PARTS OF SPEECH
1. Words and Their Meaning
It may seem a superficial question to ask “what is a word?” However, this
question has stymied some of the greatest minds on history. Ferdinand de Saussure
once said that a word is like a coin. It has two sides in that it has form (the sounds that
make up a word) and meaning (the concept associated with it). In this sense, we could
say that a word links form with meaning. Words also have some properties that go
beyond these observations. For example, words are free as they can appear in
isolation. “How was the hamburger?” “Delicious”. A perfectly sensible word that
provides meaning on its own. Words are also movable. They are not bound to a
particular position in a sentence. Consider these examples:
• John is making a hamburger.
• Hamburger is delicious.
• Jenny loves to eat hamburgers for dinner.
The word hamburger can appear as the first, last or middle word in a sentence.
However, now consider whether the meaning of words is inseparable from the form.
We know we can break up a word’s form into phonemes. Can me break up a word’s
meaning in the same way?
2. Morphemes
If we consider meaningful units in a language, we come to a unit beyond which
we cannot derive further meaning. This smallest unit of meaning is known as a
morpheme. Consider the word ‘dogs.’ It is composed of two morphemes: ‘dog’ and ‘s’
with the latter conveying the plural number. Here we see that while ‘dog’ can be a free
morpheme, ‘s’ cannot. Such a morpheme which always needs to be connected to other
morphemes is known as a bound morpheme. One important issue to keep in mind is
that while some words are morphemes, not all morphemes are words. Words can be
made up of numerous morphemes. In a sentence such as “Jon found the box to be
unbreakable” we know there are seven words. However, we can break that sentence
into nine morphemes as: “Jon found the box to be un-break-able”. The -er and -ing in
writer and talking are known as suffixes. These are morphemes that attached to the
ends of other morphemes. Examples include the plural suffix -s and the past tense -
ed. English also has prefixes as in reheat, invisible and disagree.
Allomorphs
Previously we came across the concept of an allophone. These were variations
of the smallest sound unit in a language or phoneme. Similarly, the smallest unit of
meaning in a language, the morpheme, can also have variations called allomorphs.
These allomorphs often vary depending on the environment. The most common
example of this is the indefinite article ‘a’. It comes from the Old English ān meaning
one or alone. Gradually, the n was lost before consonants by the 15th century so you
get the allomorphs a and an. So, you say ‘a book’ but ‘an apple’. Some allomorphs
actually change the form of words due to over analysis. For example, a norange
overtime became an orange because people thought the initial n was part of the
indefinite article. Similarly, an ekename /iːkneɪm / (from Middle English eke or
suppliment) was analysed as a nickname. This time the n in an became attached to
the following word. Another example of an allomorph in English is the plural suffix -s.
This comes in three variations: [s], [z], and [əz]. So, after a unvoiced consonants we
get [s] as in carrots and books. It is pronounced [z] after voiced segments as in friends
and iguanas. It is also pronounced (and written) differently in words such as churches
and bushed.
3. Morphology of Different Languages
The way in which morphemes are employed to modify meaning can vary
between languages. Morphological typology is a method used by linguists to classify
languages according to their morphological structure. While a variety of classification
types have been identified, we will look at a common method of classification: analytic,
agglutinative and fusional. Figure 3.2 give some examples of morphological typology
across the world’s languages. Analytic languages have a low ratio of morphemes to
words. They are often isolating languages in that each morpheme is also a word and
vice versa. These languages create sentences with independent root morphemes with
grammatical relations between words being expressed with separate words.
Examples of analytics or isolating languages include Chinese languages and
Vietnamese. While in English we inflect numbers: one day, two days, an analytic
language such as Mandarin Chinese has no inflection: 一天, yì tiān “one day”, 三天,
sān tiān “three day”. The Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang has created an
analytic language, Toki Pona, as a minimalist creative endeavour.
Unlike analytic languages, synthetic languages employ inflection or
agglutination to express syntactic relationships. Agglutinative languages combine one
or more morphemes into one word. The distinguishing feature of these languages is
that each morpheme is individually identifiable as a meaningful unit even after
combining into a word. Examples of agglutinative languages include Tamil,
Secwepemc, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish, Basque and Hungarian. Figure 3.3 shows
you an example of agglutination in Turkish. Each coloured morpheme is also given an
approximate English translation. Figure 3.2 give another example from Tamil. Another
type of synthetic languages are fusional languages. Like agglutinative languages,
fusional languages also combine morphemes to modify meaning. However, these
combinations often do not remain distinct and fuse together. In addition, these
languages also have a tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote
numerous grammatical or syntactic features. For example, the suffix -í in Spanish comí
(“I ate”) denotes both first-person singular agreement and preterite tense. Examples
of fusional languages include Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Spanish,
Romanian, and German. Modern English could also be considered fusional; although
it has tended to evolve to be more analytic. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional language
Sindarin is fusional (another elvish language, Quenya, is agglutinative). Figure 3.2
shows an additional morphological type named polysynthetic. These languages tend
to a high morpheme-to-word ratio as well as regular morphology. They often combine
a large number of morphemes to form words that are the equivalent of entire
sentences in other languages. Many languages in North America such as Mohawk
tend to have this type of morphology.
