Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

The simple picture we have just described is complicated somewhat by

example (102):

(102)

A picture of Dick was taken by Harriet

Here, Harriet is still the one taking the picture, and it is still the picture that is being affected by the action of being taken (in that it is being created). However, grammatically speaking, a picture of Dick is the subject in (102). This is clear if we consider agreement in (102) in contrast to (103): (103)

Pictures of Dick were taken by Harriet

Here, the form were is the appropriate form for a third person plural subject (*pictures of Dick was taken by Harriet), indicating this reversal of grammatical roles, which is a systematic phenomenon affecting transitive verbs. When it

occurs, the verb appears in another special inflectional form (identical to the perfect participle) and is accompanied by the auxiliary be, the old object becomes the subject of the new verb form, while the old subject is either introduced by the preposition by, as in (102, 103), or omitted altogether (as in pictures of Dick were taken). The traditional term used to distinguish sentences in which the relations of subject and object are changed is voice. Thus, we say that (101a) is in the active (voice), while (102, 103) are in the passive (voice). The verb form taken in (102,

103) is the passive participle. The passive participle of any verb in English is always identical to the perfect participle in form, that is, it is always the -n form (cf. section 21, pp. 304ff., for further discussion of passive constructions).

English has little inflection. Nouns have only two forms, singular and plural, and verbs have relatively few forms. Subject agreement takes place only with third person singular subjects, and then not in the past tense (with the exception of forms of be as in I was, you were, etc.). Not all words inflect in exactly the same way, of course. Languages have irregularities in morphology. For instance, as we have noted, the regular past tense form consists of adding -(e)d to a verb (walk →

walked), though take has an irregular form took. English has about two hundred verbs with inflectional irregularities. The implications of these observations for the structure of the lexicon are straightforward. As the lexicon is a repository for the idiosyncratic linguistic properties of words, if a word is regular inflectionally,

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words

there will be no need to specify its inflectional forms in the lexicon. Thus, the lexical entry for the noun train will not contain any indication that the plural form of this word is trains; and the lexical entry for the verb jump will not include the information that this verb has a third person singular present form jumps, a past tense form jumped, etc. These facts are entirely predictable, so do not need to be specified. However, the fact that women is the plural form of woman will be listed in the lexical entry for woman, as will the fact that gave is the past tense form of give in the latter’s lexical entry, etc. (exercise 5)

Exercises

1.

The following text contains invented words (like plingle). Identify the

lexical class of each word, giving a justification for each case.

In the Ancient Order of Grand Wizards a monesticant often demo-

gulates the less vericle regulations. In a recent lecture anent the history

of Order, one of the monesticants drongly explained why an old splink

should never be croodled.

Model answer for monesticant -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

monesticant is a noun because

(a) it has a plural form in -s, as we see later in the text;

(b) it is preceded by the articles a with its singular form and the with

its plural form, monesticants;

(c) it serves as the main word in the phrase one of the monesticants, in

which the monesticants comes after a preposition (of);

(d) the phrase the monesticants appears to function as an argument

(subject) of the verb explain; if demogulates is also a verb form,

the phrase a monesticant appears to function as an argument

(again, subject) of this verb.

2.

The following words have unusual plurals. Identify as many other

words as you can which show similar behaviour in the plural.

goose

change vowel of singular form

sheep

no change at all

criterion

replace -on with -a

knife

replace voiceless fricative with voiced fricative then add /z/

3.

The following words do not have plurals or undergo an interest-

ing shift in meaning when pluralised. Describe the nature

of these meaning changes. How would you account for this

behaviour?

water, sand, lemonade, arrogance, kindness

Word classes

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4.

Consider the adjectives below. Some form a comparative and super-

lative in -er/-est and others do not, in which case the comparative/

superlative meaning is conveyed by more/most, e.g. more/most sar-

castic and not *sarcasticer/*sarcasticest. What might account for this

difference in behaviour?

large

warm

complex

crooked

malicious

strong

frantic

splendid

frightened

grand

dreadful

frank

pretentious

close

comical

candid

incorrigible

remarkable

round

dark

fiendish

small

stupid

trenchant

wild

The following words may seem to be counter-examples to the solution

you’ve proposed for the first set of words. Is there any way of

incorporating them into your explanation?

friendly, gentle, slimy, noble, happy, funny, simple, hazy

5.

Assign all the words in the following examples to word classes

by means of a labelled bracketing. This involves placing the word

between square brackets […] and labelling the left-hand bracket with

the word category using the abbreviations we have introduced in the

text. For instance, John has left would come out as [N John] [AUX

has] [V left]:

(a) Will the gerbils want to be fed again before we go out to the

cinema?

(b) The plucky arctic fox can withstand the unbelievably harsh

climate of the Siberian tundra

(c) Often, the meerkat will carefully and patiently observe the distant

horizon for hours

(If you get stuck, note that the technique of labelled bracketing is

introduced with discussion in section 19.)

10

Building words

In the previous section, we have referred to both derivational and inflectional processes which enable us to form words from other words. The field of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words and processes of word formation is known as morphology, and in this section we shall introduce some of the important ideas in this domain by illustrating their application to English word structure.

Morphemes

Many words in English can easily be split into smaller components.

Consider words like reader, printer and illustrator. These are all nouns related to the verbs read, print and illustrate, and they all mean roughly ‘person or instrument that Verb-s’. Clearly, it is the ending -er (with its alternative spelling -or in certain words) which conveys this new aspect of meaning and we can say that -er/-or creates a new noun from a verb. We can also create new verbs from verbs, as illustrated by pairs such as read ~ re-read, print ~ re-print and illustrate ~ re-illustrate. Here, the new verb begins with re- and means ‘to Verb something again’. In both these cases, the complex word consists of a number of components, each with its own meaning.

We call such components morphemes, and to make them easier to identify we can separate them by means of a hyphen (e.g. read-er). You will often see the morpheme described as the minimal linguistic sign. What this means is that the morpheme is the smallest component of a word which contributes to its meaning. We will see that if we are to subscribe to this, we have to understand ‘meaning’ rather broadly.