Morphology: Crash Course Linguistics #2

Summary

In this Crash Course Linguistics episode, Taylor delves into the complex nature of what constitutes a 'word'. The script explores the difference between 'big' and 'small' meanings of words, introducing 'lexemes' for unpredictable combinations of form and meaning, and 'morphemes' for the smallest units. It discusses free and bound morphemes, affixes, and the intricacies of compound words and morphology across languages. The episode highlights the challenges linguists face in defining 'words' and the importance of morphemes in understanding language patterns and structures.

Takeaways

• 📝 The script defines a 'word' in two ways: a simple definition for word count and a more complex linguistic definition.
• 📚 Linguists differentiate between 'big' and 'small' meanings of 'word', with 'lexemes' or 'lexical items' referring to the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning.
• 🔍 The unpredictable meaning of phrases like 'rabbit hole' distinguishes them as lexemes, unlike 'deep hole', which is predictable and not a lexeme.
• 🧩 The script introduces 'morphemes' as the smallest units of language, which are studied in morphology, the branch of linguistics concerned with the structure and composition of words.
• 🌐 Morphemes help identify patterns across languages, showing similarities and differences in the way information is conveyed, not just word count.
• 🔑 Free morphemes can stand alone, like 'rabbit' or 'hole', while bound morphemes, like the plural '-s', cannot and are attached to other morphemes.
• 🔄 Compounds are formed by combining two or more free morphemes, which can be written in various ways, including with spaces or hyphens.
• 🌿 The script uses a plant metaphor to explain how morphemes fit together, with roots and affixes creating stems that can support further morphemes.
• 🔄 Words can have multiple affixes, which can lead to ambiguity in meaning, depending on the structure of the word.
• 🔍 The script discusses bound roots, infixes, and circumfixes as additional types of morphemes that can be part of word formation.
• 🔄 Fusional morphology is highlighted as a complex aspect of word formation where one affix can carry multiple pieces of information.
• 🔄 Suppletion is identified as a process where a word is completely replaced rather than modified by an affix, an irregularity in word formation.
• 🤔 The script concludes that linguists often use the term 'morpheme' for precision, acknowledging the complexity and variability in defining what constitutes a 'word'.

Q & A

What is the initial definition of a 'word' provided in the script?

The initial definition of a 'word' is a thing with spaces around it, as per the word count feature in a document.

Why is the initial definition of a 'word' not sufficient for linguists?

The initial definition is not sufficient for linguists because it doesn't account for the complex nature of what 'counts' as a word, such as the varying use of spaces in words like 'doghouse' and 'rabbit hole'.

What is a lexeme or lexical item according to the script?

A lexeme or lexical item is the largest unpredictable combination of form and meaning, defined by dictionary-makers as a single entry or unit.

How does the script distinguish between 'rabbit hole' and 'deep hole' in terms of lexemes?

'Rabbit hole' is considered a lexeme because its meaning is unpredictable from its parts, whereas 'deep hole' is not, as its meaning is predictable from the definitions of 'deep' and 'hole'.

What is a morpheme and what does it represent?

A morpheme is the smallest unpredictable combination of form and meaning. It is a unit in linguistics, and the study of morphemes is called morphology.

Why is dividing language into morphemes helpful?

Dividing language into morphemes helps to identify patterns across languages, such as how a separate word in one language might be part of a word in another.

What is the difference between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme?

A free morpheme can stand by itself and have meaning, like 'rabbit' or 'hole'. A bound morpheme cannot stand by itself and is part of a word, like the '-s' in 'rabbits'.

How does the script describe the formation of a compound?

A compound is formed when two or more free morphemes are combined together, which can be written with a space, a hyphen, or joined together without any separator.

What is the significance of recognizing compounds in different languages?

Recognizing compounds allows us to see similarities between languages that might have been missed, such as the use of long compound nouns in English and German.

What is the role of affixes in the formation of words according to the script?

Affixes are morphemes that are attached to a root to form a stem for additional morphemes. They can be prefixes, suffixes, infixes, or circumfixes, and they contribute to the word's meaning.

What is the concept of fusional morphology mentioned in the script?

Fusional morphology refers to the situation where one affix can hold more than one piece of information, making it difficult to distinguish how each morpheme relates to a specific part of the meaning.

