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Morphology Part 1 Hey everybody, today we are going to be talking
about Morphology. I believe the news item if you all read it I said that you could wait
for this lecture and turn in your homework by midnight on Wednesday I think it was and
that’s fine. If you have already turned in your homework and you feel pretty confident
then by all means go ahead. If you have already turned it in that’s 5 points on your next
quiz. Like I said we will be dealing with morphology in this lecture, that’s the smallest
meaningful unit of a language and we use these units to build together to make the language.
And how we form language we have two different kinds of morphology that occur, we have derivational
and inflectional. Derivational is a derived meaning so you can use morphology to your
benefit by breaking down words so derivational, basically you derive new meaning. So we have
WRITE and ER, when we put them together and we have WRITER, we have a new meaning. We’ve
derived a noun. Inflectional is different, in that it’s a morpheme that basically just
changes barely the meaning of the root word. So is we have WRITE plus S, we are not deriving
a new meaning we have WRITES which is the same meaning but it’s a different inflection.
It means that she writes, she does that over a certain amount of time for however long.
So it is not a new meaning such as WRITER or WORKER, we take a meaningful word, we add
a morpheme and we change the meaning, the end meaning of the word. We know that these
are the two fundamental processes that all languages are going to use and we can explore
ASL within the context of derivational and inflectional and go deeper into how this language
is structured. One example of a derivational process is deriving
a noun from a verb, in the case of English, it can be done, it’s by changing the emphasis,
the syllabic emphasis. So you have subject, emphasis is on the second syllable or subject,
which is the noun form and the emphasis is on the first syllable. That occurs, it is
a natural process in our language, I don’t know if new words that are coming up can do
that. What is interesting and one of the other examples that they give is when we have a
relationship between the verb and the –er in English. So we have WRITE and ER which
I’ve already used once. So when we are done with that WRITE is a verb we add the –ER
now we have a person who is a writer. It is interesting to me because text a long time
ago was a fixed noun, and now you can text somebody. You can send them a text and you
can text them. So now it’s become a verb so now we can add –ER to the so the texter
wrote and it’s interesting to me that now the noun became a verb became a noun again.
So it’s interesting how flexible and how open our language can be and how it has these
processes and these rules that we, by using our innate grammar we create new words. Another
good one is Google, Google is a company, it was a search engine it wasn’t a verb and
now it’s a verb. Now it’s a verb, I googled it and you could have used Bing to google
something, you googled it, you searched for the answer online. So it’s interesting how
our language is welcoming in new words every time every day. So the explanation on pg.
64 goes further into what kinds of movements and holds are involved in deriving the noun
from the verb. So you have the hold movement hold of SIT and by reduplicating that which
is the process of the bounce-bounce, that’s called reduplication in fancy words, double
bump, bounce-bounce or reduplication and because it is a linguistics class we really want toward
the saying reduplication. But the hold movement hold but you are not going to leave it there.
I am trying to get up high enough so my signs are within my sign space. So your whole movement
hold in SIT is SIT, you can tell someone to have a seat, sit down and there is a long
hold there longer then when you do chair which is barely a tap. So you have hold movement
hold, that hold is now an X movement up X up here and then you switch directions again
movement back down to a hold. Alright, so that’s one process, now I would encourage
you to find words that not only can do that but words that can’t. So I can do open a
drawer and I can do, it’s over there or open the drawer and do whatever. Door open
the door or door. So where can I do the double bump and where can’t I. Play and act, that’s
really going to be context I mean you aren’t going to have a differentiation between Play
and Act based on it, there is no double bump, why? Because it is not a hold movement hold
to begin with, so try to find some of those hold movement hold patterns that you can derive
the noun from the verb. Several people wrote to me about compounds.
Compounding is an interesting process in any language and I guess as someone who has always
been fascinated by words even when I was very young, compounds have always been interesting
to me. The fact that you can drive on a parkway and park on a driveway, that’s fascinating
to me and I actually want to know why you can do that. I am also interested in things
like… Sorry squirting the dogs to get them to stop fighting. One of the examples that
always come to mind for me is breakfast because a long time ago you would break your fast
and we certainly are not breaking anything but you break it, end it. So you break your
fast and now its breakfast and if you would break fast your syllabication there is equal.
When it becomes breakfast, the emphasis is on the first syllable the pronunciation changes
a little bit. So remember that, I mean the emphasis and pronunciation changes. Greenhouse,
I have a green house or do I have a greenhouse. Green house the syllabication is equal, I
have a green house. But if you have a greenhouse and its said much quicker together and the
emphasis is on the first of those syllables, now I have a building in my backyard that
has plants growing in it and it may be built of plastic or glass and it keeps the sunlight
in and allows things to grow in the winter; that’s a greenhouse as opposed to my house
which is the color green. So ASL has a compounding process too and it’s regularized compounding
process, so we have… The one that they use the most detail on is Goodnight. Its good-night, so if I tell
somebody, they ask me “How was your night?” and I say “it was a good night” it was
not great or awful it was a good night. When I say goodnight you will notice this hand
is already there, it is already face down, goodnight. So it’s not good night, have
a good night. No it is “have a goodnight”. So in the citation form of good, hold movement
hold and in the citation form of night, hold movement hold. That’s where we start and
then the first step that happens is, I will follow on homework assignment 8 pg. 73, the
first rule that they are going to apply is the contact hold rule and that is basically
saying that the only thing that is preserved in that first part of the compound, that first
sign is the initial contact hold and everything else, across they took out M and H and they
left X movement hold movement X movement hold so there is your night piece. The only rule that
they have applied is the contact and hold rule where you only preserve that first contact.
The next is the single sequence rule, that in the noun part of the sign instead of the
reduplication you only preserve one piece of that, so you only have the x movement hold
and you delete the m x movement hold. Next is the weak hand anticipation, in the citation
form of good, we know that we can sign good or GOOD. This hand is sort of going away these
days when we sign good regardless even if it were there, the weak hand anticipation
that is occurring is this not THIS, THIS. This is the weak hand anticipation of the
NIGHT part of the sign so you have goodnight. So my hand is already here when I am signing
the GOOD part. And then we apply some phonological processes as well, we have epenthesis, remember
that it is just saying that we have to move from one piece to the next and without that
we don’t have a sign. From good, this piece to this, we still have to move between them
because otherwise my hand is still going to stay there, we have that contact and hold
rule and I’ll leave it there and it wouldn’t be goodnight because there is nothing that
moves it to the night part of that compound. So we have to put back in a movement that
moves us from that to this soft hold in the beginning of night. We are basically moving
from this to THIS, that’s my movement from the contact hold to the movement part of the
sign. So here is my X, M, H, my X and M and H. Ok, and then the hold reduction basically
says I am not going to go goooodnight but GOODNIGHT. We take out that soft hold that
is in between there and that is a hold reduction rule which basically says you are not going
to stop in the middle. That is awkward and not fun or normal, you do goodnight and that
is a hold movement movement hold and that is a compound.