An introduction to english morphology

Hue University College of Foreign Languages Hue University College of Foreign Languages Department of English Compiled by Nguyen Van Huy Than Trong Lien Nhan HCFL CHAPTER MORPHOLOGY Introduction How can we use and understand words in our language that we have never encountered before? This is the central question of a component of a grammar that deals with words and their internal structure Can we always tell precisely what a word is? Do motet, motion and motive have anything to with each other? What ways we have of making new words in English? Are the same ways of forming new words found in all languages? Is it just coincidence that although you can have a word like people which means much the same as ‘a lot of persons’, and a word peoples which means, more or less, ‘a lot of lots of persons’, you cannot have a word personss meaning the same thing? Is it just coincidence that the ablative plural of the Latin word re:x ‘king’, re:gibus, meaning ‘by/ from/ with the kings’ is so much longer than the nominative singular re:x? (I use the phonetic length mark rather than the traditional macron to show long vowels in Latin.) All of these questions relate to morphology, the study of words and their structure It is a well-established observation that words occur in different forms It is quite clear to anyone who has studied almost any of the Indo-European languages Students of these languages learn paradigms like those below as models so that they can control the formchanges that are required As illustrations, consider a verb paradigm from Latin and a noun paradigm from Icelandic (The word ‘paradigm’ means ‘pattern’ or ‘example’.) (1) amo; amais amat ama:mus amaitis amant ‘I love’ ‘you (singular) love’ ‘he/she/it loves’ ‘we love’ ‘you (plural) love’ ‘they love’ (2) Singular nominative accusative dative genitive hestur 'horse' hest hesti bests Plural nominative accusative dative genitive hestar hesta hestum hesta In the nineteenth century, the term ‘morphology’ was given to the study of this change in the forms of words The term is taken from the biological sciences, and refers to the study of shapes In linguistics this means the study of the shapes of words; not the phonological shape (which can be assumed to be fairly arbitrary) but rather the systematic changes in shape related to changes in meaning, such as those illustrated in the paradigms above, or such as that relating the pairs of words below: (3) desert design fight kill paint twist deserter designer fighter killer painter twister By extension, the term ‘morphology’ is used not only for the study of the shapes of words, but also for the collection of units which are used in changing the forms of words In this sense, we might say that Latin has a more complex morphology than English Again by extension, ‘morphology’ is also used for the sequence of rules which are postulated by the linguist to account for the changes in the shapes of words In this sense we might contrast the morphology of language L with the syntax of language L (where the syntax is the sequence of rules postulated by the linguist to account for the ways in which words are strung together) In this sense we might also say that something is part of the job of ‘the morphology of language L’ or, more generally, of ‘morphology’, implying that this is true for all languages We shall see later how all these senses fit together; such extensions of meaning are common within linguistics, and not usually cause problems of interpretation Many traditional ‘grammars’ (in the sense ‘grammar books’) deal largely with such morphology as can be laid out in paradigms like those presented above, and have little to say about syntax This has led to the situation where many lay people today still believe that languages like Chinese or English not have much grammar, because they not have extensive morphological paradigms That is, for many people the term ‘grammar’ is equated with morphology For most linguists today, however, ‘grammar’ includes both morphology and syntax, and most of the linguistic study of ‘grammar’ in this sense has, since the middle of this century, not been of morphology, but of syntax This is understandable Syntax, especially from 1957 onwards, was a relatively new field of study, while morphology was considered well-researched and well-under-stood It did not seem at that time as if there was a great deal that was new to say about morphology Morphological descriptions of hundreds of languages were available, but all the languages differed in what appeared to be essentially random ways There did not seem to be any cross-linguistic generalizations to be made in morphology Syntax, in the middle of this century, was a far richer ground for linguistic discoveries It was the excitement of the progress being made in the study of syntax which gave Linguistics such a boost in the 1960’s It was also progress in the study of syntax which eventually led to the realization that there were still questions to be answered in morphology As a result, there has in recent years been a resurgence of interest in morphology The theoretical background to this new interest in morphology comes from three distinct sources Firstly, there is the philological study of grammar in the last century and the early years of this century Secondly, there is the study of diverse languages under the influence of one or another of the structuralist schools of Linguistics In particular the work of the American structuralists, especially Bloomfield and his followers, is important here Finally, there is the influence of transformational grammar and the school of