How does the script explain the process of suppletion in language?

Suppletion is a process where a language completely replaces a word rather than adding a morpheme. It is used with a handful of common words and is not a systematic process.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Defining 'Word' in Linguistics

The script introduces the topic of linguistics by discussing the definition of a 'word'. Taylor, the host, challenges the simple notion of a word being a string of characters separated by spaces, using examples like 'doghouse' and 'rabbit hole' to illustrate the complexity. The script then delves into the linguist's perspective, distinguishing between the 'big' and 'small' meanings of a word. The 'big' meaning relates to lexemes or lexical items found in dictionaries, which are unpredictable in meaning when broken down into parts. In contrast, the 'small' meaning examines morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, and how they combine to form words, a study known as morphology. The importance of recognizing morphemes is highlighted for understanding language patterns across different languages.

05:04

🌱 Morphemes and Their Relationships

This paragraph explores the concept of morphemes in more depth, explaining the difference between free morphemes, which can stand alone (e.g., 'rabbit', 'hole'), and bound morphemes, which cannot (e.g., the plural '-s'). It discusses how morphemes combine to form compounds and the significance of recognizing these in different languages. The paragraph also introduces the idea of affixes, which are morphemes that attach to a root to form new words, and provides examples of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. It further explains how the meaning of a word can change with the addition of multiple affixes, and how languages can fuse morphemes together, making it difficult to separate their individual contributions to meaning. The paragraph concludes with a look at other ways languages build meaning in words, such as vowel changes and the complete replacement of words in certain cases, known as suppletion.

10:05

🎬 Crash Course Linguistics and PBS Promotion

The final paragraph steps away from the linguistic discussion to acknowledge the production of the series, Crash Course Linguistics, by Complexly & PBS. It then promotes a new PBS show, Self-Evident, which aims to explore the resilience of people during challenging times, hosted by a historian and a therapist. The paragraph invites viewers to subscribe to PBS Voices for more content from Self-Evident and other shows, playfully suggesting they mention Crash Course as the referral source.

Keywords

💡Word

The term 'word' is central to the video's exploration of linguistics. It is defined in a broad and narrow sense. In the broad sense, a 'word' is an entry in a dictionary, a lexeme or lexical item, which represents the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning. For instance, 'rabbit hole' is a word because its meaning cannot be deduced from 'rabbit' and 'hole' separately. In the narrow sense, a 'word' can also refer to morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, which are the focus of morphology.

💡Lexeme

A 'lexeme' is a unit of meaning in a language's lexicon, or dictionary. It represents a word or a group of words that are considered to have the same underlying meaning. For example, the script mentions that 'rabbit hole' is a lexeme because it has a specific meaning that isn't simply the sum of 'rabbit' and 'hole'.

💡Morpheme

A 'morpheme' is the smallest meaningful unit in a language, which can be a word or a part of a word. Morphemes are the building blocks of words, and they can be free-standing, like 'rabbit', or bound, like the plural suffix '-s' in 'rabbits'. The study of morphemes is known as morphology, which is a central theme in the video.

💡Morphology

Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the formation and structure of words. It looks at how morphemes combine to create words and how words can be broken down into their constituent morphemes. The video discusses various aspects of morphology, including free and bound morphemes, roots, affixes, and different types of word formation.

💡Compound

A 'compound' is a type of word formation where two or more free morphemes are combined to create a new word. In the script, examples like 'doghouse' and 'rabbit hole fence sign' are given to illustrate compounds. These words are formed by joining other words or word elements together, often without spaces or hyphens.

💡Root

The 'root' is the most central part of a word, often a free morpheme, from which other morphemes can be attached to form new words. For example, 'rabbit' in 'rabbits' is the root to which the suffix '-s' is added to indicate plurality.

💡Affix

An 'affix' is a morpheme that is attached to a root to form a new word or word form. Affixes can be prefixes, which come before the root, or suffixes, which come after. The script mentions 'un-' as a prefix in 'untwistable' and '-s' as a suffix in 'rabbits'.

💡Prefix

A 'prefix' is an affix that is added to the beginning of a root to create a new word with a different meaning. The script uses 'un-' in 'untwistable' as an example of a prefix that can change the meaning of the root word.

