PowerPoint Presentation 323 Morphology

3.3 The form of Morphological Rules

3.3.5 Other Changes
Phonological changes cease to be regular and predictable:
E.g. At one time the Old-English word for ‘foot’ was ‘fo:t’ and ‘feet’ was ‘föti’. The umlauted vowel gradually became /e:/, and at some point in time, the plural marker for Old English, /i/ was gradually lost leaving /fo:t/ (Sg.) and /fe:t/. After the Great Vowel Shift (16th to 18th C), /e:/ -> /i/, and inexplicably, /o:/ in foot’ delaxed to ‘/ʊ/’. After the loss of word-final (plural marker) /I/, the conditioning factor was lost. The alternation is now morphological.
Semantic shift of the morpheme is another change:
At one time in the earlier stages of Russian, the suffix /l/ referred to a participle, but it is unclear what the original function of the participle was. The participle combined with an auxiliary verb which corresponds with the auxiliary be in English. In time the auxiliary was lost in this construction as was the original way of forming the past tense. The l-participle took on the meaning of the past tense. Something similar probably occurred in the Germanic languages. I.E. ‘t’ was a participle, and in German this morpheme came to mark the past tense of weak verbs (the regular ones), and it remained to mark participles, breaking into two morphemes, [Past] and the non- progressive participle. Hence played is ambiguous.