Morphological Change Morphological Change By morphological change we
Morphological Change
Morphological Change • By morphological change, we refer to changes in the morphological structure of lexical items and of inflected forms, and changes in morphological systems.
Reanalysis • The simplest type of morphological change is reanalysis. • A word that historically has one particular morphological structure comes to be perceived by speakers as having a second, quite different, structure. • The Latin word minimum consisted in Latin of the morphemes min- ‘little’ (also found in minor and minus) and -im- ‘most’, plus an inflectional ending; however, thanks to the influence of the unrelated miniature ‘a very small of its kind’, English-speakers have apparently reanalysed both words as consisting of a prefix mini- ‘very small’ plus something incomprehensible, leading to the creation of mini-sized, mini-clip, minibar, minicamp and all the newer words that have followed it.
Reanalysis • The Old English word bryd-guma, which survives in Modern English as bride-groom was a compound of bryd and guma and originally meant ‘bride-man’. • After a time the word guma was lost and replaced by man. • Because the word bride-goom appeared mysterious so people replaced the word groom, which meant ‘servant’. This process is called folk etymology.
Metanalysis • The former English words naddre, napron and noumpere have become adder (a type of snake), apron and umpire; on the other hand, the former ewt and ekename ‘also-name’ have become newt and nickname. • The English article a(n) was the reason. Forms like a napron and an ewt were apparently misheard as an apron and a newt, producing the modern forms. • Cases like an ewt > a newt show that morpheme boundaries can be moved so as to shift a segment from one morpheme to another. • Reanalysis involving nothing more than the movement of a morpheme boundary is called metanalysis.
Metanalysis • Our word unicorn derives from Latin, in which it is composed of uni- ‘one’ and cornu ‘horn’. • Most European languages have the identical word, but the French word is the curious licorne. • The original word, of course, was unicorne, a grammatically feminine noun. But the French word for ‘a’ with a feminine noun is une – and hence unicorne was misinterpreted as une icorne, and icorne therefore became the French name of the beast. But the French word for ‘the’ before a noun beginning with a vowel is l’. Hence ‘the unicorne’ was expressed as l’icorne - and this form in turn was reanalysed as a single noun licorne, producing the modern form.
Analogy • Suppose we are given the words zielf, zo and zuk are all obscure English nouns denoting things that can be counted and asked what would the plural of these be? • We do it by invoking analogy - that is, we assume that the required plurals are formed according to a pattern that is already familiar to us from large numbers of other English nouns. • In this case, the pattern forming plurals is so widespread and regular that it actually constitutes a rule of English grammar.
Analogy • Let’s begin with a simple example. English has a small class of nouns derived from Latin and commonly used with irregular plurals derived from Latin: cactus/cacti, radius/radii, succubus/succubi, and some others. • Now English also has a noun octopus, but this word is not derived from Latin: it’s of Greek origin, and its Greek plural, if we used it in English, would be octopodes. In fact, however, the plural form which is used by many speakers is octopi. • This is the simplest type of analogy and is sometimes called proportional analogy.
Analogy • drive: has a past participle in drove. • What about dive: ? • As a result of this analogy, the past tense of dive, dived for most speakers, has become dove for many eastern American speakers. • The word teach: has a past participle in taught. • catch: ? • Apparently as a result of this analogy, the past tense of catch, which was formerly catched for all speakers, has become caught.
Analogy • On the analogy of landscape, we have recently created such forms as seascape, moonscape and, with additional layers of meaning, soundscape, ‘a form of musical experience where the music is not necessarily linear’. • By analogy with cases like Japan and Japanese, we have recently begun coining a large number of words with the general sense ‘language typical of’, such as journalese, motherese, Americanese, headlinese and officialese.
Analogy • A good example is the suffix -able. The Latin suffix -bilis occurs in a large number of words that have found their way into English: imaginable, edible, invincible, portable, credible, tolerable and hundreds of others. • In some cases, we have also borrowed the related Latin verb, as with imagine and tolerate. The existence of pairs like imagine/imaginable has induced English-speakers to extend the suffix -able to all sorts of other verbs not of Latin origin, including native English verbs, and so we now readily coin adjectives like washable, likeable, lovable, burnable, unkillable, as well as more elaborate forms like biodegradable. • The construction of new words by any of these analogical processes is sometimes called analogical creation.
Sturtevant’s paradox • Sturtevant’s paradox, after Edgar Sturtevant, who first stated it over a century ago: sound change is regular, but produces irregularity; analogy is irregular, but produces regularity. • The majority of Latin verbs had perfectly regular inflectional paradigms, with each verb exhibiting a single constant stem taking a regular set of endings. • However, Latin had a stress rule that assigned stress by counting syllables from right to left, so that the stem of a Latin verb was stressed in some forms but unstressed in others, depending on the length of the ending. • During the development of spoken Latin into Old French, stressed vowels developed differently from unstressed vowels; in particular, stressed /a/ was diphthongized to /ai/, while unstressed /a/ was unaffected.
Contamination • Contamination is an irregular change in the form of a word under the influence of another word with which it is associated in some way. • For example, the opposite of male was formerly femelle, but the constant pairing of these two words has induced speakers to alter the second to female. • Similarly, the word overt is borrowed from French ouvert ‘open’, and has final stress. The word covert, though, is in origin merely a variant of covered, but the frequent use of these two words as opposites has resulted in an alteration of the second: most people now pronounce covert to rhyme with overt.
Morphologization • Morphologization is a process in which a formerly independent word becomes reduced to a bound morpheme, in the process typically losing its former lexical meaning and acquiring instead a mere grammatical function. • Latin had a noun mens ‘mind’, whose stem was ment- and whose ablative case-form was mente. Quite early, it became usual in Latin to use the ablative mente with an accompanying adjective to express ‘the state of mind in which an action was performed’. • We thus find phrases like devota mente ‘with a devout mind’ (i. e. , ‘devoutly’) and clara mente ‘with a clear mind’ (i. e. , ‘clear-headedly’.
Morphologization • But then speakers began to reinterpret the mente construction as describing not ‘the state of mind of somebody doing something’, but ‘the manner in which something was done’. • Consequently, the construction was extended to a much larger range of adjectives, and new instances appeared, like lenta mente (lenta ‘slow’) and dulce mente (dulce ‘soft’). • As a result, the form mente was no longer regarded as a form of mens ‘mind’; it was taken instead as a purely grammatical marker expressing an adverbial function, and it was therefore reduced from a separate word to a suffix. • Hence, we find in French lentement ‘slowly’, doucement ‘softly’, vraiment ‘truly’.
Morphologization • Old English had a noun lic ‘body’, which has developed in various ways. • Early on, the word lic also came to be compounded with nouns to express the sense of ‘resembling’ and then ‘having the characteristics of’: hence Old English fœderlic ‘father-like’, ‘fatherly’ and manlic ‘man-like’, ‘manly’; here the original noun has since been reduced to a mere suffix. • Finally, much the same thing happened with adjectives: a caseinflected form lice was added to an adjective to express the meaning ‘in the manner of’: hence Old English slawlice ‘slowly’ and cwiculice ‘quickly’, and here again the original noun has been reduced to a purely grammatical affix: the suffix -ly for making adverbs out of adjectives.
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