Editing Morphology (linguistics) (section)

==Fundamental concepts==
===Lexemes and word-forms===
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning.{{sfn|Haspelmath|Sims|2002|page=15}} Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: [[lexeme]] and word-form{{Definition needed|date=April 2024}}. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the [[citation form]] in [[Small caps|small capitals]].{{sfn|Haspelmath|Sims|2002|page=16}} For instance, the lexeme {{Smallcaps|eat}} contains the word-forms ''eat, eats, eaten,'' and ''ate''. ''Eat'' and ''eats'' are thus considered different word-forms belonging to the same lexeme {{Smallcaps|eat}}. ''Eat'' and ''Eater'', on the other hand, are different lexemes, as they refer to two different concepts.

====Prosodic word vs. morphological word====
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word form. In [[Latin]], one way to express the concept of '<span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">NOUN-PHRASE</span><sub>1</sub> and <span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">NOUN-PHRASE</span><sub>2</sub>' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and". An extreme level of the theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the [[Kwak'wala]] language.{{efn|Formerly known as [[Kwakiutl]], Kwak'wala belongs to the Northern branch of the Wakashan language family. "Kwakiutl" is still used to refer to the tribe itself, along with other terms.}} In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by [[affixes]], instead of by independent "words". The three-word English phrase, "with his club", in which 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even one word in many languages. Unlike most other languages, Kwak'wala semantic affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwak'wala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):{{efn|Example taken from {{harvtxt|Foley|1998}} using a modified transcription. This phenomenon of Kwak'wala was reported by Jacobsen as cited in {{harvtxt|van Valin|LaPolla|1997}}.}}

{{interlinear|indent=3|glossing=no abbr
|kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəma<sub>i</sub>-χ-a q'asa-s-is<sub>i</sub> t'alwagwayu
|clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3SG-POSSESSIVE club
|"the man clubbed the otter with his club."}}

That is, to a speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the [[descriptive marker|markers]] -''i-da'' (<span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">PIVOT</span>-'the'), referring to "man", attaches not to the noun ''bəgwanəma'' ("man") but to the verb; the markers -''χ-a'' (<span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">ACCUSATIVE</span>-'the'), referring to ''otter'', attach to ''bəgwanəma'' instead of to ''q'asa'' ('otter'), etc. In other words, a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

{{interlinear|indent=3|glossing=no abbr
|kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-is<sub>i</sub>-t'alwagwayu
|clubbed PIVOT-the-man<sub>i</sub> hit-the-otter with-his<sub>i</sub>-club
|}}

A central publication on this topic is the volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo, Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit [[clitic]], possessing the grammatical features of independent words but the [[prosody (linguistics)|prosodic]]-phonological lack of freedom of [[bound morpheme]]s. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable challenge to linguistic theory.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/704513339|title=Word : a cross-linguistic typology|date=2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|others=Robert M. W. Dixon, A. I︠U︡. Aĭkhenvalʹd|isbn=978-0-511-48624-1|location=Cambridge|oclc=704513339}}</ref>

===Inflection vs. word formation===
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme, but other rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are [[inflection]]al rules, but those of the second kind are rules of [[word formation]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Anderson |first1=Stephen R. |title=A-Morphous Morphology |year=1992 |url=https://archive.org/details/amorphousmorphol00ande |url-access=limited |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge University Press |page=[https://archive.org/details/amorphousmorphol00ande/page/n87 74], 75|isbn=9780521378666 }}</ref> The generation of the English plural ''dogs'' from ''dog'' is an inflectional rule, and compound phrases and words like ''dog catcher'' or ''dishwasher'' are examples of word formation. Informally, word formation rules form "new" words (more accurately, new lexemes), and inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word (lexeme).

The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples for which linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word formation. The next section will attempt to clarify the distinction.

Word formation includes a process in which one combines two complete words, but inflection allows the combination of a suffix with a verb to change the latter's form to that of the subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, 'go' is used with subject I/we/you/they and plural nouns, but third-person singular pronouns (he/she/it) and singular nouns causes 'goes' to be used. The '-es' is therefore an inflectional marker that is used to match with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may differ from its source word's [[grammatical category]], but in the process of inflection, the word never changes its grammatical category.

