Lecture 3: Morphology, Part 2

NORVIN RICHARDS: All right, so welcome to day two of morphology.

Last time, I was trying to get you to believe that it's worth-- for trying to think about what you

have in your mind, the representations you have in your mind of what you can do with your native language--

if we're trying to think about that, that it's useful to think, yeah, your mental list

of elements of your basic elements of your language consists, maybe, of a list of morphemes,

where morphemes are these units that can combine in various ways, as we've seen.

Each morpheme we're going to need to tag with information about its sound, how it's pronounced, its meaning,

and then information like is it a bound morpheme or a free morpheme? That is, is it the kind of morpheme

that needs to combine with another morpheme or not? So there are free morphemes like "cat,"

where, when we're listing its sound, will represent the fact that it's pronounced "cat,"

and when we're listing its meaning, will represent the fact that it refers to a certain type of small mammal.

And when we're listing whether it's bound or free, we'll say that it's free because "cat" is a word.

You can say it by itself. As opposed to the S at the end of a word like "cats,"

we'll say that's a bound morpheme because it's not a word on its own.

And if we're talking about bound morphemes, we ran through bound morphemes from a bunch

of different languages. We saw there are prefixes out there, there are suffixes, and there are other things we talked about-- infixes,

various other kinds of things. There are other kinds of morphemes to talk about. We eventually will.

But first-- so what I said here was first, another kind of information we're going to have to list. But actually, before that, is any of that unclear?

Does that all make sense? Is everyone convinced of the existence of morphemes?

Are you willing to at least assume that they exist? OK. So you're used to looking words up in the dictionary,

but in your mental dictionary, maybe what you have are not words but morphemes-- things that are at least sometimes smaller than words.

So another kind of information we're going to have to list. Think about the bound morpheme "-al"

that shows up at the end of industrial, or national, or autumnal.

That's limited in where it can go. So there aren't words like "assert-al" or "impress-al,"

or "industrializ-al," yeah? Again, let me pause and make sure that I'm not saying things that are just false.

I think I told you there's a danger when you're a linguist you gradually get out of touch with your native language. But I'm pretty sure this is true.

Is there a generalization about the kinds of things you can add -al to?

What are they? Yeah? AUDIENCE: Nouns. NORVIN RICHARDS: Nouns, Yeah. So "industry" and "nation" and "autumn"

are all nouns, as opposed to "assert," and "impress," and "industrialize," which are not nouns.

What are they? AUDIENCE: Verbs. NORVIN RICHARDS: Verbs, Yep. And if anybody is listening to this and thinking,

nouns, verbs? What the heck? Don't worry. We will talk more about this eventually.

Yep, OK, so we just said there is a word "industrial"

because "-al"-- maybe I should write this on the board. Or I would if I thought there was chalk anywhere, anywhere

at all. Here we go, I'll write it on the board right here. That will be helpful.

No, I won't. I'll put it over here. We've just said "-al" attaches to nouns and can't attach

to verbs. That's what's going on in the first of the list there. So we've got a noun can have "-al" on it.

I'll write that again over there. This is surely not the most efficient way

to use the blackboard. Is it necessary? Does it work? Can everybody see one or another of the things that I wrote?

Is there anybody who can only see one of the things that I wrote? Yeah, OK, so it's worth it to write it twice.