Word structure: morphology.

 

Most languages have both simple words, such as teach, and complex words, such as teach+er. Knowing English entails understanding the internal structure of its complex words, as well as the ability to create and understand new complex words that exploit those same kinds of internal structures. The study of the internal structure of words is called morphology. For example, given a new verb scaff, as in The purpose of this machine is to scaff computers against viruses, we can also create or analyze the internal structure of the word scaffer and can deduce something about its meaning in the sentence, The company purchased several expensive scaffers last year. We would also immediately judge the nonce word *er+scaff to be impossible in English. Speakers of English know the form and function of the meaningful word component-er, and they know that it is a suffix rather than a prefix. Although users of a language are usually not conscious of their linguistic knowledge, their use of language clearly reveals the existence of this underlying system. Another type of complex word formation can be thought of as relating words to each other within a sentence. For example, the word walk has two different suffixes in the following sentences, -s, and -ed. The -s in sentence (10a) is an agreement marker; it shows that the subject of the sentence, Hadar, is third person singular (“he” or “she”). The -ed in sentence (10b) is a tense marker, showing that the event described by the sentence took place in the past.

The existence of complexity of structure within words is a typical property of spoken language, though many different kinds of word formation can be found in The languages of the world. Most languages have complex words, and many languages have far more complex morphology than English has. What about sign languages? While one might expect any communication system to have syntax, one might not necessarily expect sign languages to have internal structure to their words. Rather, one might expect, as naive early descriptions of sign language used to claim, that signs are holistic gestures, each one representing a unitary concept. Concomitant with this view is the belief that the vocabulary of sign languages is purely iconic, that there is a one-to-one relationship between the form of a word or concept and its meaning. The ASL sign for AIRPLANE looks something like an airplane; the sign for GIVE looks something like the act of handing something to someone. If these sign words are iconic wholes, then adding grammatical complexity to them in a systematic way might seem counterintuitive. Yet sign languages do have a great deal of morphological complexity. Such complexity is one of many sources of evidence that systematic grammatical structuring strongly dominates the presumably iconic origins of these languages. We will describe two kinds of word complexity here: verb agreement and verbs of motion and location. We begin with verb agreement. In many spoken languages, verbs have some kind of marking on them that gives information about their subjects, objects, or other nouns directly related to them in the sentence. Example (10a) above shows the only agreement marker that English has on main verbs, the -s which indicates third person and singular in the present tense. Other languages have far richer agreement systems. 

For example, Swahili has both subject and object agreement markers that indicate person (“I,” “you,” “s/he”), gender (“he” or “she”), and number (singular or plural):

All sign languages investigated so far show a comparable kind of verb agreement. Consider for example the Israeli Sign Language verb LOOK-AT, shown in figure 22.5. To say “I look at you,” the motion of the sign is from a point near the signer toward the addressee. To say “you look at me,” the beginning and endpoints of the sign are just the opposite, beginning at a point near the addressee, and ending near the signer. The beginning and endpoints of the sign are markers for the subject and object of the verb it represents. To say, “I look at you (plural),” the hand moves in a horizontal arc in front of the signer. In the first example, “I look at you,” the first position of the hand corresponds to the prefix a in the Swahili example in (11) above: it marks agreement with the person of the verb’s subject – third person (“he”) in the Swahili example, and first person (“I”) in the ISL example. The second position of the hand corresponds to the morpheme ku in the same Swahili example, agreeing with the person of the object of the verb – second person (“you”) in Swahili, and second person also in ISL. The beginning and endpoints of the second example in figure 22.5 similarly mark agreement with subject and object – here, “you” and “me.” To agree with the second person plural – “I look at you (plural)” – the shape of the movement is altered. This kind of phenomenon can be described as subject-object agreement; in particular, sign language verbs agree for person and number of their subject and object. In this way, the verb agreement found in sign languages is similar to that in many spoken languages. A characteristic of verb agreement systems in sign languages is that different categories of verbs participate in this system in different ways. For example, in addition to the subject-object agreement described earlier, some verbs, commonly called backwards verbs, have the opposite agreement pattern of the one shown above. In these verbs, the movement of the hand is from the object to the subject, instead of the usual direction from subject to object. This class includes verbs such as INVITE, TAKE, COPY, ADOPT, essentially the same list in ASL and ISL, and possibly in all sign languages. Other verbs agree with points in space denoting specific locations, rather than with the verb’s subject and object. Still others do not agree at all. We will have more to say about the peculiarities of sign language agreement and possible implications for languagetheory, A more complex type of morphology in sign languages is found in verbs of motion and location, first described by T. Supalla (e.g. 1986). In these constructions, handshapes that stand for classes of nouns combine with types of movements and with locations in space. As such, these complex forms differ from the morphologically simple signs of the language exemplified in the phonology subsection above. As an aid to interpreting these forms, which have no analog in English, let us consider some words in the native American language, Navaho. This language incorporates into the stems of verbs of motion and location the shape and dimensionality of associated objects, as shown in the following examples. The hyphens show that what are separate words in English are not independent words in these other languages. Rather they are morphemes, like -er in English, which combine with words or parts of words to form a new, complex word.

