So let’s talk about change. We all go through experiences that fundamentally affect who
we are; but sometimes, no matter what happens, we come out of it stronger than ever before.
And, the same is true when we put together our building blocks and assemble our words!
But how can we tell which words have been transformed beyond recognition, and which
ones made it through unscathed? I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
At first glance, it might seem like words are the furthest we can dig when we mine for
meaning, but as we’ve talked about before, the connection between sound and sense can
be broken down into pieces much smaller than individual words. We call these smallest bits
morphemes. And although lots of morphemes are strong enough to stand on their own, others
need to lean on their neighbours to find the support that they need.
Take a word like “break.” It’s definitely a morpheme, since it can’t really be broken
down any further; it’s as small as it’s gonna get. And it’s also perfectly happy by
itself, unlike the suffix “-able,” which isn’t.
”-able” is a morpheme which hooks onto verbs and turns them into adjectives that
mean it’s possible to do whatever the verb is. With a definition like that, though, it’s
not so surprising that it doesn’t really have what it takes to support itself. So,
it goes looking for a verb-y friend to hang out with, giving us words like “breakable”.
Okay, so for English, we’ve got roots like break, which are pretty independent characters
that don’t need to be bound to anything else to feel happy, and we’ve got affixes
like -able, which are a little more demanding and have to attach to somebody else to feel
complete. So just like how sentences are more than flat strings of words without any kind
of organization to them, words have structure too. And to see how, we’ll have to take a closer
look at the different kinds of affixes, and what they do to the roots they cozy up with.
The biggest distinction is between derivation and inflection. Let’s zoom in on each one,
and then see how they interact. First, let’s focus on derivational affixes.
Derivational affixes stick out in a couple of ways. For one, they usually carry a fair
bit of semantic baggage with them. That “-able” that we mentioned earlier,
along with other suffixes like “-ism” and “-esque”, and prefixes like “pro-”
and “trans-”, are pretty meaningful, even if they can’t generally make it on their own as words.
Each one adds something substantial to the overall meaning of the stem it attaches to.
And also, sometimes you can find a whole bunch of affixes together in one word, and when
a new one moves into the neighbourhood, the category of the word often changes.
For example, looking back at “breakable”, we can see we started off with a verb, which
then combined with a suffix that turned it into an adjective.
We can represent how we build up our words using word structure trees, like this one.
It captures how the affix switched the category of the original root. And if we add another
suffix? Then, we just add more structure!
Now, you might wonder why we can’t just represent our word using a flat structure, like this.
The thing is, a word structure tree is meant to depict a word’s derivational history,
the steps we took to get it to where it is. And we know that the suffix “-ity” can
only attach after “-able” does, since we only ever see “-ity” at the ends of
adjectives-turned-nouns. If we try to hook “-ity” up onto a verb directly, we get
a word like “breakity” . . . which sounds cute, but. . . yeah, no.
But “-ity” loves hanging around adjectives, changing “clear” to “clarity,” “feminine”
to “femininity,” and so on. So word formation has to happen in a stepwise fashion, one morpheme
at a time, with each step giving you another possible English word. Morphological processes
are a lot like syntactic rules, separating out the well-formed expressions from the impossible ones.
This kind of derivation happens in other languages, too! The prefix “dé-” in French can attach
to verb stems like “construire” for the verb “construct,” making “déconstruire”,
or “deconstruct”.
We can attach the suffix “-tion” onto the result, forming the even more complex
“déconstruction,” for “deconstruction.”
And with these tools in place, we can even make certain predictions. When it comes to
full sentences, we often run into ambiguities. And one way to explain why is that when we’re
building our trees, some pieces can latch onto more than one kind of phrase. For instance,
prepositional phrases are often just as happy inside noun phrases as they are inside verb
phrases. So, in a sentence like “Kimmy bribed the therapist with a drink,” that prepositional
phrase “with a drink” can either glom onto "the therapist” or reach up into the verb phrase.