===Types of word formation===
{{main|Word formation}}
There is a further distinction between two primary kinds of morphological word formation: [[Morphological derivation|derivation]] and [[Compound (linguistics)|compounding]]. The latter is a process of word formation that involves combining complete word forms into a single compound form. ''Dog catcher'', therefore, is a compound, as both ''dog'' and ''catcher'' are complete word forms in their own right but are subsequently treated as parts of one form. Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, but the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. The word ''independent'', for example, is derived from the word ''dependent'' by using the prefix ''in-'', and ''dependent'' itself is derived from the verb ''depend''. There is also word formation in the processes of clipping in which a portion of a word is removed to create a new one, blending in which two parts of different words are blended into one, acronyms in which each letter of the new word represents a specific word in the representation (NATO for [[North Atlantic Treaty Organization]]), borrowing in which words from one language are taken and used in another, and coinage in which a new word is created to represent a new object or concept.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam041/2003048479.pdf|title=Word Formation in English|last=Plag|first=Ingo|date=2003|website=Library of Congress |publisher=Cambridge|access-date=2016-11-30}}</ref>

===Paradigms and morphosyntax===
{{Linguistic typology topics}}
A linguistic [[inflection|paradigm]] is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the [[grammatical conjugation|conjugations]] of verbs and the [[declensions]] of nouns. Also, arranging the word forms of a lexeme into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as [[Grammatical tense|tense]], [[Grammatical aspect|aspect]], [[Grammatical mood|mood]], [[Grammatical number|number]], [[Grammatical gender|gender]] or [[Grammatical case|case]], organizes such. For example, the [[English personal pronouns|personal pronouns in English]] can be organized into tables by using the categories of [[Grammatical person|person]] (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive).

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily but must be categories that are relevant to stating the [[syntax|syntactic rules]] of the language. Person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English because the language has [[agreement (linguistics)|grammatical agreement]] rules, which require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. Therefore, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between ''dog'' and ''dogs'' because the choice between both forms determines the form of the verb that is used. However, no syntactic rule shows the difference between ''dog'' and ''dog catcher'', or ''dependent'' and ''independent''. The first two are nouns, and the other two are adjectives.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms that are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, and there are no corresponding syntactic rules for word formation.

The relationship between syntax and morphology, as well as how they interact, is called "morphosyntax";<ref name="Dufter2017">
Dufter and Stark (2017) ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=_VBKDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT29 Introduction – 2 Syntax and morphosyntax: some basic notions]'' in Dufter, Andreas, and Stark, Elisabeth (eds., 2017) ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=_VBKDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT29 Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax]'', Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG</ref><ref>Emily M. Bender (2013) ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=XaheAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA35 Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax]'', ch.4 ''Morphosyntax'', p.35, Morgan & Claypool Publishers</ref> the term is also used to underline the fact that syntax and morphology are interrelated.<ref name="VanValin1997">Van Valin, R. D., van Valin Jr, R. D., van Valin Jr, R. D., LaPolla, R. J., & LaPolla, R. J. (1997) ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=DxcrbgT1_oMC Syntax: Structure, meaning, and function]'', p.2, Cambridge University Press.</ref> The study of morphosyntax concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, and some approaches to morphosyntax exclude from its domain the phenomena of word formation, compounding, and derivation.<ref name="Dufter2017"/> Within morphosyntax fall the study of [[agreement (linguistics)|agreement]] and [[government (linguistics)|government]].<ref name="Dufter2017"/>

===Allomorphy===
Above, morphological rules are described as [[Analogy|analogies]] between word forms: ''dog'' is to ''dogs'' as ''cat'' is to ''cats'' and ''dish'' is to ''dishes''. In this case, the analogy applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning. In each pair, the first word means "one of X", and the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the plural form ''-s'' (or ''-es'') affixed to the second word, which signals the key distinction between singular and plural entities.

One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that the one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the language. In English, there are word form pairs like ''ox/oxen'', ''goose/geese'', and ''sheep/sheep'' whose difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way that departs from the regular pattern or is not signaled at all. Even cases regarded as regular, such as ''-s'', are not so simple; the ''-s'' in ''dogs'' is not pronounced the same way as the ''-s'' in ''cats'', and in plurals such as ''dishes'', a vowel is added before the ''-s''. Those cases, in which the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", constitute [[allomorph]]y.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Haspelmath |first1=Martin |last2=Sims |first2=Andrea D. |title=Understanding Morphology |date=2002 |publisher=Arnold |location=London |isbn=0-340-76026-5}}</ref>

Phonological rules constrain the sounds that can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For example, to form the plural of ''dish'' by simply appending an ''-s'' to the end of the word would result in the form {{IPA|*[dɪʃs]}}, which is not permitted by the [[phonotactics]] of English. To "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural marker, and {{IPA|[dɪʃɪz]}} results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the ''-s'' in ''dogs'' and ''cats'': it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding [[phoneme]].

===Lexical morphology===
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the [[lexicon]] that, morphologically conceived, is the collection of [[lexeme]]s in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.