So let’s talk about words. Now, you probably think that words are one of the biggest things
a linguist could care about. After all, words are the little Lego pieces of language,
right? You connect them together, and you suddenly have bigger meanings, whole sentences
and conversations. That’s all true, but when it comes to the tiniest
meaningful bits, we usually want to aim a little smaller than the word. I’m Moti Lieberman,
and this is the Ling Space.
So of course, since I’m a linguist, I love words. They’re amazing and cute, and they
often sound really cool. But the thing is, when we want to look at meaning, words can
just be too big. A single word can have a whole bunch of different meanings wrapped
up inside it. So, just think about a word like “rekillable", as in “The Others are rekillable.”
It might be one word, but inside, you can see three different pieces that have their
own meanings – “re,” or do again; “kill”, so to cause to die; and “able,” or can
be done. So when we put all the different meanings together, we get something like “can be killed again”.
That’s one word, but it’s got three different pieces of meaning inside.
So if we really want to talk about meaning, we need to dig down past the word level and look at
the different parts inside the word. We need to make it down to where we can’t go any farther
without breaking up the raw ore of meaning. When we’ve removed everything extraneous,
and all that we're left with are sets of sounds that are paired up with one individual meaning
each, we’ve hit the bottom.
Then we’ve managed to find the morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest pairing between
sound and meaning. So that means if you split off any more of the sound, you
wouldn’t keep the same meaning anymore. Something like “Stark” is a morpheme
by itself, because even if you can see another morpheme like “star” inside it, you can’t
cut off that [k] without changing meaning. That [k] is an essential
part of Starkness; without it, you’ve ended up with something completely different. Starks
aren’t stars.
Now, this goes the other way, too. Just because you can put some sounds together doesn’t
mean that they make up a morpheme. There has to be a meaning attached to those sounds, too. So
in the Stark example from before, another reason you can’t cut off that [k]
is that [k] doesn’t even mean anything in English. So you can't just attach
it as its own morpheme to something else.
Or take something like “khaleesi .” Now, that’s a perfectly fine combination of sounds right
there, and any English speaker will tell you that’s an okay word, even if they don’t
necessarily know what it means. But it’s not until you pair that sound with a meaning that
it becomes a morpheme. If you said khaleesi in 1995, that wouldn’t have been a morpheme,
because it didn't mean anything.
But now, a lot of people know what that is – the sounds have been paired with a meaning,
and voila! A morpheme is born.
Not all morphemes are the same, of course. There are a few distinctions between different
kinds of morphemes that should just jump out at you. The one we’ll talk about this week
is that some morphemes can stand on their own, and other ones can’t. Let’s consider
a word like “Tickler.” Now this word has two morphemes in it, “tickle” and “er”.
The first part, “tickle”, can stand on its own, like “I’ll tickle the information
out of him.” But that second part, “er”, can’t be by itself like that. It clearly
has a meaning of its own – “someone that does… whatever thing it’s attached to”,
so a tickler tickles and a hunter hunts, etc. But it needs that piece to attach to – if
someone asks you what your job is, you can’t say “I’m an er.” It can’t be independent.
Morphemes like “tickle” or “hound” or “red” that can stand on their own like
that are known as free morphemes. They’re free-standing meaning bits, or at least, they
can be. But things like “er” or “un” or “de”, those aren’t strong enough
to stand by themselves. They need to attach to something, and so these are known as bound
morphemes.
But there’s no fundamental rule that says any morpheme, or even any type of morpheme, has
to be free or bound in any given language. We can find free morphemes in English that are bound
in other languages. Take “the” in English – now that’s a free morpheme, like in “the
cat.” But in Hebrew, that “the” is bound – it’s the [ha] in [haxatul] - החתול.
And we can find things that are bound in English that are free in other languages.
So, how about the –er we use for comparison in English? Now, that’s bound, as in “It’s
colder on the Wall.” But in Japanese, that comparative is its own word – it’s the [motto] in
“kabe-ga motto samui desu.”
Beyond these examples, there are languages where basically every morpheme is free,
like Mandarin or Vietnamese. These languages don’t really have bound morphemes at all. Other
languages, like Mi’qmaq or Mohawk, basically have all their morphemes bound. These
are languages where an entire sentence gets rolled up together into a single word.
So a sentence like “She made the thing that one puts on one’s body ugly for him” is just
a single word in Mohawk , like this: wahuwajaʔdawitsherahetkʌ:ʔdʌʔ.
Linguistic example sentences can get pretty wacky sometimes!
But this is why we can have such a hard time talking about words in linguistics. Something that's just
one word in English could turn into a few words in a different language, and something that's a whole sentence
in English could be a single word somewhere else. What’s free and what’s bound are
different from one language to the next, but no matter what language you look at, morphemes
are always there. And that's why that’s where it’s most meaningful to look.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you were able to associate
my sounds with meanings, you learned that morphemes are the pairings of sounds and meaning
that can’t be broken up further without losing the meaning; that there are free morphemes
that can stand on their own, and bound morphemes that need to be attached to something to be
used; that languages make up their own minds about what should be bound and free; and that
because of the variation, talking about morphemes can be more appropriate than talking about
words.
The Ling Space is written and produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Élise
Prévost, our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, music and sound design is by Shane
Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you
can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material on this
topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Huitou jian!