thought that emerged from the work of Chomsky It is not always easy to separate out these three strands in current morphological theory, and sometimes one dominates, sometimes another Nonetheless, all three influences can be strongly felt This book provides an introduction to the study of morphology covering the input from these various sources, and attempting some kind of synthesis in the light of the most recent research It discusses both the general background to all morphological study, and also some of the detail of recent theories of morphology (Laurie Bauer 1992: 3-5) As with any other area of linguistic theory, we must distinguish between general morphological theory that applies to all languages and the morphology of a particular language General morphological theory is concerned with delimiting exactly what types of morphological rules can be found in natural languages The morphology of a particular language, on the other hand, is a set of rules with a dual function First, these rules are responsible for word formation, the formation of new words Second, they represent the speakers’ unconscious knowledge of the internal structure of the already existing words of their language Definition Morphology is the study of internal structure of words and of the rules by which words are formed Deinstitutionalization: practices of releasing patients from hospitals for the mentally ill Reinstitutionalization: practices of returning them to these institutions By means of morphological rules we all understand that the above two words are derived from the root institution and the affixes de-/re-, -al, - ize, -ation Questions: How is morphology of a particular language understood/meant? What is meant by English morphology? 76 APPENDIX The following is chapter extracted from Laurie Bauer Introducing Linguistic Morphology (1988: 19-41) It aims at providing readers with more detailed information on morphological structure of words 77 78 79 80 62 Types of Grammar 2.1 Prescriptive Grammar From ancient times until the present, 'purists' have believed that language change is corruption and that there are certain ‘correct’ forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing The Greek Alexandrians in the first century, the Arabic scholars at Basra in the eighth century, and numerous English grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held this view They wished to prescribe rather than describe the rules of grammar, which gave rise to the writing of prescriptive grammars The age of prescriptive grammar begins in the second half of the 18th century The most influential grammar of the period was R Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar, first published in 1762 Lowth, influenced by Latin grammar and by personal preference, prescribed a number of new rules for English Before the publication of his grammar, practically everyone - upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class speakers of English - said I don't have none You was wrong about that, and Mathilda is fatter than me Lowth, however, decided that ‘two negatives make a positive’ and therefore one should say I don't have any; that even when you is singular it should be followed by the plural were; and that I not me, he not him, they not them, and so forth should follow than in comparative constructions Many of these ‘rules’ were based on Latin grammar, which had already given way to different rules in the languages that developed from Latin Because Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak ‘properly’, many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the ‘prestige’ dialect (Fromkin et al, 1990) Prescriptive grammars aimed to lay down the rules on how language should be used and to set up a standard of correct usage As Lowth put it “The principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety and to enable us to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not.” The plain way of doing this is to lay down rules and to illustrate them by examples But besides showing what is right, the matter may be further explained by pointing out what is wrong The authors of prescriptive grammars believed that their task was not only to prescribe, to provide rules for distinguishing what is right from what is wrong, but also to prescribe expressions which they considered to be wrong * … to quickly approve * What did she want to talk about? * If anyone comes in late they should go quietly to the rear * This program is intended to impact the trade imbalance (Impact could not be used as a verb.) * Hopefully, they don’t have to re-sit for the examination * Double negatives: don’t know nothing; double comparatives: lesser and worser; begun for began; the possessive case of a noun or possessive pronoun before the gerund: his smoking; the confusion of who and whom; whose as a possessive of which; the use of the so-called "flat" adverbs without the suffix -ly; the expressions It is me; were strongly criticized The expressions had rather, had better were also condemned on the ground that had, being a past tense form, could not in this case be properly expressive of the time present 63 2.2 Descriptive Grammar Unlike Prescriptive Grammar, Descriptive Grammar aims to present the grammar that underlies the actual usage of speakers of the language, i.e ‘it describes the system of grammar of the language It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand, and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language.’ An article precedes its noun The plural ‘~s’ of a count noun is pronounced /z/ if it stands after a vowel or a voiced consonant We have used the word grammar in two ways: the first in reference to the grammar speakers have in their brains; the second as the model or description of this internalized grammar Almost 2000 years ago the Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax defined grammar as that which permits us either to speak a language or to speak about a language From now on we will not differentiate these two meanings, because the linguist's descriptive grammar is an attempt at a formal statement (or theory) of the speakers’ grammar When we say that there is a rule in the grammar - such as ‘Every sentence has a noun phrase subject and a verb phrase predicate - we posit the rule in both the ‘mental’ grammar and the model of it, the linguist’s grammar When we say that a sentence is grammatical, we mean that it conforms to the rules of both grammars; conversely, an ungrammatical (starred) sentence deviates in some way from these rules If, however, we posit a rule for English that does not agree with your intuitions as a speaker, then the grammar we are describing is in some way different from the grammar that represents your linguistic competence; that is, your language is not the one we are describing No language or variety of a language (called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense Every grammar is equally complex and logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect It might involve different means and different words, but it can be expressed Languages of technologically undeveloped cultures are not primitive or ill-formed in any way Reading I.9 Descriptive grammar vs prescriptive grammar To conclude this chapter we must introduce a distinction between two kinds of grammar, descriptive grammar and prescriptive (or 'normative') grammar Descriptive grammar aims to present the grammar that underlies the actual usage of speakers of the language, while prescriptive grammar aims to tell its readers what grammatical rules they should follow: the difference is one of goals This book is, of course, an exercise in descriptive grammar The reader should be aware, however, that there is a long and quite influential tradition of prescriptivism in school grammars and other manuals of grammatical usage (for which there is a large commercial market) - and that a good deal in the widely established prescriptive doctrine is open to objection from the point of view of descriptive linguistics For this reason I shall have occasion from time to time to refer to various traditional prescriptive rules that I would regard as descriptively unsound or in need of modification The main objection to the prescriptive tradition concerns the treatment of what we shall call 64 variation in style For most purposes it is sufficient to distinguish three styles, ‘formal’, ‘informal’ and ‘neutral’, illustrated, for example in (36)i He advised us by whom it had been designed ii Who had it been designed by? iii He knew who had designed it Formal Informal Neutral Speakers of Standard English will normally have in their repertoire all three of these, but the first two will be restricted to certain contexts of use distinguished by the speaker or writer's attitude to the audience or to the occasion In formal style we make use of grammatical and/or lexical features that convey the attitude that the occasion is one of some social formality - we come across as relatively deferential, stiff, cold, impersonal, distant; informal style contains features reflecting an attitude of social informality -here we come across as relatively relaxed, warm, friendly The differences are thus analogous to those found, say, between formal and informal dress And of course people vary a good deal with respect to the conditions under which they use formal and informal style, just as they vary with respect to the conditions in which they dress formally or informally Now the prescriptive tradition very often treats constructions that belong to informal style as though they are not really grammatically 'correct' For example, Fowler's Modern English Usage, one of the best-known prescriptive manuals, writes as follows of the construction illustrated in (ii): ‘The interrogative who is often used in talk where grammar demands whom, as in Who did you hear that from?’ This is a very unsatisfactory way of putting it (ii) is just as grammatical as (i), and more generally informal style is just as systematic, as ‘rule-governed’, as formal style It is simply that the rules of grammar very often provide for variants - such as from whom and who … from - which are characteristic of different styles People are often led by the prescriptive tradition to subscribe to such beliefs as the following: ‘I say things like Who did you hear that from?, but I realize that I ought really to say From whom did you hear that?’, but such beliefs are totally without foundation there is not the slightest reason to think that that is what we ought to say Neither construction is inherently any better than the other: they are equally grammatical, but differ in meaning, more particularly of course in non-propositional meaning It is worth observing that the contrast between (i) and (ii) is to be distinguished from that between (37) i I haven't seen anything ii I ain't seen nothing for here the difference is one of social dialect, not style: (i) belongs to the standard dialect, (ii) to a non-standard one, so that (37ii), unlike (36ii), is ungrammatical in Standard English But in spite of this difference there is an important similarity between the pairs inasmuch as in neither case is there any sense in which one construction can be said to be inherently better, or more subject to