Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Mor-Morphol |
MORA
- (Phonology) A unit of syllable weight in moraic theory. Moras are the units to which metrical structure may refer.
E.g., long vowels are often considered to be bimoraic, while short ones are monomoraic. This would explain the difference in behavior with respect to stress rules between these two classes of vowels in quantity-sensitive languages. (Hyman 1985, McCarthy and Prince 1986, Prince 1983, Van der Hulst 1984) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
- (Phonology) Plural, morae or moras. Often symbolized μ. A basic timing unit in some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ba consists of one mora (monomoraic), while a long syllable such as baa consists of two (bimoraic); extra-long syllables with three moras (trimoraic) are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as syllable weight.
The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate the Greek word χρόνος (chrónos, 'time') in its metrical sense. | Wikipedia, 2022
See Also SYLLABLE WEIGHT.
MORA AUGMENTATION
(Morphology) Morphological mora augmentation is a straightforward case of prosodic morphology. Aronoff and Fudeman (2005) provide the following characterization of this field of linguistic inquiry:
Prosodic morphology deals with the interaction of morphology and prosodic structure. Prosodic structure, in turn, is particularly concerned with the timing units of languages, e.g., the word and syllable, and vowel length.
In linguistic theory the mora has been understood as a unit of phonological weight/timing. This notion allows us, among other things, to model the opposition between heavy syllables (bimoraic) and light syllables (monomoraic), as well as to account for the equivalence among different types of heavy syllables. Although the notion of mora had been used in an informal manner for a long time, only in the eighties has it been used formally as an explicit level of representation.
Within prosodic morphology, one of the most common phenomena is reduplication, that is, the operation of copying a continuous substring from either the beginning or the end of a root. Reduplication may be used for both inflection and derivation. In fact, even within a given language this type of prosodic operation can be used for several purposes. In Nahuatl, for
example, reduplication can be used for the plural of nouns, the superlative of adjectives, while in verbs it can express distribution, reiteration, intensification, reciprocal, and other semantic changes (see Peralta 1991 and references therein).
Mora augmentation is also a common type of process in prosodic morphology. It can be achieved through diverse strategies: vocalic augmentation, consonant insertion, consonant gemination, metathesis, and reduplication. However, mora augmentation can also be simply conditioned by the prosody, with no consequence for the morphology whatsoever. Such is the case of the so-called iamb optimization in Cariban languages. In this paper we shall examine cases of mora augmentation as instances of a morphological operation applying to various bases (differently defined according to each case): "The base of a morphologically complex word is the element to which a morphological operation applies" (Haspelmath 2002). Davis and Ueda (2001, 2002) claim that the selection of strategies of mora augmentation can be predicted in a typologically interesting way according to whether it is required by the prosody or by the morphology. If required by the prosody, the preferred strategy is vocalic augmentation, as in Hixkaryana (Derbyshire 1985), and Kari'ña (Álvarez 2000). If required by the morphology, then consonant insertion takes prominence, as in Japanese (Davis and Ueda 2002), Saanich (Davis and Ueda 2001), and Choctaw (Lombardi and McCarthy 2000). | José Álvarez, 2006
MORIBUND LANGUAGE
- (Diachronic) We see languages at various stages of endangerment. In the earliest stages, because children want or are forced to speak the language of a dominant group, they shy away from using their ancestral tongue. Soon a language becomes moribund, with no child speakers left. Then, as the speakers age and are not replaced, the language undergoes a process of invisibilization. The pool of users becomes smaller and less active. People begin to forget the language. Eventually, it may go extinct. | Ironbound Films, 2009
- (Diachronic) Nearly half of the world's languages are already moribund, that is, are no longer being learned by children. | ?, 2012
MORPHOLOGICAL IMPOVERISHMENT
(Distributed Morphology) One of the central postsyntactic operations employed in DM. It was first proposed by Bonet (1991), and has been adopted, in varying forms, by much subsequent work (e.g., Noyer 1992, 1997, Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, Halle 1997, Harris 1997, Bobaljik 2002, Frampton 2002, Harley 2004, 2008, Embick and Noyer 2007, Arregi and Nevins 2012). Broadly speaking, impoverishment is an operation that deletes morphosyntactic features postsyntactically, a process that affects morphological exponence in systematic ways.
