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The Field of Morphology
Indeed, morphology as a field lies between grammar and lexis, with grammar itself being the theoretical analytical explanation for morphological and grammatical synthesis. According to the most usual division of subjects explicated in Ajulo (1994:27), the field of morphology in general is divided into two major subfields: one is concerned with processes of inflection (for example, with the role of the English nominal endings –s, –es plural marking), and the other with what we usually refer to as processes of word-formation. This latter subfield, of which one is concerned with process of derivation (for example, the derivation of the noun ‘national’ from ‘nation’, or the adjective ‘advisory’ from the verb ‘advise’), and the other with processes of composition or compounding (for example, the formation of the compounds blackstar, sunbeam from the simple black, star, sun, beam respectively. These processes combined explain the formation of lexemes (the ‘lexical word’).
Early Distinction of Syntax and Morphology
Positive linguistic wars have so far been fought on the need to explain the mode of interaction between syntax and word formation. As far back as 1960s and early 1970s, disagreement involving the nature of the Word Formation (WF) component and the lexicon provided the background for the emergence of two radically different trends within generative grammar: Generative Semantics and Lexicalism. The contention lies in the appropriate constraining of the grammar, and whether an independent, list-like lexicon is more or less costly than an extremely powerful syntax in which transformations could derive varying syntactic and morphological structures from unique semantic representations. This issue reemerged in the mid-1980s, albeit in a slightly different guise. The corpus of work done during that decade has resulted in important structural insights into the nature of word formation, thus strengthening the claim that morphology is an autonomous module, in consonance with the phonological and the syntactic modules, and that it should be understood in these terms. Several other works were later done during that same decade which resulted in the emergence of syntactic systems capable of handling word-formation operations in a more restricted way, therefore avoiding many of the pitfalls encountered by earlier, less constrained such work.
Chomsky (1957:32) viewed syntax as the grammatical sequences of morphemes of a language. Chomsky’s morpheme-based theory of syntax has come to adopt, in its most recent development, a rather more traditional view of the complementarity of syntax and inflection than it did in its earlier versions. In particular, it now treats derivational morphology as something which is not handled by the central syntactic component of the grammar, but as relating to the structure of the vocabulary (or lexicon). In general, morphology was not held to be a separate field of study. Lees (1960/1963) is a key document of the approach that attempts to explain word-formation processes in terms of syntactic transformations. For example, a compound such as manservant was seen to incorporate the sentence The servant is a man; this sentence by transformation generates the compound. Such a description is naturally highly problematic, especially when confronted with the idiosyncrasies of derived and compound words. Perhaps, this may have prompted Lyons (2005:100) to submit that it is ‘inflection’, not ‘morphology’ that opposes ‘syntax’ in traditional grammar.
Modern Distinction of Syntax and Morphology
Early transformational grammarians continued the structuralist tradition of blurring the morphology/syntax division. Highlighting the original but relegated role of syntax in morphology, Adejare and Adejare (2006:16) refers to syntax as a description of word-order in which grammatical and lexical (morphological) units are treated together as in Transformational model. The modern distinction of syntax and morphology, according to which syntax deals with the distribution of words (i.e. word-forms) and morphology with their internal grammatical structure is, at first sight, very similar to the traditional distinction of syntax and inflection. But it differs from it in two respects: (a) morphology includes not only inflection, but also derivation; (b) it handles both inflection and derivation by means of roles operating upon the same basic units – morphemes (Lyons ibid:103). For example, as the derivation form teacher is made up of the two more basic units teach and –er, so the inflection form teaching is made up of the two more basic units (morphemes) teach and –ing. Furthermore, it is the same process of affixation: i.e. of adding an affix (either a prefix or a suffix) to a base form in each case. Looked at from this point of view, morphemes – minimal forms – are seen as the basic units of grammatical structure; and a good deal of morphology can be brought within the scope of syntax by denoting the word from its traditional position of centrality in grammatical theory.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1 Distinguish between syntax and morphology, using a diachronic approach.
Is Morphology Independent of Syntax?
