2 Words and Lexemes 2.1, What is a Word? 34 2.4.1 Defining words syntactically 35 2.41.2. Defining words phonologically 36 2.1.3 Grammatical words 37 2.2. Empirical Tests for Wordhood 38 2.2.1. Fixed order of elements 38 2.2.2 Non-separability and integrity 38 2.2.3 Stress 39 2.3. Types of Words 40 2.3.1. Phonological words 40 2 Content words vs. function words al 2.3.3 Lexemes 43 2.4 Inflection vs. Derivation 47 2.5 Two Approaches to Morphology: Ttem-and-Arrangement, Item-and-Process 49 2.5.1. Affixation in the item-and-process and item-and-arrangement models 50 2.5.2 Non-affixal phenomena and the item-and-process model 51 2.5.2.1. English noun-verb pairs 51 25.2.2 Agar Dinka 52 2.6. The Lexicon 54 2.7, Summary 57 Kujamaat Jéola Noun Classes 58 Further Reading 67 What is Morphology?, 2nd edition, by Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman © 2011 Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman,34 WORDS AND LEXEMES Asingle word can have multiple uses and interpretations. Occasionally a headline-writer underestimates this fact and ends up writing amus- ing headlines when no humor was intended. Here are some oldies but ‘goodies that have circulated widely by e-mail: BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLAND ISLANDS MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH EYE DROPS OFF SHELF LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS CUT IN HALF REAGAN WINS ON BUDGET, BUT MORE LIES AHEAD SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT KIDS MAKE NUTRITIOUS SNACKS The British didn’ treally abandon breakfast pastries on the Falkland Islands, and zombie miners aren’t acting up. While waffles tends to be interpreted more easily as a noun, it’s used in the first headline as a verb. Left, con- versely, is used as a noun in the headline, but is more often used in speech asa verb. Death in the second headline can be understood as ‘the act or fact of dying’ or as ‘the death of a specific person’ — the intended meaning. The last headline is horrifying until we realize that make is ambiguous in mean- ing here between two of its thirty-odd meanings: ‘prepare’ and ‘be useful as’. The first sense is the one intended in the headline. Words like noun, verb, adjective, and adverb refer to what linguists call lexical category. They are labels that tell us how a word is generally used in a sentence. A noun can be the subject of a sentence, but not so a verb. In many cases, identical-sounding or identical-looking words can belong to multiple categories, and that is what is going on in some of these sentences. Lexical category is basic information about a word, but there is much more that, as linguists, we want to say. For example, waffles ‘batter-cake baked in a waffle iron’ and waffles ‘vacillates’ sound the same but are not semantically related. Death ‘act or fact of dying’ and death ‘the dying of a specific individual’ are. In this chapter we address the question of what a word is in detail. It will pave the way for the more advanced discussions of later chapters. @ 2.1 What is a Word? ‘There are various ways to define a word, but no definition is entirely satisfactory. Scholars have acknowledged this fact over and over again.WORDS AND LEXEMES 35 Here we present some of the reasons why what seems like a relatively simple task (we all think we know what a word is, right2) proves to be so problematic. 2.1.1 Defining words syntactically One way that people have attempted to define words is to call them the smallest unit of syntax. This seems reasonable: sentences are built by combining words according to particular patterns. But even this simple definition runs into problems. Take a sentence like the following (1) Harry coughs every time he steps outside. Everyone would agree that Harry, every, and outside are words, and that -s is not, But at the same time, some people (though not all) would argue that -s is indeed a unit of syntax and that it occupies a particular position in a syntactic tree. The following diagram illustrates how we might break cough off from -s syntactically: Q) i™ Calling words the minimal units of syntax raises the question, “What is, syntax?” If we think of syntax as the component of the human grammar that governs the ordering of items, then -s should be a word. After all, it is subject to ordering principles. It must follow cough; we don’t say s-cough. If we respond by saying that syntax governs the ordering of not just any item, but only words, then we are back where we started. What is a word? Another characteristic of words is that they are the smallest unit of language that can stand alone: (3) When are you going to the store? Tomorrow. What did the emperor wear to the procession? Nothing! We recognize the ability of words to stand alone by saying that they are free forms. Units that are incapable of standing alone, such as affixes, are correspondingly called bound forms. This characteristic of words36 WORDS AND LEXEMES also runs into problems. Certain forms that native