Word Structure

M. H. Aronoff, 1974

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This work deals, in the main, with that aspect of word structure referred to commonly as derivational morphology, though other related areas are touched upon in the course of discussion. Much, though by no means all of the material discussed is drawn from English. The framework presented pretends, however, to universal scope.

We divide the question of word structure into two subparts, that of word-formation, the coining of new words, and that of word-analysis, the provision of structure to already existing words. We say that there is a lexicon or dictionary, the main provision for entry into which is that an entry must be a word, and be arbitrary (unpredictable) in at least one aspect of its meaning or form. New words are coined by the application of general rules called Word Formation Rules. Such a rule forms a new word from an already existing one, one in the lexicon, by performing an operation of a specific sort on that existing word. Existing words are analysed by applying to them the same Word Formation Rules, but as redundancy rules, i.e. as rules for determining how a word might have been formed. Not all new words are added to the lexicon. Whether a given word is added depends on whether it is arbitrary, and this is correlated with the productivity of a rule by which it is formed.

Because of the way in which Word Formation Rules are formulated (one affix, one rule), it is necessary to posit a class of readjustment rules, which operate on the output of the Word Formation Rules, and whose output itself is the input to the phonology, and to the Lexical Insertion Transformation.

The rules of derivational morphology are completely separated from the other sets of rules of a grammar. They operate on words to produce words or to provide structure to existing words. The figure below gives a simplified picture of the interaction of the derivational morphology with other parts of the grammar.

[FIGURE]

Thesis Supervisor:      Morris Halle, Professor of Linguistics

1 Ground and teleology 13
1.1 Derivation and inflection 14
1.2 Other types of morphology 17
1.3 A brief survey of the recent history of the study of morphology 19
Footnotes to Chapter 1 24
           
2 Basics 25
2.1 Trouble with morphemes 25
  2.1.1 Minimal signs 26
  2.1.2 Words 27
  2.1.3 Morphemes 28
    2.1.3.1 Cranberry morphs 29
    2.1.3.2 Other berries 29
    2.1.3.3 Prefix=stem (+latinate) 31
    2.1.3.4 A similar case 37
    2.1.3.5 Defining the morpheme 37
  2.1.4 Trouble with words 38
    2.1.4.1 Cranberry words 38
    2.1.4.2 The numerous verbs stand 39
  2.1.5 An historical note on inflection 40
2.2 Word formation 41
  2.2.1 Possible and actual words 41
  2.2.2 Types of new words 45
  2.2.3 What are new words coined from 46
    2.2.3.1 Oddities 46
    2.2.3.2 Words from morphemes 46
    2.2.3.3 Word-based morphology 48
    2.2.3.4 Word Formation Rules 48
    2.2.3.5 Assumptions about the lexicon 50
  2.2.4 Evidence for the proposal 51
    2.2.4.1 The phonological cycle 51
    2.2.4.2 Irregular back-formations 58
  2.2.5 Counter-evidence 61
  2.2.6 Word structure 64
Footnotes to Chapter 2 68
           
3 Productivity 72
3.1 Preliminaries 72
3.2 +ness and +ity 76
  3.2.1 Gaps 76
  3.2.2 Semantics 77
  3.2.3 Phonology 79
  3.2.4 Gaps again 82
  3.2.5 Semantics again 86
3.3 Blocking 87
3.4 Conclusion 91
Footnotes to Chapter 3 92
           
Preface to Part 2 93
           
4 Word Formation Rules 99
4.1 Syntax and semantics 101
  4.1.1 The base 101
    4.1.1.1 The unitary base hypothesis 102
  4.1.2 The output 104
    4.1.2.1 Semantics 105
    4.1.2.2 Syntax 107
4.2 Morphology 109
  4.2.1 Morphological restrictions on the base 109
    4.2.1.1 Abstract morphological features 109
    4.2.1.2 Restrictions statable on individual morphemes 113
    4.2.1.3 Encoding morphological restrictions 117
      4.2.1.3.1 Ordering of WFRs 119
      4.2.1.3.2 Unordered WFRs 129
  4.2.2 The morphological operation 133
    4.2.2.1 Copying rules 134
    4.2.2.2 Infixing 144
    4.2.2.3 Consequences 146
  4.2.3 The place of the morphological operation in the grammar 150
    4.2.3.1 Reduplication paradoxes 152
4.3 Phonology 167
  4.3.1 Phonological conditions 167
    4.3.1.1 An aside concerning negative and positive conditions 168
    4.3.1.2 Conditions on the underlying form of the base 169
    4.3.1.3 Stress-sensitive affixes 170
    4.3.1.4 + boundaries and cycles 172
    4.3.1.5 # boundaries and cycles 175
    4.3.1.6 A theory of boundaries and brackets 175
  4.3.2 Problems 176
    4.3.2.1 A condition on the surface form of the output 176
    4.3.2.2 A global phonological condition 177
    4.3.2.3 A transderivational constraint 178
    4.3.2.4 Boundary problems 180
4.4 Summary 183
Footnotes to Chapter 4 185
           
5 Adjustment rules 188
5.1 Truncation rules 189
  5.1.1 +ee 189
  5.1.2 +ant 192
  5.1.3 +er 195
  5.1.4 TruncaWFRs 198
  5.1.5 Truncation and phonology 199
  5.1.6 Russian truncation 200
  5.1.7 German ge-deletion 205
5.2 Allomorphy rules 207
  5.2.1 -ion 208
    5.2.1.1 Allomorphs of ation 209
    5.2.1.2 +ation 210
    5.2.1.3 Stems of the form X+ate 212
    5.2.1.4 The marked roots 212
  5.2.2 Root allomorphy 218
    5.2.2.1 fy+ and ply+ 228
  5.2.3 Other allomorphy 229
  5.2.4 Allomorphy and other parts of the grammar 232
Footnotes to Chapter 5 236