introductiontomorphology.pptVIP

The History of Morphological Studies Ancient India The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Panini(? 600 BC)， who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. His Sanskrit grammar has been described by Bloomfield as ‘one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence’. One of the features of the work is the formal analysis below the word in terms corresponding to the modern Morpheme. Greco-Roman morphological analysis was set out in terms of paradigms of whole words grouped together by similarities of morphological composition, but the actual concept of the morpheme as a formal component of such words was never clearly explicated by scholars in Western antiquity. Ancient Greece Morphological description was built around the identification and definition of the word classes of Greek. The first distinction recognized in this field was that of noun and verb, a distinction found in Plato [428-348BC], who based it on the logical distinction between subject and predicate. Subsequently Aristotle [384-322BC] and the Stoics added further members of the system of word classes, and refined their defining criteria. The number was set at eight (noun, verb, pronoun, participle, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article) in the short Greek grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax (?100 BC). The system of eight word classes was accepted for most teaching and further research in Greek grammar. Thrax’s definitions, largely the product of earlier work, were in the main formally grounded on the morphological categories of the variable words. Ancient Rome In linguistic studies, the Roman scholars were content largely to model themselves on Greek patterns. Among them the most famous is Priscian, whose comprehensive Latin grammar, written about AD 500, ran to eighteen volumes. Priscian models himself on Thrax and Appollonius. His word class system is the same as theirs except that the article, a class not represented in Latin, is omitted and th