It is within this enhanced understanding of both syntax and word-formation that the same question is now raised: is word formation an independent module, subject to restrictions all of its own, or should it be subsumed under syntax, obeying syntactic restrictions which are independently motivated? If we assume that word-formation exists as an independent component, how is the interaction between such an independent word-formation component and the syntax be characterized? Borer (2001:152) reviews very briefly some of the answers that have been given to these two questions in recent studies, pointing out the strengths as well as the weaknesses of these positions. In six segments, he surveyed a number of important issues that have emerged in an attempt to model the relationship between word-formation and syntax. He looks exclusively at syntactic and lexicalist models, surveying a number of issues that emerge in each. He shows that the lexical/syntactic distinction interacts with another and as well resolves the issue of isomorphism, which cuts across the lexical/syntactic distinction. He also looks at mixed systems, where solutions to the interaction between morphology and syntax are given in terms of partitioning the morphological component, allowing it to accomplish its task in slightly different ways, depending on the way in which it interacts with the syntax. The obvious conclusion is that from the range of models and possibilities, issues concerning the interaction between word-formation and syntax are not resolved, and they remain sensitive to theoretical contributions to syntactic theory on the one hand, and to WF theory and phonology on the other.
Nature of Agreement
In order to be able to generalize about different types of agreement, Corbett (2001:191) introduces a set of terms. He calls the element which determines the agreement (say the subject noun phrase) the ‘controller’. The element whose form is determined by agreement is the ‘target’. The syntactic environment in which agreement occurs is the ‘domain’ of agreement. And the respect in which there is agreement (e.g. agreement in number) he refers to as ‘agreement features’. Traditional accounts treat agreement as a matter of syntax. However, there are well-known cases where the information available to the syntax is inadequate to allow a full account without the aid of semantics. For example, the noun police will only be capable of selecting its appropriate verb agreement if meaning is explicit. Thus it is possible to derive two notions of agreement from police if meaning is considered as the case below:
The police has issued a warning to the terrorist.
The police have issued a warning to the terrorist.
The Role of Morphology in Syntax
The role of morphology in syntax is to mark the agreement information (whether of syntactic or semantic/pragmatic origin) on the element whose form is determined by agreement. Let us illustrate with example of an utterance with agreement that related to number.
I saw two boys
In the above sentence, the morphological role of the inflection –s in the morpheme boy is made explicit by the syntactic role of two in the noun phrase two boys.
Given the nature of agreement just discussed, this means that agreement morphology will mark on target information which relates primarily to ‘controllers’. Note especially that the morphological part of agreement need not mirror syntax: dependants may agree with their heads, mirroring the syntactic dependency; but, conversely, the syntactic head may bear agreement morphology controlled by its syntactic dependent (Nichols 1985; Zwicky 1993: 293, 303-10).
In other words, the agreement ‘controller’ may be the syntactic dependent. In summary, it is worthwhile to establish that within the morphosyntactic structures of elements within the domain of agreement, different forms can be selected in the agreement process as exemplified below:
The apples and potatoes are ripe
Here we find noun phrases headed by nouns of the same gender, both plural, and the verb takes the same plural form. Now consider phrases headed by non-human plural nouns which are of different genders, but whose subject agreement forms happen to coincide:
The dogs and the plates are there.
The gender/number marker on the verb is that corresponding to all the plural genders. The regularity here is that if noun phrases headed by plural nouns which would take the same target gender form are conjoined, then that ‘target’ gender form will be the preferred form. For further discussion on agreement morphology see Spencer & Amold (2001); Zwicky (1991); Gvozianovic (1991) and Carstairs – McCarthy (1992).
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Describe the way agreement links syntax and morphology.
Morphology and Agreement Structure
In English, we can say (1a) or (1b):
1(a) The mother sang for the child.
(b) The mother sang the child a song.
However, although we can say (2a), we can’t say (2b):
2(a) My mum put salt in the stew.
(b) *My mum put the stew in the salt. And while we can say (3b), we can’t say (3a):
3(a) *The boy filled water into his belly.
(b) The boy filled his belly with water.
Further, we can say (4a) or (4b):
4(a) Sola broke the glass.
(b) The glass broke.
Yet, although we can say (5a), we can’t say (5b):
5(a) He fenced his house.
(b) *His house fenced.
Examples such as these raise the question of how participants which are entailed by the lexical meaning of predicates are made explicit in the morpho-syntactic representation, and whether and under what conditions they may remain implicit: that is, issues of valency. In addition, they raise the question of alternations: that is, where two morphologically relate (or even identical) predicates differ in their lexical semantics and in the way participants are realized in the morpho-syntactic and, in particular, in morphology. This facet of the morphology – syntax interface has come to be referred to as ‘argument structure’.
