eight inflections.
  
• 
  А zero-morpheme is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. А word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by /0/ within glosses.
  
• 
  Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the plural forms; rather than taking the usual plural suffix - s to form hypothetical *sheeps, the plural is analyzed as being composed of sheep + -0, the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from the co­occurrence determiner (in this case, "some-" or "a-").^[10]
  
• 
  In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme. For example, the plural noun cats in English consists of the root cat and the plural suffix -s, and so the singular cat may be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix
  

Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content, and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix -ed is a function morpheme since it has the grammatical function of indicating past tense.
Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other.^[12] Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your, which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically.^[13] Here is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme:

• 
  Content morphemes include free morphemes that are nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and verbs and include bound morphemes that are bound roots and derivational affixes.
  
• 
  Function morphemes may be free morphemes that are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions. They may be bound morphemes that are inflectional affixes
  
• 
  Roots are composed of only one morpheme, but stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. For example, in the word quirkiness, the root is quirk, but the stem is quirky, which has two morphemes.
  
• 
  Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example, the suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell seller) or inflectional (e.g. small smaller). Such morphemes are called homophonous.
  
• 
  Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad, gas, and car, but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes
  
• 
  In natural language proсessing for Japanese, Chinese, and other languages, morphological analysis is the proсess of segmenting а sentenee into а row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging, but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces.
  
• 
  The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language (morphemes) by comparison of similar forms: such as by comparing forms such as "She is walking" and "They are walking" with each other, rather than either with something less similar like "You are reading." Those forms can be effectively broken down into parts, and the different morphemes can be distinguished.
  
• 
  Both meaning and form are equally important for the identification of morphemes. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach teacher). English also has another morpheme that is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g. small smaller). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning but different forms
  

In generative grammar, the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves.

• 
  Direct surface-to-syntax mapping in lexical functional grammar (LFG) - leaves are words
  
• 
  Direct syntax-to-semantics mapping
  

o Leaves in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: distributed morphology - leaves are morphemes
o Branches in syntactic trees spell out morphemes: radical minimalism and nanosyntax - leaves are "nano-" (small) morpho-syntactic features
Given the definition of a morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit," nanosyntax aims to account for idioms in which an entire syntactic tree often contributes "the smallest meaningful unit." Ап example idiom is "Don't let the cat out of the bag." There, the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag." That might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is itself composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases of the "smallest meaningful unit" being longer than a word include some collocations such as "in view of" and "business intelligence" in which the words, when together, have a specific meaning.
The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs:

• 
  Event semantics: the idea that each productive morpheme must have a compositional semantic meaning (a denotation), and if the meaning is there, there must be a morpheme (whether null or overt).
  
• 
  Spell-out: the interface with which syntactic/semantic structures are "spelled out" by using words or morphemes with phonological content. That can also be thought of as lexical insertion into the syntactic.
  

2. 
   Аllomorph.
   

For example, an English past tense morpheme is -ed, which occurs in several allomorphs depending on its phonological environment by assimilating the voicing of the previous segment or the insertion of a schwa after an alveolar stop:

• 
  as [sd] or [id] in verbs whose stem ends with the alveolar stops [t] or [d], such as 'hunted' [hAntid] or 'banded' [b^ndid]
  
• 
  as [t] in verbs whose stem ends with voiceless phonemes other than [t], such as 'fished' [fijt]
  
• 
  as [d] in verbs whose stem ends with voiced phonemes other than [d], such as 'buzzed' [bAzd]
  

The "other than" restrictions above are typical for allomorphy. If the allomorphy conditions are ordered from most restrictive (in this case, after an alveolar stop) to least restrictive, the first matching case usually has precedence. Thus, the above conditions could be rewritten as follows:

• 
  as [od| or [id] when the stem ends with the alveolar stops [t] or [d]
  
• 
  as [t] when the stem ends with voiceless phonemes
  
• 
  as [d] elsewhere
  

The [t] allomorph does not appear after stem-final /t/ although the latter is voiceless, which is then explained by [sd] appearing in that environment, together with the fact that the environments are ordered. Likewise, the [d] allomorph does not appear after stem-final [d] because the earlier clause for the /sd/ allomorph has priority. The /d/ allomorph does not appear after stem-final voiceless phoneme because the preceding clause for the [t] comes first.
Irregular past tense forms, such as "broke" or "was/were," can be seen as still more specific cases since they are confined to certain lexical items, such as the verb "break," which take priority over the general cases listed above
Plural allomorphs
The plural morpheme for regular nouns in English is typically realized by adding an 5 or es to the end of the noun. However, the plural morpheme actually has three different allomorphs: [s], [z], and [sz]. The specific pronunciation that a plural morpheme takes on is determined by the following morphological rules:

• 
  Assume that the basic form of the plural morpheme, /z/, is [z] ("bags" /b^gz/)
  
• 
  The morpheme /z/ becomes [sz] by inserting an [9] before [z] when a noun ends in a sibilant ("buses" /bAssz/)
  
• 
  Change the morpheme /z/ to a voiceless [s] when a noun ends in a voiceless sound ("caps" /k^ps/)
  

Negative allomorphs
In English, the negative prefix in has three allomorphs: [in], [ig], and [im]. The phonetic form that the negative morpheme /in/ uses is determined by the following morphological rules:

• 
  the negative morpheme /in/ becomes [in] when preceding an alveolar consonant ("intolerant'Vin'tolsrsnt/)
  
• 
  the morpheme /in/ becomes [ig] before a velar consonant ("incongruous" /ig'koggruss/)
  
• 
  the morpheme /in/ becomes [im] before а bilabial consonant ("improper" /im'propsr/)
  

In Sami languages
The Sami languages have a trochaic pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. The vowels and consonants that are allowed in an unstressed syllable differ from those that are allowed in a stressed syllable. Consequently, every suffix and inflectional ending has two forms, and the form that is used depends on the stress pattern of the word to which it is attached. For example, Northern Sami has the causative verb suffix -hit/-ahttit in which -hit is selected when it would be the third syllable (and the preceding verb has two syllables), and -ahttit is selected when it would be the third and the fourth syllables (and the preceding verb has three syllables):

•