💡Suffix

A 'suffix' is an affix that is attached to the end of a root or stem to form a new word or word form. In the video, '-s' in 'rabbits' is a suffix that indicates plurality, and '-able' in 'untwistable' is another suffix that conveys the ability to be done something.

💡Infix

An 'infix' is a morpheme that is inserted within a word, which is not common in English but is mentioned in the script as occurring primarily with swear words or pseudo-swears, like 'fan-hecking-tastic'.

💡Circumfix

A 'circumfix' is a type of affix that is attached at both the beginning and end of a word to change its meaning. The script explains that English does not commonly use circumfixes, but Malay has eight different circumfixes that alter the meaning of a word when both parts are added.

💡Fusional Morphology

Fusional morphology refers to a type of word structure where a single affix can carry multiple pieces of grammatical information. The script uses the French '-al' suffix as an example, which indicates both masculinity and singularity, and has fused what were once two separate suffixes.

💡Suppletion

Suppletion is a process in which a word is completely replaced by another word, rather than having an affix added, to express a grammatical relation such as tense or case. The video gives the example of the English verb 'go', which becomes 'went' in the past tense, instead of following the regular '-ed' pattern.

Highlights

A word is defined as a thing with spaces around it according to a document's word count feature, but this isn't a comprehensive definition for linguistics.

The distinction between 'doghouse' and 'rabbit hole' in terms of space usage illustrates the complexity of defining what counts as a word.

The existence of words like 'hangry' shows that dictionary inclusion isn't the sole criterion for word status.

Linguists differentiate between the 'big' and 'small' meanings of 'word', relating to dictionary entries and morphemes.

Lexemes or lexical items are defined as the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning in a lexicon.

Morphemes are the smallest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning, central to the study of morphology.

Compounds are formed by combining free morphemes, which can be written in various ways, including spaces or hyphens.

American Sign Language demonstrates compounds with signs composed of elements from other signs.

The concept of 'Deutschewörterübersetzungsproblem' or 'Word in German translation problem' highlights similarities in compound noun formation between English and German.

Bound morphemes, like '-s' in 'rabbits', are morphemes that cannot stand by themselves but alter the word's meaning.

The plant metaphor is used to explain how morphemes fit together, with roots and affixes forming stems.

Words with multiple affixes can have ambiguous meanings based on how the morphemes are combined.

Roots can be both free and bound morphemes, contributing to the complexity of word formation.

Infixes, circumfixes, and other affix types contribute to the diversity of word formation in different languages.

Fusional morphology is characterized by the difficulty in separating the specific meanings of individual morphemes within a word.

Suppletion is a process where a completely different word is used for grammatical forms, rather than following regular morphological patterns.

Linguists often use the term 'morpheme' for precision, reserving 'word' for less technical discussions.

The episode concludes by emphasizing the flexibility and exceptions in defining 'word', and the practicality of using 'morpheme' for detailed linguistic analysis.

Transcripts

Hi, I'm Taylor and welcome to Crash Course Linguistics!

According to the word count feature in a document, a word is a thing with spaces around it.

That’s a useful definition if we're just trying to figure out how long an essay should be, but it's not a very good guide to defining what “counts” as a word.

For example, "doghouse" is generally written without a space, while "rabbit hole" is written with one.

But they feel like they should both be words.

After all, sometimes people write "dog house" with the space, and we could totally start writing "rabbit-hole" or even "rabbithole" completely smushed together.

Also, just because a word like “hangry” isn’t in your dictionary doesn’t mean it’s not a word, or that I’m not feeling it right now.

Man, I should’ve eaten a snack before this shoot.

Anyway, today, we’re going to talk about how a linguist would answer the question,

“What even is a word?”

[THEME MUSIC]

To a linguist, the word "word" has a big meaning and a small meaning.

The big meaning of "word" is what we expect when we're looking something up in a dictionary.

We'd expect to find a dictionary entry for "rabbit hole" because this phrase has a meaning that we can't figure out from the definitions of its individual parts.

After looking up “rabbit” and “hole,” we wouldn't guess that “rabbit hole” means a place where a rabbit lives, or a complicated or absorbing situation

like finding yourself down a Wikipedia rabbit hole at 2am after Googling what languages are spoken on the International Space Station.

