Why do languages have morphology?

As native speakers of a language we use morphology for different reasons. We will go into both the functions of morphology and means of forming new words in great depth in the following chapters, but here, we’ll just give you a taste of what’s to come.

One reason for having morphology is to form new lexemes from old ones. We will refer to this as lexeme formation. (Many linguists use the term word formation in this specific sense, but this usage can be confusing, as all of morphology is sometimes referred to in a larger sense as ‘word formation’.) Lexeme formation can do one of three things. It can change the part of speech (or category) of a word, for example, turning verbs into nouns or adjectives, or nouns into adjectives, as you can see in the examples in (3):

(3) Category-changing lexeme formation

V→ N: amuse → amusement

V → A: impress → impressive

N → A: monster → monstrous

Some rules of lexeme formation do not change category, but they do add substantial new meaning:

(4) Meaning-changing lexeme formation

A → A ‘negative A’ happy → unhappy

N → N ‘place where N lives’ orphan → orphanage

V → V ‘repeat action’ wash → rewash

And some rules of lexeme formation both change category and add substantial new meaning:

(5) Both category and meaning-changing lexeme formation

V → A ‘able to be Ved’ wash → washable

N → V ‘remove N from’ louse → delouse

Why have rules of lexeme formation? Imagine what it would be like to have to invent a wholly new word to express every single new concept. For example, if you wanted to talk about the process or result of amusing someone, you couldn’t use amusement, but would have to have a term like zorch instead. And if you wanted to talk about the process or result of resenting someone, you couldn’t use resentment, but would have to have something like plitz instead. And so on. As you can see, rules of lexeme formation allow for a measure of economy in our mental lexicons: we can recycle parts, as it were, to come up with new words. It is probably safe to say that all languages have some ways of forming new lexemes, although,as we’ll see as this book progresses, those ways might be quite different from the means we use in English.

On the other hand, we sometimes use morphology even when we don’t need new lexemes. For example, we saw that each lexeme can have a number of word forms. The lexeme WALK has forms like walk, walks, walked, walking that can be used in different grammatical contexts. When we change the form of a word so that it fits in a particular grammatical context, we are concerned with what linguists call inflection. Inflectional word formation is word formation that expresses grammatical distinctions like number (singular vs. plural); tense (present vs. past); person (first, second, or third); and case (subject, object, possessive), among others. It does not result in the creation of new lexemes, but merely changes the grammatical form of lexemes to fit into different grammatical contexts.

Interestingly, languages have wildly differing amounts of inflection. English has relatively little inflection. We create different forms of nouns according to number (wombat, wombats); we mark the possessive form of a noun with -’s or -s’ (the wombat’s eyes). We have different forms of verbs for present and past and for present and past participles (sing, sang, singing, sung), and we use a suffix -s to mark the third person singular of a verb (she sings).

However, if you’ve studied Latin, Russian, ancient Greek, or even Old English, you’ll know that these languages have quite a bit more inflectional morphology than English does. Even languages like French and Spanish have more inflectional forms of verbs than English does.

But some languages have much less inflection than English does. Mandarin Chinese, for example, has almost none. Rather than marking plurals by suffixes as English does, or by prefixes as the Bantu language Swahili does, Chinese does not mark plurals or past tenses with morphology at all. This is not to say that a speaker of Mandarin cannot express whether it is one giraffe, two giraffes, or many giraffes that are under discussion, or whether the sighting was yesterday or today. It simply means that to do so, a speaker of Mandarin must use a separate word like one, two or many or a separate word for past to make the distinction.

(6) Wo jian guo yi   zhi    chang jing lu.

I see past one CLASSIFIER giraffe4

(7) Wo jian guo liang zhi chang jing lu

I see past two CLASSIFIER giraffe

The word chang jing lu ‘giraffe’ has the same form regardless of how many long-necked beasts are of interest. And the verb ‘to see’ does not change its form for the past tense; instead, the separate word guo is added to express this concept. In other words, some concepts that are expressed via inflection in some languages are expressed by other means (word order, separate words) in other languages.