A. Inflectional Morphology
Inflectional morphemes add grammatical information to a word while
retaining its core meaning and its grammatical category. The tense of a verb is
indicated by inflectional morphology. You add -ed to walk to make walked. You
can also make a past tense inflection through the change of a vowel as in sang
or wrote. Some languages have inflections for the future tense as well (which
English does not have). Another example is when you indicate number in
English by adding -s to a word you add the morpheme to the end of a singular
noun. So, book can be made a plural by adding -s to make it books. The original
stem doesn’t change in meaning and it remains a noun. While English only has
singular and plural numbers, some languages have a dual number. Consider
the following example from Ancient Greek (Weir, 1920):
- ὁ θεός (ho theós) “the god” (singular)
- τὼ θεώ (tṑ theṓ) “the two gods” (dual)
- οἱ θεοί (hoi theoí) “the gods” (plural)
B. Derivational Morphology
Another way in which morphemes modify meaning is through derivation.
Here the original word is modified by the derivation and often changes its word
category. Form example, adding -er to the verb write will modify it into a noun:
writer. The same is seen in teacher, walker and baker. In the same way, an
adjective can be changed into a noun as in sad and –ness becoming sadness.
Derivation often leads to the creation of new words. These new words can in
turn serve as a base for further derivation. This can lead to some rather complex
morphological forms. For example, a machine that computes may be called a
computer (compute and -er). When we use a computer to complete a task, we
could say they computerize (computer and -ize) which in turn can be called
computerization (computerize and -ation). One interesting observation is that
inflecting a base makes further derivation impossible. So, making a plural our
of computer into computers (computer and -s) means we cannot make it into
*computersize.
C. Nonconcatenative Morphology
Most of the morphological types we have seen make use of prefixes and
suffixes to make changes in meaning. These involve making sequential
changes to the stem. However, there are some languages 3.3 Morphology of
Different Languages 69 that make morphological modifications to a word-root
using non-sequential methods. This is known as nonconcatenative morphology,
discontinuous morphology or introflection. This type of change is also seen in
English foot /fʊt/ → feet /fiːt/ as well as freeze /ˈfriːz/ → froze /ˈfroʊz/, frozen
/ˈfroʊzən/. While these rare cases exist in other Indo-European languages as
well, this is very well developed in Semitic languages such as Arabic. Consider
some derivation of the Semitic root k-t-b in Arabic (Wehr, 1994) and Hebrew.
This root is transposed into other segments to create these morphological
derivations. As we can see, the morphemes do not attach to the ends but infuse
within the triconsonantal roots as infixes. We see the consonantal roots act as
separate morphemes from the infixes which intertwine to form the final
segmental sequence that is syllabified and spoken. This shows us that
morphology can be more complex than simple additions to a stem.
4. Syntax
Now that we are familiar with the units of sound, articulation and meaning, let
us explore how these are put together in connected speech. Syntax is the set of rules
and process that govern sentence structure in a language. A basic description of
syntax would be the sequence in which words can occur in a sentence. One of the
earliest approaches to syntactic theory comes from the works of the Sanskrit
grammarian Pāṇini (c. 4th century BC) and his seminal work: Aṣṭādhyāyī. While the
field has diversified into many schools, we will look at some basic issues of syntax and
look at the contributions of Noam Chomsky. Grammar employs a finite set of rules to
generate the infinite variety of output in a language. This is the basis for generative
grammar. Chomsky argued for a system of sentence generation that took into account
the underlying syntactic structure of sentences. He emphasised the native intuition of
any native speaker of a language to identity ill-formed sentences in that language. The
speaker may not be able to provide a rationale for why some sentences are acceptable
and other are not. However, it cannot be denied that such intuitions exist in every
person. While Chomsky’s ideas have evolved over the years, the main conclusions
appear to be that language is a rule-based system and a finite set of syntactic rules
can capture our knowledge of syntax.
