Morphology

Building words

Defining ‘parts of speech’

Making words fit the sentence

The morphophonology

Building words

Words don’t just fall out of the mouth. They have to be built in the speaker’s or listener’s mind as they are spoken or heard and analysed.

Which forms are built in the process of speech and which are just historical is the subject of intense ongoing research. The whole process is highly language specific. Learning how it works is difficult.

There are two sides to the building.

Defining ‘parts of speech’

On the one side there are the irregular and unpredictable processes which change meanings or turn one ‘part of speech’ – now commonly known as a ‘syntactic category’ – into another,

• From verbs into nouns , from slip to slipper, from gun to gunner, from chop to chopper, and, by a different morpheme, from eat to eatery;
• From nouns into verbs, from beauty to beautify;
• From verbs into adjectives, from play to playful;
• From nouns into adjectives. from origin to original;
• From prepositions into others with the opposite meaning, from like to unlike;
• From adjectives into nouns, from French to Frenchness , English to Englishness, like to likeness, unlike to unlikeness;
• From adjectives into adverbs, from clever to cleverly, sad to sadly;
• From adverbs into verbs, to out;
• From do to redo, place to replace, changing or reversing the meaning.

Rightly or wrongly, this aspect of morphology is not generally raised as a developmental issue.

Making words fit the sentence

And on the other side there are the processes by which what is felt to be a given word is changed to fit in with the rest of the sentence. These processes are mostly regular, but not entirely. This is variously characterised as the grammar, the morpho-syntax, and the morpho-phonology.

• Plural -s after a noun: cats, dogs, foxes;
• Third person singular after a verb: computes, joins, bulldozes;
• Past tense -ed after a verb: hopped, rained, bedded;
• Past participle -en after a verb: given;
• Continuous –ing after a verb: giving:

As is obvious, these ‘functors‘ are language-specific and must therefore fall within the ‘learnability space‘. They only exist by virtue of their relation to words and sentences. They raise common developmental issues.

The am form of be displays a commonality across related languages, strongly conserved from the Proto-Indo-European, of marking the first person with a lip gesture, also in the English pronominal forms, me, mine, and my. Apart from be, one other verb, go, uses another root for its past tense, went, historically from wend. Some languages, like the Celtic languages, have many more alternations between entirely different roots. This is known as suppletion.

I once heard “I think I might have misunderstoodended that”, possibly trying to express more than one degree of uncertainty with four of the available past tenses. This is known as ‘multiple marking’. It is a normal aspect of child language.

Like about half the languages in the world, English does not use tone or intonation for building words. But in a way that may hard for some first language learners, and seemingly like tone languages, English does use intonation in every sentence to mark nuances of meaning.

In the English of older speakers, questions asking for particular sorts of information, beginning with one of the words, who, what, which, where, when, why, and how, all end with a rising intonation. And questions asking for just a yes or no end with a falling intonation. But the intonational difference is currently changing.

The morphophonology

There are three phonetically distinct realisations of the singular verb, the plural noun and the possessive form or ‘genitive’ – on the right edge in pats, pads, patches and Pat’s. Brad’s and Rich’s  – as –S, -Z, and –IZ. And there three forms of the past tense – in learnt, weighed, loaded and waited – as –T, –D and –ID. The learning here is simplified by the proposal in Nunes (2002), with just two language-specific implementations of a language universal – appealing to a re-developed version of Diana Archangeli’s 1984 Radical Underspecification Theory, RUT, more radical than Archangeli’s, but like Archangeli’s in being available in all languages. By this model, developed directly from RUT, lexical entries consist only in the most minimal information about their sound structure, making as much use as possible of ‘default rules’ to make them pronounceable. On this account, getting unspecified features either by default or being ‘spread’ from the preceding element, the English implementations are as follows:

A) Mark plurals and genitives in nouns or the third person in present tense verbs by the feature known as ‘Continuance’ in the Sound Pattern of English, or otherwise as the property of being a fricative. Mark past tense by a stop or non-continuant. In both cases, the articulator is the tongue tip by default

B) Add the other features of S, Z, T, and D, by default, copying the voicing from the preceding phoneme;

C) Add a dialect-specific default vowel, between two adjacent instances of what were once known as the ‘spirants’ – in S, Z, SH, or the rightmost spirant element of CH and J, or between the tip of the tongue non-continuants or stops, T and D.

Southern varieties of British English have the him vowel as a default in lashes, bridges and so on, while Northwestern varieties have the hem vowel.

If this aspect of English raises a developmental issue, an account like the one above avoids the need to build the A, B, and C implementations from scratch. What needs to be learnt is just the three simple steps by A), B) and C). Archangeli’s original proposal identified three vowels which can play this role, including the vowels in him and hem. An underspecification account of these things is thus economical, both descriptive and explanatory, and highly relevant to therapy.