Impoverishment is made available by the core assumption in DM that morphology is postsyntactic, or realizational in Stump's (2001) terminology. According to this assumption, syntax operates on abstract feature structures that lack phonological information. This phonological information is added postsyntactically, at the PF branch of the grammar, in a process called vocabulary insertion. Thus, in this view, morphology realizes, rather than forms, syntactic feature bundles. Impoverishment modifies the syntactic feature bundles at PF but prior to vocabulary insertion, thus affecting morphological exponence.
Impoverishment is part of a broader class of postsyntactic operations, which also encompasses fusion rules, fission rules, and the like, all of which modulate syntactic feature structures prior to vocabulary insertion. While it applies before, and hence affects, vocabulary insertion, it is part of the PF branch of the grammar. Consequently, it affects neither the LF nor narrow syntax. As a result, both syntax and semantic interpretation operate on complete, unimpoverished feature representations. | Stefan Keine and Gereon Müller, 2022
MORPHOLOGICAL METATHESIS
- (Morphology) Metathesis, the transposition of segments, occurs in various parts of the language system. Morphological metathesis is the marking of two distinct morphological classes solely by the transposition of segments. | Thomas Becker, 2000
- (Morphology) While previous analyses can account for some of the data in Amarasi (Austronesian, western Timor), they cannot account for all of it. This means that Amarasi presents a true case of morphological metathesis in which metathesis alone—without any additional phonological difference—can be the only expression of a morphosyntactic category. | Owen Edwards, 2017
- (Morphology) When metathesis is the only realization of a morphological category. Morphological metathesis has been reported for about a dozen languages worldwide, of which about half are found in the greater Timor region.
| Owen Edwards, 2020
MORPHOLOGICAL OPERATION
- (Morphology) The aspect of morphology which is concerned with variations in word formation that take place in languages comes under what is described as morphological operations.
Morphological operations in Anaang identified and analyzed in this research are affixations, compounding and reduplication. However, there are other processes such as borrowing, modification, etc., but the concentration is on the three mentioned above.
In affixation, prefixes, suffixes, and suprafixes were identified. In compounding, noun + noun and noun + adjectives structures were identified. | Victoria Enefiok Etim and Joseph Udondata, 2019
- (Examples)
Morphology as Syntax (MaS)
Morphological generalizations are accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles. There is no morphological component in Universal Grammar (UG), nor are there post-syntactic morphological operations.
| Chris Collins and Richard S. Kayne, 2020- Moreover, morphological operations during compounding vary a lot across languages and lexemes: we find cases that start from the lemma and have additions (e.g., linking elements), truncations (e.g., reductions to a verbal stem), word-internal operations (e.g., Umlautung) and combinations thereof (e.g., the first constituent
of the German Weihnachts|baum 'Christmas tree',
Weihnachten, undergoes both en-truncation and
s-suffixation). | Patrick Ziering and Lonneke van der Plas, 2016
- The source of morphology is the network of paradigmatic relations beween the existing words of a language. This paradigmatic view of morphology implies that it is the word that forms the basis of morphological operations, and that morphology cannot be
defined as the concatenation of morphemes into words. As pointed out by Aronoff (1994), it is better to speak of lexeme-based morphology, because the term "word-based" has led to the misunderstanding that it is the concrete form of a word that is the basis for morphological
operations. | Geert Booij, 2008
- The incorporation of lexicalist hypotheses, in their different conceptions, into the grammar has led to new ways of approaching the relation between morphology, syntax and phonology. Regarding the model of the grammar, the consequences of adopting one or the other hypothesis are vast. If the split morphology hypothesis is adopted, the relation between morphology and syntax is restricted to processes
dealing with inflectional morphology. If the strong lexicalist hypothesis is adopted, the relation between syntax and morphology is necessarily limited. The weak lexicalist hypothesis allows for a wide variety of morphological operations in the syntax, whether they are derivational or inflectional (with anything idiosyncratic and unproductive restricted to the Lexicon). Linguists working within the weak lexicalist hypothesis vary in the role they attribute to syntactic principles in accounting for morphological operations; they are divided into those who believe that specific
morphological principles are still required (cf. Baker 1988) and those for whom syntactic principles suffice to account for morphological operations (c.f. Lieber 1992). | Amaya Mendikoetxea & Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria, 1997
MORPHOLOGICAL UNIFORMITY
(Morphology) Let us say that given a word W of category K, W is underived if it is morphologically non-distinct from the stem (or root) of W (i.e., if it does not contain any affixes attached to W). Further, let us say that a word W′ is derived if it is formed of a stem (or root) W plus an affix attached to W. (These affixes need not be limited to prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. In some instances other morphological processes of inflection may occur, such as suppletion, reduplication, stem vowel alternations, or filling consonantal skeleta with the appropriate vowels). Now we can state what we mean by morphologically uniform.
