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Meaning and Relevance of Morphological Parsing to Lexical Studies
Parsing, as the term implies, simply means breaking up words into their component parts. Morphological parsing is useful to the study of lexis in language for a number of reasons such as:
1. It helps us know in what order phonemes can come to make meaningful words in languages. For instance, the bound morpheme pre, base on meaning, can only appear before a word with which it functions and not after it e.g. pre-election, predetermine, etc. The same applies to ante (also meaning ‘before’) as in ante-natal, etc.
2. It helps reveal the finest meanings of words in language. For instance, with the aid of our understanding of the function of pre, we may talk about pre-election campaign not pre-election vote.
3. It explains the patterns of combination of morphemes that can produce words in the language. For instance, the combination of the bound morpheme dis-, the free morpheme trust and the bound morpheme –ed produce the lexis distrusted.
4. It provides ways for writing the dictionary. Lexicographers employ the logical arrangement of morphemes to produce lexical entries for dictionaries.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Define morphological parsing and clearly state how it is relevant to lexical studies.
Morphology ‘in the Lexicon’
According to one widely accepted view (Aronoff 1976, 1982), the morphology of a language, because it is part of grammar and trades in structural matters, deals primarily with the internal structure of the potential complex words of a language. These words may not all exist, but they all conform to the morphological structure of the language. By contrast, the lexicon of a language is a list of existing items in the language, those that a speaker has to know because they are arbitrary signs: unpredictable in some way. Most of the items on this list are words, though the lexicon also contains larger units like idioms, and may also be smaller units like affixes. On this view, in which the regular morphology and the irregular lexicon are separate entities, one might imagine the two having very little to do with one another, since the morphology deals only with potential words and the lexicon only with.
The First Justification
The first justification is that they serve the same role in a language: both provide words. This overlap has even led some linguists to say that morphology is “in the lexicon” (Jensen and Strong-Jensen 1984), although in doing so, these linguists are using the term lexicon in a much broader and different sense, to mean the source of all words, actual and potential, rather than in the narrow sense of a list of unpredictable items that we have inherited from traditional grammar and from Bloomfield (Bloomfield 1933, Zwicky 1989, Aronoff 1994).
The Second Justification
The second reason is that morphology and the lexicon are interdependent. Most centrally, the morphology, which forms words from words, finds the words that it operates on (its bases) in the lexicon. I will explore each of these interactions in a separate section.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Discuss the relevance or irrelevance of morphology to lexicon, justifying your position.
Morphology versus the Lexicon
Aronoff and Anshen (2001:238) illustrates the ‘rivalry’ between morphology and the lexicon like any two entities that share a task, which do not always do so happily. The rivalry of morphology and the lexicon, they say, is not empty, but plays a central role in the larger system of the language. In order to understand its nature, they consider a single speaker/hearer. Speaking of the lexicon from this perspective, they speak of the individual’s mental lexicon, the list of irregular items that the speaker/hearer carries around in his/her head. They define the difference between existing words and potential words in terms of this mental lexicon and establish that any word that is stored in a single speaker/hearer mental lexicon or list of irregular items is an existing word, and that nothing else is. In particular, a word that meets all the criteria for being a word of the language but that is not in an individual’s mental lexicon does not exist for that person, though it may exist for another speaker/hearer. The unlisted word is a potential word, and morphologically well-formed complex potential words are provided by the morphology not by the lexicon. Thus, the conventional idea that the existing words of a language – English for example – comprise all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary or some other comprehensive dictionary does not apply in this model of the lexicon and the morphology. The difference between which words exist and which are potential is defined solely in terms of the individual’s lexicon and morphology.
Most importantly for these purposes, even if an ideal speaker/hearer has spoken or heard (or read) a particular word before, if that word has not been stored in that person’s mental lexicon for some reason, then the word is still a potential word rather than an existing word as far as the mental lexicon is concerned. Which words are stored? In the simplest case, a word will be stored because it contains only one morpheme. Take the word bamboozle. It has no morphological structure, so nothing to predict its meaning. Someone who hears this word, even in a context in which its sense is clear, must enter into memory in order to use it again, so it will enter the hearer’s mental lexicon. Similarly, a morphologically complex word must be placed in the lexicon if a piece of it is unknown to the hearer. An example of this type is hornswoogle, which is almost synonymous with bamboozle. One of its components, horn, is recognizable, but the other one, swoogle, is not, so that, again, even if we can deduce its sense from the context in which we hear it. Yet again, all the components of a word may be familiar; its sense may not be deducible from them. Here too we must put the word in our lexicon. An example of this phenomenon is yet a third synonym, hoodwink. Both hood and wink are familiar words, but the sense of the entire word hoodwink has little to do with the sense of its parts, so even here our ideal speaker/hearer must resort to lexical storage in order to have a hope of reusing the word. So if a word is unpredictable, it must be stored in the lexicon, why does it not also have a regular plural, which comes from the morphology? In the case at hand, how does a speaker know not to say womans instead of women? Or why doesn’t the speaker sometimes say one and sometimes the other? Something must be preventing the morphology from producing a regular plural just in case an irregular plural for the same word exists in the lexicon. The same is true of irregular past tenses of verbs.
A person who knows that the past tense of go is went (a fact that must be stored in the lexicon) will not say goed, although a young child or someone in the early stages of learning English as a second language might say goed, because the child or learner hasn’t yet learned the form went. The lexicon and the morphology seem to interact in assuring that only one form will be used, but how? Does the speaker/hearer sometimes check the lexicon to see if a word is there, and only resort to the morphology if there is none?
A clue to the right answer to this question has been known for centuries: languages tend to avoid synonyms (though not always, as bamboozle, hornswoogle, and hoodwink reveal). In most cases, the speaker will use a word from his/her lexicon (women/went) rather than resort to the morphology to produce a new word with the same meaning. This phenomenon, “the nonoccurrence of one form due to the simple existence of another” (Aronoff 1976:43), is called blocking, and its effects can be seen not only in inflection but also in derivation, where a word like *furiousity (formed from furious) will be blocked by fury, which already exists in a speaker’s lexicon. We can tell that blocking is at work in rendering *furiousity unacceptable because other words of the same pattern are perfectly acceptable, when there is no already existing word to block them. Curiosity, on the other hand, which is structurally analogous to *furiousity, is perfectly acceptable because there is no word *cury to block it.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
How does blocking operate in morphological processes?
CONCLUSION
The relevance of lexical studies to the understanding of English language cannot be overemphasized, just as you have learned in this unit. The relationship between morphology and the lexicon, however, has also been discussed with an outcome that suggests a stringent cordiality for both aspects of studies.
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