3.8 Morpholexical Operations
This is a ‘meaning-changing’ operation that alters the semantic content of predicates. It is the hybrid of morphology and lexical semantics. Let me exemplify this with the examples below:
(a) The blacksmith hammered the metal.
(b) The blacksmith hammered the metal flat.
This example illustrates an operation which is appropriate for verbs in certain semantic clues, and adds a semantic argument to a predicate. This argument expresses the resultant state, flatness, of the object, metal. Evidently, the resultative construction increases the syntactic valency of the predicate – in (8b), hammer in the resultative complex hammer flat has a surface syntactic valency of three. The claim that result predication is a semantic or morpholexical operation is based on the assumption that the syntactically bivalent predicate illustrated in (8a) expresses a relation between just two semantic arguments, without entailing an end result. That is, (8b) crucially means that the blacksmith flattened the metal by means of hammering activity. This can be further illustrated below:
They drank the teapot dry.
Since one cannot drink a teapot, the above utterance must be interpreted as ‘they rendered the teapot dry by drinking (from it)’.
Morpho-syntactic Operations
This ‘meaning-preserving’ operation alters the syntactic manifestation of a given semantic representation, particularly the way that it is mapped on to grammatical relations.
Two constructs in English, dative shift and passive, are often taken to be examples of morpho-syntactic operations. These are illustrated in (10) and (11):
Dative Shift
(a) Chuks gave some money to his mother.
(b) Chuks gave his mother some money.
Passive
(a) Chuks killed the goat
(b) The goat was killed (by Chuks).
Each operation brings about an alteration in the morpho-syntactic manifestation of the semantic dependents of a predicate, but they do not alter the basic semantics of the predicate itself. The first of these alternations, dative shift, appears to involve a simple alternation between two different syntactic manifestations of the same semantic roles. In (1a), the direct object realizes the Theme role, and in (1b), it realizes the Recipient. Now, other things being equal, you might expect morpho-syntactic operations to be unconstrained by the semantics of the predicate. This is largely true of the passive in English for instance. On the other hand, dative shift is restricted in applicability to verbs of transfer respecting rather subtle semantic constraints.
Turning to the set of examples under passive constructions, it is common to treat passivization as a morpho-syntactic operation involving the suppression of the external argument, or most prominent argument. If passive is a morpho-syntactic operation, you would expect that the semantics of the predicate would remain constraint across the voice alternation. A consequence of this in English and many other languages is that the Agent is available semantically, and enjoys a certain presence syntactically without necessarily being syntactically expressed. In many languages, this suppressed argument may be expressed as an oblique or an adjunct of some sort, as in the English optional by phrase in (2b). If the passivization process is simply one of syntactic suppression (as opposed to downright deletion), you would expect the first argument to be available for processes which are semantically rather than syntactically governed, and indeed this seems to be the case.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
1. State and discuss two morpho-syntactic operations you have learnt about in this course.
2. State a clear distinction between morpho-lexical and morpho- syntactic operations of words.
CONCLUSION
So far, we have traced the relationship between syntax and morphology. We have pinpointed the reformations that take place as well as established the gap that exists in terms of the extent of morphological dependency on syntax. An attempt is also made to clear the air on the subject of morphology and agreement. The process is steeped in our appreciation of the role of word-formation in making utterances appear correct and intelligible. It has been largely established that meaning cannot be divorced from syntax or else what will be left will only spell ‘disagreement’ among constituents of sentences. You have learnt that valency alternations can be of two distinct types: morpholexical operations at a semantic level and morpho-syntactic operations at a level of argument structure. The morpholexical operations are likely to be semantically or lexically restricted, and to bring with them semantic changes which cannot always be predicted from the valency shift as such.
Morpho-syntactic operations are more often semantically unrestricted, and are thus often defined solely in terms of input/output conditions on argument-structure representations, independently of the semantic representation. They generally do not give rise to additional semantic effects.
SUMMARY
In this unit, you have studied the following:
• the summary of the scope of morphology;
• the early and modern distinction of morphology and syntax;
• the latest position of scholars relating to the autonomy of morphology or otherwise.
• how to make sentence parts agree (and I do hope you can still remember the technical names given to each parts of a sentence that must agree);
• the role of semantics (i.e. meaning) in syntax; and
• the place of morphology (i.e word-formation in agreement process).
• how to choose words to change the roles and functions of participants within utterances; and
• how change of structures can affect (but not change) the meanings of utterances.