2.2 Questions in morphology

A lot of focus in morphology is on the relationship between form and meaning. The further we go to the grammar side of linguistics, the harder it becomes to use an intuitive concept of meaning as a starting point. It seems rather easy to determine the meaning of the word cat. A simple definition usually satisfies. We can characterize cat as a word. It is phonologically and morphologically distinct from other words. It is also a morpheme. It can serve as a root for more complex words, such as cats. The morpheme is, “the smallest meaningful unit,” remember? So, what about the meaning of -s in cats? If the root morpheme has a meaning, the plural suffix has to has one as well. A straight forward answer would be: plural, more than one. You were introduced to this as “grammatical meaning.” Lexical words have lexical meaning, function words and inflectional affixes have grammatical meaning.

Matters still seem simple enough until we enter more complicated territory in English. Consider the -ed suffix like in the verb helped. Most people would be quick to call that the “past tense” and -ed is the past tense ending. What is complicating things now is the fact that -ed is also used in present tenses, or passives.

  1. Present perfect: I have watched the show already.
  2. Past perfect: I’d never laughed so hard in my life before that.
  3. Passive: I’m being observed right at this moment.

First, we could assume that there are, in fact, multiple -ed endings. In irregular verbs, there is another form, the past participle: write, wrote, written. It would only make sense to assume that there is a -ed past form and a -ed past participle form. That means we have a kind of homonymy here. One form that has two different meanings. So what is this meaning? Is it “past?” Does the event denoted by the verb happen in the past relative to the time of utterance?

Consider these examples:

  1. Backshifting: Trump has claimed there was evidence for fraud.
  2. Unreal Conditional: If I met him tomorrow, I would slap him with a fish.
  3. Optative: I wish people believed in science.

In neither of these examples does the event occur in the past. Therefore, we have to assume a more abstract function of the past tense suffix -ed that allows for all these use cases. More importantly, the surrounding forms, auxiliary verbs (passive be, perfect have), conjunctions (conditional if), and even certain classes of verbs (reporting verbs, such as claim). In fact, a linguistic form is not restricted to a word or morpheme, but may also include larger structures or even abstract schematic structures. For example, the grammatical function “present perfect” is fulfilled by a wealth of different forms, with optional slots, different possible word orders, etc.

The popular opinion in linguistic theory, especially in Usage-Based Linguistics, has shifted more and more towards seeing meaning and function as two sides of the same coin. Function determines meaning and meaning is in the end a function.

Here are some broader questions that we will encounter during this class:

  1. Why do we have multiple functions that seem to be encoded in the same form? (homonymy)
  2. Why do we have multiple forms that seem to do the same thing? (synonymy)
  3. Is a morpheme even a part of our cognitive reality or can we find better units of description? Are there better models for certain areas of grammar?