Its meaning is relatively unpredictable from its parts.

Dictionary-makers define one entry or unit as the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning.

They call each of these units lexemes or lexical items, because they're the parts of a lexicon, which is another word for dictionary.

In contrast, we wouldn't expect to find a dictionary entry for "deep hole" because if we look up “deep” and “hole,” we can figure out the meaning of the two combined.

It's predictable.

So "deep" and "hole" are both lexemes, while “deep hole” is not.

When we think about a phrase like "falling down rabbit holes", this is where the small meaning of “word” comes in.

Here, we can break the sentence into parts: fall, -ing, down, rabbit, hole, and -s — even though we don't say "ing" or "-s" by themselves, they have distinct meanings.

For example, -s indicates that there's more than one rabbit hole, and we can predict this from the meaning of "rabbit hole" and "-s" together.

But we can't separate "rabbit" into rabb and it, even though "it" is a word, because “rabb” doesn’t mean anything on its own.

"Rabb" and "it" don't each have their own meanings that they're contributing to "rabbit"

The meaning of "rabbit" is unpredictable.

Rabbit and -s are examples of the smallest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning.

Linguists call these units morphemes, and the study of them is morphology.

That's morph as in “metamorphosis” or “Animorphs.”

It’s from a Greek word meaning shape or form, because morphemes can stick to each other to change the shape of a word.

One reason it’s helpful to divide language into morphemes is because it helps us see patterns across languages.

A separate word in one language might be a part of a word in another language.

For example, the phrase “I washed my feet” is a sentence with several words in Mandarin.

The same idea is a single word with many morphemes in Murrinhpatha and lots of other Australian languages.

If we just think of words, rather than the morphemes that build words, we miss this and a lot of other interesting potential patterns.

If we look at morphemes instead, we can see differences and similarities between languages in the information they convey, not just the number of words they use!

There are a couple different kinds of relationships that morphemes can have with each other.

When we have a morpheme that can stand by itself, that's a free morpheme, like "rabbit" or "hole."

When we have two or more free morphemes combined together, that's a compound, whether it's written with a space, a hyphen,

or all joined together, such as doghouse, rabbit hole or even rabbit hole fence sign.

In American Sign Language, there are signs like “teacher” and “student” that are compounds, composed of “teach” and “learn” plus a variant of the sign “person”.

Recognizing compounds allows us to see similarities between languages that we might have missed.

In other languages, nouns might be linked by other words, like “the sign of the fence of the hole of the rabbit,”

but English and German just put them all together into long compound nouns.

The only difference is that English keeps spaces when writing long strings of nouns, while German doesn't write the spaces.

So while it looks like English and German have very different ways of creating words, they actually often use the same compound nouns!

Perhaps we could call this the Deutschewörterübersetzungsproblem or “Word in German translation problem”.

Meanwhile, when we have a morpheme that can’t stand by itself, like the “-s” in “rabbits, that’s a bound morpheme.

Let's head over to the Thought Bubble to see more about how morphemes fit together.

We can visualize morphemes as fitting together like the parts of a plant.

In this metaphor, the most central part of a word is the root, and the other morphemes that are stuck (or fixed) onto it are affixes.

So “rabbits” is made from the root “rabbit” and the affix “-s.”

Since the “-s” affix in “rabbits” comes after the root, we call it a suffix.

If a word has an affix stuck on before the root, it’s called a prefix.

To extend our plant metaphor, when we add a morpheme to a root, this new unit becomes the stem for the next morpheme.

And here’s where it gets interesting:

We can also have a word with several affixes at once, like untwistable, which has the prefix "un-," the root "twist," and the suffix "-able."

It sounds simple enough, but this word's meaning depends on whether "untwist" is a stem for "-able" or whether "twistable" is a stem for "un-."

It could mean: able to be untwisted.

That's untwist plus able.

Or, it could mean: not able to be twisted.

That's un plus twistable.

Not every word with multiple affixes has more than one meaning, though.

It all depends on how the word builds.

At each stage, the stem has to work as a word by itself.

So untwistable is ambiguous because "untwist" is a word but "twistable" is also a word.