In these constructions, beeso means “money” the prefix si- is a perfective marker, and the verb stems ?a, ltsooz, and nil incorporate the shape and dimensionality of the entity involved. ASL (and other sign languages) has a comparable – if potentially more complex – system of verbs of motion and location. As in Navaho, each of the meaningful ASL morphemes is taken from a finite list that is determined by the lexicon and grammar of the language. In ASL, there is a list of noun “classifiers,” that represent semantic classes such as “small animals,” “humans,” or “vehicles.” Each of these classifiers is represented by a different handshape. Another type of classifier, also represented by different handshapes, specifies the size and shape of an object, such as “cylindrical objects,” “flat objects,” or “small round objects.” These handshapes may combine, in compliance with constraints of the grammar, with one of a short list of motion morphemes (e.g., “straight,” “pivot”), location morphemes, and manner of movement morphemes, each with a meaning of its own.

Figure 22.6 exemplifies just the first of these. The shape of the hand is the morpheme meaning “small round object.” The short, downward motion means “be located,” and the location refers to a particular reference point in the discourse.

It is very important to note that these forms are linguistic entities, i.e., morphologically complex words. They are neither pantomime nor otherwise strictly analogic to real world things and activities. Furthermore, this type of morphology, which incorporates nouns, verbs, and other lexical categories into single words, is not uncommon in the world’s spoken languages. As we have seen, there are even spoken languages such as Navaho that incorporate into verbs the shape and dimensionality of associated nouns, as sign languages do. Constructions of this sort in ASL can become far more complex than the example in figure 22.6. For example, the two hands may each represent an independent classifier to create such forms as SMALL-ROUND-OBJECTLYING-ON-FLAT-OBJECT (“A coin is lying on the table”). Manner of movement morphemes can add still more complexity, forming, for example, expressions meaning roughly, SMALL-ROUND-OBJECT-TRAVERSES-ARC-TOON-FLAT-OBJECT – “A coin flew in an arc shaped path, landing on the table.” Such structures have the form of single words, though extremely complex ones. All the ordinary words that make up the vocabulary of sign languages, words such as DECIDE and PERSON in figure 22.2 in the previous subsection, are thus different from the verbs of motion and location described here. To understand this, compare DECIDE, repeated in figure 22.7a. with “A coin is lying there,” repeated in 22.7b. These two words are formationally very similar (except that DECIDE is two-handed), yet they are very different in their composition. Only 22.7b SMALL-ROUND-SHAPE-BE-LOCATED (“A coin is lying there”) is decomposable: handshapes, locations, and movements each have meanings,

The properties we have described at each level of grammatical structure –Syntax, Phonology, and morphology – provide strong evidence that certain basic characteristics of language are indeed universal, belonging to language in either of the two natural modalities available to humans.