PowerPoint Presentation 323 Morphology

3.2 The form of Morphological Rules

The use of ‘x’ and /X/ is illustrated:
‘x’ = {‘house, finger, desk, car, cougar and so forth’}.

‘x’	function
N	form
/X/	sign

If ‘house’ is selected for the ‘s’ on the right, then ‘x’ on the left is replaced with ‘house’:
Let’s look at an example of word derivation.
E.g. work+agent <----> worker. (more or less)
This a kind of mapping, another process that the symbol ‘<---->’ represents. The form on the left can be mapped to the morph on the right, and the one on the right can be mapped onto the one on the left.
[/X/]V, ‘x (= an agent)’] <--> [/X/]V, N, one who ‘xs’]. But is it really desirable to do so? H seems to think so, but I am being a bit reserved for reasons that I will talk about in the next chapter (I hope).

‘plural of ‘x’	function
N	form
/Xz/	sign

<---->

3.2 The form of Morphological Rules

The word-class category of the lexeme must be part of the lexical entry. Note that the Symbol ‘A’ refers to lexical modifiers; ‘Adj’ refers to the set of adjectives, and ‘Adv’ refers to the set of adverbs. Degree words, such as very, quite, rather, somewhat, …, are not lexical and hence are not members of the set A. I will now represent A as a set:
E.g. A = {Adj, Adv}.
The lexical items in English include nouns, verbs, and lexical modifiers:
E.g. Lexeme = {N, V, A}. (Note: we could use ‘L’ for ‘Lexeme’ as long as ‘L’ is not used for anything else.
Additionally, some functional terms are useful. Above there is ‘agent’ = [+Agent], which has been around for decades. It corresponds with ‘one who Vs’. Another is ‘manner’ = [+Manner], which corresponds to

WRITE	function
V	form
/rajt/	sign

[+Agent]	function
[+Suffix-N, [+Host, V]]	form
/r/	sign

<---->

‘one who writes’	function
N	form
/rajtr/	sign

‘write’	function
V	form
/rajt/	sign