grammatical rule, than the other For while (37ii) is ungrammatical in Standard English, it is not ungrammatical tout court: it is completely grammatical, i.e constructed in accordance with systematic rules of grammar, in its own dialect The difference between (37i) and (ii) is a sociolinguistic matter, with speakers who use (i) belonging to socially more privileged groups than those who use (ii) - but on purely linguistic grounds there is no reason for saying that (i) is intrinsically better than (ii), just as there is none for saying that From whom did you 65 hear that? is intrinsically better than Who did you hear that from? or that (37i) is intrinsically better, or worse, than French Je n'ai rien vu.12 (Rodney Huddleston 1993: 47-49) The Immediate Constituent Grammar - the IC Grammar One of the most widely used techniques to display sentence structures is to use the immediate constituent (IC) analysis This approach works through the different levels of structure within a sentence in a series of steps At each level, a construction is divided into its major constituents, and the process continues until no further divisions can be made For example, to make an IC analysis of the sentence The girl chased the dog, we carry out the following steps: Identify the two major constituents, the girl and chased the dog Divide the next biggest constituent into two, viz chased the dog into chased and the dog Continue dividing constituents into two until we can go no further, viz the girl and the dog into the + girl, the + dog, and chased into chase + -ed ending The order of segmentation can be summarized using lines or brackets If the first cut is symbolized by a single vertical line, the second cut by two lines, and so on, the sentence would look like this: The /// girl / chase /// -ed // the /// dog However, a much clearer way of representing a constituent structure is through the use of ‘tree diagrams’; The girl chased the dog The girl chased the dog IC grammar is based on the argument that different elements of language not belong to the same layer; they belong to different layers and create different meanings You can see this more clearly in the following analyses of the two sentences He likes pleasing women and More beautiful girls are coming The sentences can be analyzed in two different ways and consequently have different meanings: (A) (B) He likes pleasing women He likes pleasing women 66 Representations of structure like these are very helpful, as far as they go But not all sentences are as easy to analyze in IC terms as these ones It is sometimes not clear where the cuts should be made (e.g., whether to divide the three old men into the + three old men or the three old + men, or the three + old men) More important, the process of segmenting individual sentences does not take us very far in understanding the grammar of a language IC analyses not inform us about the identity of the sentence elements they disclose, nor they provide a means of showing how sentences relate to each other grammatically (as with statements and questions, actives and passives) To develop a deeper understanding of grammatical structure, alternative approaches must be used Reading I Constituent structure Words are not the only units that we need in describing the structure of sentences Although we can break a sentence down into a sequence of words, we will not go from sentence to word in a single step but will recognize units intermediate in size between sentence and word For example, in (i) The boss must have made a mistake it is intuitively obvious that although a is immediately adjacent in the sequence to both made and mistake, it is more closely related to the latter than to the former: this relationship between a and mistake can then be described by saying that they go together to form a constituent of the sentence More generally, the syntactic analysis of a sentence will assign to it a constituent structure which identifies the full hierarchy of its constituents A standard way of representing constituent structure diagrammatically is illustrated in (2): (2) This diagram identifies eleven constituents: the seven words, represented by the bottom row of points, and four intermediate units, the boss, must have made, a mistake, and must have made a mistake The point from which the lines lead down to a and mistake represents the constituent a mistake, and so on By contrast made a is not a constituent: there is no point from which the lines lead down to just this pair of words If we read the diagram from the top downwards we see that the sentence is divided first into the boss and must have made a mistake: these are said to be the immediate constituents (or ICs) of the sentence Each of them is then broken down into its own ICs, the and boss for the first, must have made and a mistake for the second - and so on until we reach the bottom 67 ‘Constituent’ is a relational concept: if x is a constituent, it must be a constituent of something For example, in (2) must have made is a constituent of the sentence - and also of must have made a mistake Similarly with ‘immediate constituent’: must have made is an IC of must have made a mistake (but only of this) It follows that the sentence itself is not a constituent: as the maximal unit in syntax it is not part of any other unit We will then apply the term construction to the sentence and any constituent except the minimal ones, the words Thus with ‘constituent’ we are as it were looking upwards: x is a constituent if it is part of some element higher in the hierarchy; and with ‘construction’ we are looking downwards: x is a construction if it is analyzable into, i.e