speakers would identify as words are not capable of standing alone and therefore do not meet this definition: (4) Whose book is this? “My My is a word, as we would all agree. But it generally does not stand alone! The reasons why my cannot stand on its own have more to do with syntax than with morphology: it is a determiner, and it generally appears alongside a noun. Speakers would use mine in this context instead. Nevertheless, this example shows that a potential diagnostic for wordhood — can it stand alone? ~ is not universally reliable. Once in a while we even get a supposedly bound form appearing on its ‘own. In the musical Camelot, Queen Guenevere sings the following lines: (8) It’s May, it’s May, the month of “yes, you may” The time for every frivolous whim, proper or im- When all the world is brimming with fun, wholesome or un- The prefix im- is used on its own to rhyme with whim, and un- is used to rhyme with fun. We are dealing with a creative word play here. Both im-and un- are stressed here, which means that in some sense, the song- writer has turned them into words. We are not proposing otherwise. We present this example to help demonstrate that words are difficult to define, and that traditional notions such as bound and free are not always reliable 2.1.2 Defining words phonologically Words tend to be important units phonologically as well as syntactically. For example, the word is typically the domain of stress assignment. In French, stress always falls on the last syllable of a word. In Cairene Arabic, stress falls on one of the three final syllables, depending on syllable weight. In Polish, main stress falls on the penultimate (next-to-last) or antepenultimate (third-to-last) syllable (Hayes 1995: 67-8). Even this gen- eralization is not absolute. Clitics (from Classical Greek klinein ‘to lean’) are grammatical words that are unable to stand on their own phonologi- cally and must instead ‘lean’ on an adjacent word — be incorporated intoWORDS AND LEXEMES 37 its prosodic structure. This means that clitics often have an effect on the position of word stress. In Modern Greek, for example, stress is always on one of the last three syllables of a word. When a genitive clitic such as mas ‘our’ follows or leans on a word that is stressed on the third-to-last sylla- ble, stress readjustment occurs (Nespor and Vogel 198 © a. 0 dnOropos “the person’ b. 0 anGropds mas “our person’ We see in (6) that én@ropos ‘person’ is stressed on the third-to-last syl- lable. When followed by mas, a secondary stress is inserted on its final syllable. This readjust mentiis understandable if we think of the sequence 4nGropos mas as a single word for stress purposes. Imagine that no secondary stress were added to the sequence “én0ro- pos mas, which we have just called a word. This hypothetical form bears stress only on its fourth-to-last syllable. Greek, however, requires that words be stressed no further back than the third-to-last syllable. The addition of a secondary stress on the syllable -pds (the second-to-last syllable, the most common position for word stress in Modern Greek) creates a well-formed phonological word. This example demonstrates that the word-plus-clitic sequence functions as a single word as far as stress assignment is concerned in Modern Greek. (See the definition of phonological word below.) 2.1.3 Grammatical words Despite the elusiveness of a definition of word, speakers ~ literate and illiterate — have clear intuitions about what is and what isn’t a word. Children readily learn to break utterances up into words when learning to write. Some written languages, such as Chinese, represent words with symbols called logograms. For now, we are simply going to assume that we know a word when we see one. The term grammatical word or morphosyntactic word is virtually synonymous with word but is generally used to refer specifically to dif- ferent forms of a single word that occur depending on the syntactic context. You would be justified in thinking, for example, that rabbit and rabbits are tokens of the same word. But they absolutely must be38 WORDS AND LEXEMES considered to be different grammatical words. The first occurs in con- texts appropriate for a singular noun, and the second in contexts appro- priate for a plural noun. Even though forms like and, into, and lovely have only one form, they are also considered grammatical words, @ 2.2 Empirical Tests for Wordhood While it is difficult to come up with a definition that tells us whether something is a word, there are empirical tests that can tell us whether something isn’t a word. 2.2.1. Fixed order of elements Our first empirical test has to do with the fixed order of elements within aword. Take a morphologically complex word like unbreakable. We can’t say breakableun or unablebreak. The same doesn’t hold for sentences. To use examples from the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, “I see what I eat” is just as grammatical as “I eat what I see,” and “I like what I