And each syntactic possibility is paired with a different meaning. When the PP sticks to
the noun phrase “the therapist,” it’s the therapist that has the drink. And when it
finds its way into the verb phrase, Kimmy’s the one with the drink, doing the bribing.
So if different structures are usually connected to alternative interpretations, and words
can have different structures, then we should be able to see those alternatives. So let’s
take a look at “unbreakable.”
We already know that “-able” has to attach to verbs, and we know that “un-“ can stick
itself onto adjectives, from words like “unhappy.” So, we get this structure:
But prefixes have more flexibility to them, and “un-” can live side-by-side with a
verb, too, like in “untie” or “unstick.” And so, there’s another way that we can draw our tree.
And if you think about it, there are two possible interpretations available. The more natural
one describes something that can’t be broken. But, you can also imagine it describing something
that can be unbroken; in other words, something that can be fixed.
This is easier to get with other words, like “unfoldable,” which seems like it could
refer either to the property of being able to unfold, or of being impossible to fold.
So we can see the word’s derivational history at work, making its way down either of two
possible paths, each with a separate semantic outcome!
Okay, so now that we’ve found our way around derivational morphology, what about inflection?
What makes that different? Well, for one, inflectional morphemes tend not to have as
much meaning attached to them; they sort of “decorate” a word, like ornaments on a
Christmas tree. They add information, but they don’t fundamentally change the underlying concept.
Like, if you stick a tense marker on a verb, like escape-d, it just tells you around when
the escaping happened; it doesn’t change anything else about the action. And inflectional
morphemes leave the category unchanged, too, so an inflected verb is still a verb, and
inflected nouns stay nouns.
Examples of inflectional affixes include indications of tense, aspect, voice, comparison, and number,
alongside many categories not obviously present in English, like mirativity, animacy, gender, and case.
So in German, the suffix “-en” combines with certain verbs to create their infinitive
forms, as in “sagen” for “say,” whereas the suffix “-te” marks for past tense
for regular verbs, like in “sagte”, or “said.” In English, the past tense suffix for regular
verbs is “-ed,” while “-ing” can indicate that an action is happening continuously.
And the suffix “-s” can be used to mark plurals, with the same sounds showing up as
a third-person singular agreement marker on verbs, and a marker of possession. Yeah, English
isn’t as creative as it could be with inflection.
You might have noticed, too, that inflectional affixes only ever show up at the ends of words
in English. Of course, this isn’t true of all languages. Take Japanese honorifics. Now, lots
of nouns can get used in blunt, no-nonsense forms, like 返事 [hendʒi] for “reply”,
or 酒 [sake] for alcohol. But if you want to make them sound more polite and respectful,
you can stick an お [o] on the front, like お返事 or お酒. The nouns don’t change;
they’re just nicer.
What is interesting, though, is that cross-linguistically, inflectional affixes tend to show up around
the edges of words, not in the middles, no matter how derivationally complex the word gets. Even
in a ginormous word, like “antidisestablishmentarian", which went from a verb, to a noun, to
an adjective, and then back to a noun — the plural “-s” still shows up all the way
at the end, as in “antidisestablishmentarians,” not “antidisestablishment-s-arian.”
So, it looks as if derivation has to happen first. A word is built up, and then once it’s
done, the result acts as a stem which can be inflected in any number of ways, depending on the category.
And we can put inflectional affixes in our word structure trees, too, but unlike with
derivation, the resulting categories don’t change.
So, it turns out words have a lot more structure to them than you might think. It’s not just
sentences that get built up out of parts, it’s the words themselves. When we look
at how language gets put together, the more things change, the more they stay the same!
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week. If you ordered all your affixes
right, you learned that words have internal structure, and that this can lead to ambiguity;
that affixes can be either derivational or inflectional, depending on how they affect
the category or meaning of their stem; and that inflectional affixes apply only after
all the derivational affixes have been attached.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost. This
week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music
is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back to our website, where we’ll have some
extra material on this topic.
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