constructed from, one or more elements lower in the hierarchy.1 ‘This allows for the special case where a construction has only one IC For example the imperative sentence Stop! contains only one word, but we will still speak of it as a construction: it is constructed from that one word It is for this reason that I say ‘higher/lower in the hierarchy’ rather than the more concrete ‘larger/smaller’ (See 3.3 for further discussion of this issue.) Finally we will use form as a general term covering both constituents and constructions Thus in (2) there are eleven constituents, five constructions and twelve forms Notice that this use of ‘form’ is consistent with that introduced in the last section, where we spoke of teeth, for example, as a form of the lexeme tooth: in He cleaned his teeth it is teeth not tooth that is a constituent of the sentence, so that teeth like his teeth, cleaned, cleaned his teeth, etc., will be a form A given sequence of words may be a constituent in one sentence but not in another Thus John and Bill is a constituent of the sentence He saw John and Bill at the races but not of He saw John and Bill did too Moreover, a single sentence may have two (or indeed more) constituent structure analyses, each corresponding to a different interpretation Liz attacked the man with the knife, for example, is syntactically ambiguous, being analyzable (approximately) as shown in (3) or (4); (3) (4) Liz attacked the man with a knife Liz attacked the man with a knife Analysis (3) corresponds to the interpretation “Liz attacked the man who had a knife” here the man with a knife forms a constituent, and serves to pick out the person whom Liz attacked Analysis (4), by contrast, represents the structure the sentence has under the interpretation “Liz used a knife in her attack on the man” - here the man and with a knife not go together to form a constituent, but are both ICs of the larger constituent attacked the man with a knife, with the man identifying the person attacked and with a knife giving information about the means of attack, not about the man Sometimes such ambiguities are resolved ‘prosodically’ - the different constituent structures are 68 distinguished by the intonation and rhythm (similarly in writing they may be resolved by punctuation) An elementary example is Liz saw John and Kim and Robin did too, which can be analyzed (again approximately) as either (5) or (6): (5) Liz saw John and Kim and Robin did too (6) Liz saw John and Kim and Robin did too (5) matches the interpretation “John and Kim were seen by Liz and they were also seen by Robin”, whereas (6) corresponds to “John was seen by Liz and he was also seen by Kim and Robin” In any normal utterance of the sentence the prosodic features (or punctuation) would show clearly whether Kim was coordinated with John, as in (5), or with Robin, as in (6) But in general relatively little information about the constituent structure is derivable directly from the physical signal: constituent structure is an abstract property of sentences In discussing example (i) I said it was intuitively obvious that a goes with mistake to form a constituent, but clearly it will not to proceed simply on the basis of intuition we need to find less subjective evidence for our analysis What kinds of evidence are relevant is a question we shall take up later - one cannot determine the constituent structure without considering other aspects of the syntax and it will therefore be better to proceed to the other main concepts, leaving till the next chapter the issue of how one chooses one analysis rather than another (Rodney Huddleston 1993: 2-5) Phrase Structure A good way of putting more information into an analysis would be to name, or label, the constituents that emerge each time a sentence is segmented; each label abbreviates a formal category The approach that is most widely practiced has developed its own abbreviations such as NP for Noun Phrase, VP for Verb Phrase, S for Sentence, AP for Adjective Phrase, PP for Prepositional Phrase, and so on Phrase structure is the division of a sentence into parts, or constituents, and the division of those constituents into subparts For instance, the sentence The bear went over the mountain is made up of two main constituents: The bear and went over the mountain The second constituent is, in turn divided into two parts, went and over the mountain, which is divided 69 even further, into over and the mountain All sentences have such hierarchical structure, even a very simple two-word sentence like Carol giggled Phrasal categories are named according to the most important word of the phrase Noun Phrases (NPs) are so labeled because they typically contain nouns - the exception: a Noun Phrase can be made up of just a pronoun Verb Phrases (VPs) always contain verbs Adjective Phrases (APs) are so-called because an adjective is the only required word; intensifiers are optional Prepositional phrases (PPs) contain a preposition and an NP With these labels, The girl chased the dog and The bear went over the mountain can be displayed as tree diagrams: The girl chased the dog NP Art The bear went over the mountain VP N V NP NP Art VP N V PP Prep Art NP N Art The girl chased the N dog The bear went over the mountain Grammars that generate phrase structures in this way have come to be called Phrase structure grammars or PSGs If we follow these rules through, it can be seen that there is already a significant increase in the 'power' of this grammar over the single-sentence analysis used previously If we choose the girl for the first NP, and the dog for the second, we generate the girl chased the dog; but