1.1. How to do morphological analysis (or any （1.1。）.pdf

Ling 201 Professor Oiry Fall 2009 1. Morphology 1.1. How to do morphological analysis (or any other kind of linguistic analysis) Morphology is the study of word formation – how words are built up from smaller pieces. When we do morphological analysis, then, we’re asking questions like, what pieces does this word have? What does each of them mean? How are they combined? In general, when you’re asked to do any sort of linguistic analysis, you’ll be given a set of data – words or sentences from some language that generally isn’t, but occasionally is, English – and asked to find patterns in it. Cree (Algonquian) t∫ i:ma:n canoe nit∫ i:ma:n my canoe so:niya money niso:niya my money wiya: ∫ meat niwiya: ∫ my meat How to do morphological analysis? When you don’t know anything about the language: • Find a pair of words whose English translations differ only in a single way that’s relevant to the task at hand. • Find the corresponding difference in the non-English words – often some letters will be added, or the word will be changed in some systematic other way. Making this change in the non-English word therefore produces the relevant change in the English meaning. • Check your theory: find another pair of foreign words whose English translations also differ only in this relevant way, and make sure this pair of foreign words change in the same way as the last. We’ll encounter kinds of morphology that are more complex than this, but this basic method of looking for forms with minimal differences and figuring out how to describe that difference is always a good approach. 1 Ling 201