get” and “I get what I like” are equally acceptable. When we change the order of words in a sentence, we gener- ally also change the meaning. When we change the order of morphemes in a word, we generally end up with something ungrammatical Of course, in English we cannot change the order of words in a sen tence any which way and still have a grammatical result. We don’t say *get like I what I, for instance. But there are languages such as Latin where you can order the words of particular sentences any possible way and still have a grammatical result, In contrast, there are no lan- guages in which you can arrange morphemes any which way. 2.2.2 Non-separability and integrity ‘Two more diagnostics for wordhood involve thenotions of non-separability and integrity. Words differ from larger units, such as phrases, in that they cannot be broken up by the insertion of segmental or phrasal material. (For the moment, we'll ignore infixes.) This characteristic of words is called non-separability. Likewise, syntactic processes cannot apply to pieces of words. This is integrity. Adjectives and adverbs, for example, modifyWORDS AND LEXEMES 39 words, not morphemes. Words and phrases are often displaced to the beginning of a sentence or questioned, but not morphemes @ a. Now, that one Ilike. Which one do you like? b. *Possible, it’s im-. *Which school did you see bus? (ie., Which school's school bus did you see?) Non-separability and integrity diagnostics tell us that compounds like doghouse, greenhouse, and school bus consist of a single word, rather than a pair of words. Let's begin with doghouse. We know this is a single word because we can’t put anything inside it or modify the internal components in any way. We can’t distinguish between a doghouse and a *dogshouse, where a doghouse is a house for one dog and a dogshouse for two or more. The same restrictions hold for greenhouse. If we break up the compo- nents in any way (8a) or try to modify only a part (8b), the meaning ‘warm glassed-in structure for growing plants’ gets lost: (8) a. agreen and blue house a greener house b. avery green house *a very greenhouse Ithappens to be the case that the way we write doghouse and greenhouse reflects their status as single words. But orthography cannot always be relied upon as a diagnostic. Deer tick is also a compound, but it is gener- ally written as two words. Modifiers must modify the whole compound, not just a part (so a brown deer tick is not a tick that lives on brown deer, but is instead itself brown), and its components are non-separable (“deer brown tick is impossible, though brown tick is perfectly acceptable, because we can’t reach inside a compound and separate its compo- nents). 2.2.3. Stress The diagnostics given in the preceding section, non-separability and integrity, establish that hot dog (the edible kind) is a compound. If the hot dog you are eating is hotter than mine, you wouldn't say that you40 WORDS AND LEXEMES were eating a *hotter dog or a *very hot dog. Given this fact, compare the pronunciation of the sequence hot dogs in the following two sentences: (9) Weate two hot dogs each. The hot dogs ran for the lake. In the first sentence, the main stress in hot dog is on hot. In a neutral pronunciation of the second, both hot and dog are stressed. It is also pos- sible to emphasize dogs by stressing it more heavily: The hot dégs ran for the lake — hot dogs, not hot children, or canines, not frankfurters. These two examples suggest that stress can also be used as a diagnostic for whether or not a sequence of words is a compound - compounds are normally stressed on their first component in English, while phrases are normally stressed on their last element. Take care in applying thi diagnostic, however. As many linguists have noted, some compounds like kitchen sink and apple pie are stressed like phrases (see Giegerich 2004 for discussion and analysis), and sometimes people's pronuncia- tion of compounds differs, as with ginger ale, which some people pro- nounce ginger ale, and others ginger dle. [Exercise 1] 2.3 Types of Words As fluent readers of English, we tend to think only in terms of written words. Separated by blank spaces, they are easily identifiable. But words may be defined in different ways from different perspectives, with each perspective picking out a somewhat different object. Linguists distinguish phonological words, grammatical words (discussed in 2.1.3), and lexemes. In this book we are most concerned with gram- matical words and lexemes, but we begin with phonological words, just to make sure that we have made the proper distinctions. 2.3.1 Phonological words A phonological word can be defined as a string of sounds that behaves as a unit for certain kinds of phonological processes, especially stress or accent. For the most part, we don’ thave to distinguish phonological words from other kinds of words. Itmakes no difference for the words morphology, calendar, Mississippi, or hot dog whether we think of them as phonological