In contrast, with a word like "un-rabbit-y", rabbit-y is a word , but "un-rabbit"?

That's not a word, so un-rabbit-y only has one meaning.

Rabbit, rabbity, unrabbity, unrabbitiness…

This can go all the way up to lots and lots of affixes.

That was the most thought-bubble-y of Thought Bubbles!

The root is often a free morpheme, like rabbit.

But the root isn't always free -- think of words like: receive, deceive, perceive, and conceive.

You can receive.

And you can deceive.

But can you just...ceive?

It's the same part in all these words, but it doesn't have its own independent meaning.

It's a bound morpheme, just like -s, but it's also the root.

It’s one of a handful of examples of bound roots in English.

And in addition to prefixes and suffixes, there are some other kinds of affixes that can be attached to a root.

Affixes can sometimes go inside a word.

This is called an infix, and in English, it primarily happens with swear words or pseudo-swears:

fan-hecking-tastic.

And for the completionists out there, there’s also circumfixes, which have information attached to both the beginning and end of a word.

English doesn't really do circumfixes, but Malay has eight different ones.

The meaning of the word changes only with the addition of both parts of the circumfix.

So far, morphology is looking very neat and defined — you can make words by stacking morphemes on roots to make longer stems.

But morphology isn’t always neat little packages of affixes.

Sometimes one affix can hold more than one piece of information.

This is known as fusional morphology, because it’s hard to tease out how each morpheme relates to a specific part of the meaning.

It’s all fused together.

For example, as languages change over time, they often smush smaller words together, making free morphemes into bound morphemes.

The English words "not" "none" "never" and "nothing" all contained "ne", the Old English word for "not".

And "not" itself gets smushed together in Modern English into words like "didn't" or "dunno".

In French, when a word ends in -al, like animal or journal, the suffix -al indicates that it’s masculine and that it’s singular.

You may not be familiar with the idea of words being masculine, but don't worry!

For now, just focus on how this suffix tells us two things about the word.

To make it plural, you need to change the whole ending into -aux like "animaux" or "journaux" to indicate both of these things.

There were once two suffixes, one for masculine and one for plural — which we can still kind of see in the spelling.

But -aux is now simply pronounced “o” and indicates both.

To further broaden our idea of morphology, we should mention, there are ways of building meaning in words that go beyond adding affixes all in a single row.

For example, some words in English change their vowels instead of adding an affix, such as foot and feet or sing, sang and sung.

In Arabic, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages, the root of a word is just the consonants, and then vowels are added in different configurations to create different related words.

For example, this Arabic root means things having to do with books or writing, and from it we get "kitaab" meaning "book", "kutub" meaning "books",

"kaatib" meaning "writer", "maktab," meaning “office" and more.

In American Sign Language, nouns and their related verbs sometimes have the same handshape and location, but different movement.

For example: “chair” and “sit”

And occasionally, a language will change the word completely, rather than adding a morpheme.

Think about the English verb ‘go’, which is ‘went’ in the past tense, rather than "goed", which would follow the regular patterns of English morphology.

This process of completely replacing a word is called suppletion, and languages mostly use it with a handful of common words rather than as a systematic process.

Thank goodness for that!

If you thought conjugating verbs with different suffixes was hard - imagine having to learn a completely different word each time!

So, to get back to this tricky question of what a word is...

linguists don't really know, and that's actually fine.

There are so many edge cases and exceptions about the word "word" that when linguists need to be really precise, we use completely different terminology instead

We talk about morphemes.

But when we're not zoomed in quite so closely, it's still totally okay to talk in terms of words

Like when we're talking about combining words into longer phrases and sentences, like in our next video!

See you next time!

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, which is produced by Complexly & PBS.

So 2020 has been... bad.

PBS has a new show called Self-Evident that explores how we've been persevering in this supremely weird year.

It's hosted by historian Danielle Bainbridge from Origin of Everything and therapist Ali Mattu, who you might know from The Psych Show.

Because who better than a historian and a therapist to help guide us through ALL of this.

Self-Evident is part of PBS American Portrait, a massive storytelling project involving thousands of people around the country.

Subscribe to PBS Voices for Self-Evident and other great shows, and tell them Crash Course sent you.