A key aspect of language is that we can construct sentences with words using
a set of finite rules. Phrase-structure rules are a way to describe how words can be
combined into different structures. Sentences are constructed from smaller units. If s
sentence is designated as S, we can use rewrite rules to translate other symbols such
as noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP) as in: S → NP + VP Phrase-structure
grammar has word (terminal elements) and other constituent parts (non-terminal
elements). This means that words usually form the lowest part of a sentences building
up towards a sentence. The rules that we use to construct these sentences do not
deal with individual words but classes of words. Such classes include words that name
objects (nouns), words for actions (verbs), words that describe nouns (adjectives), and
words that qualify actions (adverbs). We can also think of words that determine
number such as ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘some’ (determiners), words that join constituents such
as ‘and’ and ‘because’ (conjunctions), words that substitute for a noun or noun phrase
as in ‘I’ and ‘she’ (pronouns), and words that express spatial or temporal relations as
in ‘on’ and ‘on’ (prepositions). These types of words combine to form phrases. Such
phrases that can take the part of nouns in sentences are called noun phrases. So
‘dog,’ ‘the dog’ or ‘the naughty dog’ are all noun phrases because they can fill the gap
in a sentence such as ‘_____ ran through the park’. Phrases combine to form clauses.
These contain a subject (what we are talking about) and a predicate (information about
the subject). Every clause has to have a verb and sentences can consist of one or
more clauses. As we see in Figure 3.6, the sentence ‘the dog likes John’ consists of
one clause composed of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. It contains a subject ‘the
dog,’ a verb ‘likes,’ and an object ‘John.’ One way to think about how sentences are
organized in the mind is through a notation called a tree diagram. They are called tree
diagrams because they branch from a single point into phrases which in turn branch
into words. Each place where the branches come together is called a node. A node
indicates a set of words that act together as a unit or constituent. Consider Figure 3.6
which illustrates how a sentence can be depicted in a tree diagram.
Word Order in Different Languages
The order of the syntactic constituents varies between languages. When talking
about word order, linguists generally look at 1) the relative order of subject, object and
verb in a sentence (constituent order), 2) the order modifiers such as adjectives and
numerals in a noun phrase, and 3) the order of adverbials. Here we will focus mostly
on constituent word order. English sentences generally display a word order consisting
of subject-verb-object (SVO) as in ‘the dog [noun] likes [verb] John [object]’. Mandarin
and Swahili are other examples of SVO. About a third of all languages have this type
of word order (Tomlin, 1986). About half of all languages employ subject-object-verb
(SOV). Japanese, Turkish as well as the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of India
are examples of SOV word order. Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew as well as the
Salishan languages of British Columbia employ verb-subject-object (VSO). Rarer are
typologies such as verbobject-subject (VOS) as is found in Algonquin. Unusual word
ordering can be employed for dramatic effect as in the object-subject-verb (OSV) word
order of Yoda from Star Wars: ‘Powerful (object) you (subject) have become (verb).
The dark side (O) I (S) sense (V) in you.’
The Neurolinguistics of Syntax and Semantics
We know that a sentence’s syntax has an influence on how its meaning is
interpreted (semantics of the sentence). Any given string of words can have different
meanings if they have different syntactic structures. However, syntax doesn’t
necessarily need to be in line with semantics. Chomsky (1957) famously composed a
sentence that was syntactically correct but semantically meaningless: “colorless green
ideas sleep furiously.” The sentence is devoid of semantic content, but it is a perfectly
grammatical sentence in English. The words “*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless”
are the same but their order would not be considered grammatical by a native English
speaker. We have psycholinguistic evidence from electroencephalography to support
the idea that syntax and semantics are processed independent of each other. In
measuring event related potentials (ERPs) for sentences there are some interesting
observations. For example, the sentence “He eats a ham and cheese …” sets up a
very strong expectation in your mind about what words comes next. If the word that
comes next is in line with your expectations, the ERP signal will be a baseline
condition. However, if the next word violates your expectations, then we often see a
sudden negative spike in the EEG voltage around 400ms after the unexpected word.
This ERP signal is called an N400 (where the N stands for negative and 400 indicates
the approximate timing of the ERP after the stimulus). Numerous studies have found
an N400 response when a semantically unexpected word is inserted into a sentence.
However, not every unexpected word elicits an N400 response. In some cases, where
the unexpected word belongs to an unexpected word category (for example, a verb
instead of a noun), we see a positive voltage around 600ms after the unexpected word.
This is known as a P600. Therefore, we see that violations of semantic expectations
elicit an N400 while violations of syntactic expectations elicit a P600. This suggests
that syntax and semantics are independently processed n our brains.