if the choices are made the other way round, we generate the sentence the dog chased the girl By the simple device of adding a few more words to the rules, a vast number of sentences can be generated: V Æ chased, saw, hit… DET Æ the, a N Æ girl, man, bear V Æ went, ran A Æ over, down N Æ bear, tiger; mountain, hill The girl chased the man The man saw the bear The bear hit the girl, etc The bear went over the hill The tiger ran over the hill The tiger ran down the hill etc 70 Reading 2.3 Phrase Structure rules The claims about the structure of the sentence represented in diagrams (15) and (17) can be formulated in terms of ‘rewrite rules’ such as the ones in (18) (read ‘Æ’ as ‘rewrite as’ or, less formally, ‘goes to’) 18a 18b 18c S Æ NP Aux VP NP Æ Det N VP ÆV NP (18a-c) are Phrase Structure (PS) rules in the sense that they incorporate claims (specified to the right of the arrow) about the constituent structures of phrases (specified to the left of the arrow) PS rules are said to generate structures, where generate is understood to mean ‘make explicit’ (18a), for example, generates the structure of S by making explicit the information that S consists of NP, Aux and VP (18b), on the other hand, generates the structure of NP by making explicit the information that NP consists of Det and N Finally, (18c) generates the structure of VP by making explicit the information that VP consists of V and NP Tree diagrams and labeled brackets are (visual) devices of representing claims about constituent structures incorporated in PS rules The PS rules (18a-c) were based on sentence (3) in the previous section, reproduced in (19) However, their generative capacity goes well beyond (19), to include all possible sentences in the language with similar strings (20a-d) are a few examples of such sentences They all resemble (19) in that they include the same patterns of constituency for each category: 19a This boy can solve the problem 19b [S [NP this boy ] [AUX can] [VP [V solve] [Np the problem]]] 20a The police will arrest the thief 20b This man can drive that car 20c The President will chair the meeting 20d The Parliament can impeach the President To generate a specific sentence of the set of sentences generated by rules (18a-c), another set of rules which generate specific lexical items can be added (19), for example, is fully generated by the set of rules in (21): 21a 21b 21c 21d 21e 21f 21g S Æ NP Aux VP NP Æ Det NP VP Æ V NP Aux Æ can Det Æ the, this N Æ student, problem V Æ solve 71 Rules (21a-c) generate phrasal categories one constituent of which is a terminal node Terminal nodes are nodes that not branch and that immediately dominate the lexical item For example, the phrasal category VP has the terminal node V as one of its constituents, and NP has the terminal node N as one of its constituents S is called the root node Rules (21d-g), on the other hand, generate terminal nodes by introducing corresponding lexical items in the sentence The structures generated by both sets of rules are called phrase markers (15) is the phrase marker of sentence (19), represented in the form of a tree diagram Obviously, there is also an equally large number of possible sentences which PS rules (21a-c) cannot generate, mainly because they have constituency patterns which differ from the ones in (19) and (20a-d) In the rest of this chapter, we will try to accommodate as many types of sentences as possible, essentially by enriching the system of PS rules developed so far We will discuss each of the PS rules in (21a-c) separately and modify it in such a way that it can accommodate a broader range of constituency patterns for the category it generates, and therefore a broader range of sentences Our first target will be the PS rule that generates Aux 2.4 Aux and Tense (22a&b) and many similar sentences differ from the ones discussed so far in that they apparently lack an Aux: 22a The boy kicked the ball 22b The boy saw the girl (22a&b) are problematic for rule (21a) for the simple reason that the rule states that Aux is an obligatory constituent of S To accommodate sentences such as (22a&b), as well as generate sentences with Aux, we need to modify rule (21a) An obvious way of achieving the desired result is simply to make the occurrence of Aux optional Notationally, this can be done by including Aux between parentheses roughly as follows: S Æ NP (Aux) VP The latter states that S consists of NP, an optional Aux and VP This version of the rule now generates sentences with an Aux as well as sentences without an Aux However, there is an alternative way of accommodating sentences such as (22a&b) which, when examined carefully, turns out to be more adequate than the solution which makes the occurrence of Aux optional Examples (23a-d) show that Tense, the category which specifies the time of the event in relation to the time of the utterance, is a constituent of Aux rather than of V: 23a The boy [will] kick the ball 23b The boy [doesn't/didn't] like the party 23c The girl [didn't] like the party, but the boy did 23d [Go to the party] I wonder whether the boy will [ -] In (23a), Tense shows up as the Modal will, while the main verb does not carry any Tense information In (23b), Tense also shows up on the auxiliary In (23c), deletion of the verb and its complement (i.e deletion of VP) does not affect Tense Finally, in (23d), displacement of VP does not affect Tense 72 Now, given that sentences invariably have a Tense category, and given that Tense is a constituent of Aux, it follows that all sentences have an Aux category Sentences differ only in that some of them have a Modal auxiliary under the Aux node, in