Morphological Uniformity
An inflectional paradigm P in a language L is morphologically uniform iff P has either only underived inflectional forms or only derived inflectional forms.
In other words, a paradigm is uniform if all its forms are morphologically complex or if none of them are. If the paradigm is mixed, that is, if some of its forms are morphologically divisible into stem+affix while other forms, on the other hand, are bare stems, then it is not uniform. | Osvaldo Jaeggli and Kenneth J. Safir, 2012
MORPHOLOGICAL WORD
- (Morphology) Todd (1987) states that we can isolate four of the most frequently implied
meanings of word: the orthographic, the morphological, the lexical, and the semantic
word.
- An orthographic word is one which has a space on either side of it. This definition applies only to the written medium, however, because in informal speech we rarely pause between words. Nevertheless, even in speech it is possible to isolate words by pausing between them.
- A morphological word is a unique form. It considers form only and not meaning. Ball, for example, is one morphological word, even though it can refer to both a bouncing object and a dance. Ball and balls would be two morphological words because they are not identical in form.
- A lexical word comprehends the various forms of items which are closely related by meaning. Thus, chair and chairs are two morphological words but one lexical word. Similarly, take, takes, taking, taken, and took are five morphological words but only one lexical word. Often in linguistics, when capital letters are used for a word, for example, TAKE, it implies that we are dealing with a lexical word and so TAKE comprehends all the various forms, that is, take, takes, taking, taken and took.
- A semantic word involves distinguishing between items which may be morphologically identical but have a different meaning. We have seen above that ball can have two distinct meanings. This phenomenon of polysemy is common in English. Thus, table can refer to a piece of furniture or to a diagram. The diagram and the piece of furniture are the same morphological word, but they are two semantic words because they are not closely related in meaning.
| Viator Lumban Raja, 2014
- (Example) We begin by sketching the structure of the canonical morphological word in Luganda (Niger-Kordofanian, southern Uganda), which is very clearly agglutinating. The Luganda canonical morphological word (CMW) is summarized in (1a).
- a. CMW → prefix(es) + stem
b.
 
Noun
Adj
→
(augment)
V-
(noun class prefix)
CV-/ N-
+
stem
E.g.
o-mu-limi
mu-limi
'farmer'
'he's a farmer'
c.
 
Verb
Stem
→
→
(prestem) + stem
root + extensions + FV
(FV = inflectional final vowel, usually -a)
E.g.
[ a-
aug
bá-
subj
tà-
neg
lì-
fut
[ lìm-
ROOT
ir-
appl
agan-
recip
a ]stem
FV
]
'they who will not cultivate for each other'
As seen, the CMW consists of one or more prefixes followed by a stem. The typical noun and verb structures are indicated and exemplified in (1b) and (1c). | Larry M. Hyman and Francis X. Katamba, 2001
MORPHOLOGY AS SYNTAX
(Morphosyntax)
Morphology as Syntax (MaS)
Morphological generalizations are accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and
principles. There is no morphological component in UG. There are no post-syntactic morphological operations.
MaS is a program for research. The underlying assumption is that you cannot separate morphology and syntax in any natural way. Furthermore, it is impossible to do work on morphology in isolation from syntax. For example, it is impossible to understand syncretism in a verbal paradigm without an analysis of the syntax of the language.
MaS is a consequence of the SMT (Strong Minimalist Thesis) of Chomsky 2000, which states that "Language is an optimal solution to legibility conditions." A theory lacking a morphological component is plausibly more optimal. Furthermore, just as the operations and principles of syntactic theory can be subject to scrutiny from the point of view of the SMT (e.g., D-Structure, S-Structure, traces, c-command, labels, etc.), proposed operations and principles of morphology can be subject to scrutiny from the point of view of MaS. | Chris Collins and Richard Kayne, 2023
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