addition to Tense, as in (19), while others have only Tense under the Aux node, as in (22a&b) Thus, the optional occurrence of Aux implied by (22a&b) only reflects the optional occurrence of a Modal in addition to Tense In view of this, our initial solution, which made the occurrence of Aux optional, is inadequate This is because it was based on the assumption that Tense is not a constituent of Aux, contrary to what examples (23a-d) indicate The solution which is consistent with the facts illustrated in (23a-d) is one which maintains Aux as an obligatory constituent of S on the grounds that it is the node under which Tense is located The new version of the PS rule which generates Aux now looks as in (24b) where Tense is an obligatory constituent and the Modal an optional constituent (24a) is the PS rule which generates S This rule remains as we stated it originally, with Aux and obligatory constituent: 24a 24b S Æ NP Aux VP Aux Æ Tense (Modal) In view of (24b), in particular the idea that Tense is a constituent of Aux, we need to explain how it is that Tense shows up on the verb in sentences such as (22a&b) This task is carried out in Chapter For the moment, note that Tense elements such as the past tense marker -ed are morphologically dependent morphemes or bound morphemes They cannot stand alone, and need to attach to a verbal category such as a Modal or a verb It is for this reason that Tense appears attached to the verb in sentences such as (22a&b) Obviously, Tense attaches to the verb only when Aux does not include a Modal category In sentences where Aux includes a Modal category, e.g This boy will solve the problem Tense appears on the Modal category and the main verb appears unmarked for Tense The category Neg(ation) also belongs under Aux, irrespective of whether it has form not or the contracted form n't This is shown in (25a), where the and Neg are coordinated with a similar string of categories, and in (25b), the Modal and Neg are displaced together to the beginning of the sentence: 25a This politician [cannot] and [will not] solve the problem 25b [Can't] this politician [ _ ] solve the problem? The rule which generates Aux now looks as in (26a) Tense is an obligatory lent present in all sentences, and Modal and Neg are optional (26b) is the structure of Aux implied by rule (26a): 26a Aux Æ Tense (Modal) (Neg) 73 26b Aux Tense (Modal) (Neg) (Jamal Ouhalla 1999: x-y) Transformational Generative Grammar - TG Grammar Structural linguistics was followed by a new type of grammar which is known as transformational generative grammar or TG grammar Its main aim was to find out mechanisms, which account for the generation of the variety of sentences of a language out of a few kernel sentences At the first stage of its development the representatives of TG gave a list of rules which covered up the derivation of sentences out of kernel sentences These rules are called T-rules or transformational rules The second period of TG began with the introduction of the notions of a deep and a surface structure for each sentence Of these, the surface structure is the more complicated, based on one or more underlying abstract simple structures In certain very simple sentences the difference between the surface structure and the deep structure is minimal Sentences of this kind, simple, active, declarative, indicative, are designated as kernel sentences They can be adequately described by phrase or constituent structure methods, as consisting of noun and verb phrases (the so-called P-markers, the NP's & VP's) Kernel sentences are produced by applying only obligatory transformations to the phrasestructure strings (e g the transformation of affix + verb info verb + affix in the present tense, hit -s, etc.) Non-kernel or derived sentences involve optional transformations in addition, such as active to passive (the boy was hit by the man) But later interpretations of the transformational theory have made less use of this distinction, stressing rather the distinction between the underlying ‘deep structure’ of a sentence and its ‘surface structure’ that it exhibits after the transformations have been applied Transformational operations consist in rearrangement, addition, deletion and combination of linguistic elements E Bach in his Introduction to Transformational Grammars links up PS rules (Phrase Structure Rules) both with traditional and IC analysis, saying that PS rules form a counterpart in the theory of generative grammar to two techniques of linguistic analysis (one old and one rather new): ‘The old practice is the schoolroom drill of parsing, that is, of assigning grammatical labels to parts of a sentence The other technique - in reality only a more sophisticated version of parsing - is so called 1C analysis.’ (E Bach, An Introduction to Transformational Grammars, New York, 1964, p 33.) The transformational grammar is organized in three basic parts The first part - its syntactic component (which includes a lexicon, i.e a list of words - boy, hit, ball, etc.) is described, as mentioned above, in terms of IC’s or P-markers The syntactic component includes description both of deep and surface structure The second is the semantic component, which provides a semantic interpretation of the deep syntactic structure E.g in sentences we enjoy 74 smoking and we oppose smoking the semantic component would indicate that the former is a paraphrase of we smoke and we enjoy it, though the latter is not a paraphrase of we smoke and we oppose it The third, the phonological component provides a phonetic interpretation of the surface structure of the sentence (Note that ‘to generate sentences’ according to this theory does not mean ‘to produce sentences’, but ‘to characterize’, ‘to enumerate’, ‘to determine’ the rules for forming all of the infinite number of sentences, some of them never heard before.) (In 1957, Avram Noam Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1928 - ), published Syntactic Structures, which proved to be a turning point in 20th century linguistics The first chapter of the book declared that grammar was an autonomous system, independent of semantics (i.e., the meanings associated with the forms of the language) and of the study of the use of language in situations, and furthermore that it should be formalized as a system of rules which generate an infinite set of sentences.) Pedagogical Grammars or Teaching Grammars The grammar of a language is different from a teaching grammar, which is used to learn another language or dialect In countries where it is advantageous to speak a ‘prestige’ dialect, people who not speak it natively may wish to learn it Teaching grammars state explicitly the rules of the language, list the words and their pronunciations, and aid in learning a new language or dialect As an adult, it is difficult to learn a second language without being instructed Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of the native language The meaning of a word is given by providing a gloss - the parallel word in the student's native language, such as maison ‘house’ It is assumed that the student knows the meaning of the gloss ‘house’, and so the meaning of the French word maison Sounds of the target language that not occur in the native language are often described by reference to known sounds Thus the student might be aided in producing the French sound u in the word tu by instructions such as ‘Round your lips while producing the vowel sound in tea.’ The rules on how to put words together to form the grammatical sentences also refer to the learners’ knowledge of their native language Thus the teaching grammar Learn Zulu by Sibusiso Nyembezi states that ‘The difference between singular and plural is not at the end of the word but at the beginning of it’ and warns that Zulu does not have the indefinite and definite articles "a" and "the" Such statements assume students know the rules of their own grammar Although they might be prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to teach the student what is or is not a grammatical construction in the new language, their aim is different from grammars that attempt to change the rules or usage of a language already learned Grammatical Units The first step usually taken in the study of grammar is to identify units in the stream of speech The following five-rank hierarchy is a widely used model in the study of grammar: 75 SENTENCES SENTENCES are analyzed into are used to build CLAUSES CLAUSES are analyzed into are used to build PHRASES PHRASES are analyzed into are used to build WORDS WORDS are analyzed into are used to build MORPHEMES MORPHEMES Morphemes are the ‘lower’ limit of grammatical enquiry, for they have no grammatical structure Similarly, sentences form the ‘upper’ limit of grammatical study, because they not usually form a part of any larger grammatical unit Syntactic relations In general, the grammatical relations between units in a sentence are called syntactic relations The followings are the three categories of syntactic relations: Subject - Predicate relations Subordinate relations Coordinate relations Questions: What is prescriptive grammar? Give some examples to illustrate prescriptive grammar What is descriptive grammar? Analyze the structure of the following sentences, using I.C Grammar The students went to the museum They sang the song with their teacher What is Phrase Structure Grammar (P.S Grammar)? What is Transformational Generative Grammar? What transformational operations consist in? What are the three basic parts of Transformational Generative Grammar? What is syntactic relation? What syntactic relations can we find in language? 99 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauer, Laurie (1992) Introducing Linguistic Morphology Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Fromkin, V A et al (1990) An Introduction to Language Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Group (Australia) Pty Limited, Marrickville, NSW Huddleston, Rodney (1993) Introduction to the Grammar of English Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Jacobs, R.A (1995) English Syntax - A Grammar for English Language Professionals Oxford University Press, New York Kuiper, Koenaad, & W S Alan (1996) An Introduction to English Language - Sound, Word and Sentence MacMillan Press Ltd., London O’Grady, W et al (1993) Contemporary Linguistics - An Introduction St Martin’s Press, New York Ouhalla, J (1999) Introducing Transformational Grammar Arnold, London Quirk, Randolph & Greenbaum, S (1987) A University Grammar of English Longman Group UK Limited, England Radford, Andrew et al (2001) Linguistics - An Introduction Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ... College of Foreign Languages Department of English Compiled by Nguyen Van Huy Than Trong Lien Nhan HCFL CHAPTER MORPHOLOGY Introduction How can we use and understand words in our language that we... green apple (b) an oak an elephant an uncle an apple an old man In this case the choice between the two morphs a and an is determined or conditioned by the following phonetic sound We can say that... How is morphology of a particular language understood/meant? What is meant by English morphology? 76 APPENDIX The following is chapter extracted from Laurie Bauer Introducing Linguistic Morphology