Fundamentals of Linguistics

Assignment 01 / Morphology – David Schlangen

Exercise 1 Divide the following words by placing a + between their morphemes (note that some of
the words may be monomorphemic).
Example: replaces → re + place + s
1. creating
2. unhealthy
3. seaward
4. waiter
5. wastage
6. reconsider
7. poetic
8. keys
9. modernize
10. incompletion

Exercise 2 The examples below show possible wordforms and impossible ones, which are pre-
ceded by an asterisk (*). Divide the words into morphemes, and say which morphological processes
are involved:
1. a. right – rightist – rightists
b. right – rights – *rightsist
2. a. foot – football – footballs
b. foot – feet – *feetball
3. a. sleepwalk – sleepwalked
b. sleepwalk – *sleptwalk
Based on your analysis, what can you conclude about the order of application of morphological
rules?

Exercise 3 There are many asymmetries in English in which a root morpheme combined with a
prefix is a nonword. For example *cognito vs incognito. Provide 5 more examples.

Exercise 4 Provide 5 examples of composites in English.

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Exercise 5 Below is a list of words from Turkish. In Turkish, articles and morphemes indicating
location are affixed to the verb.
deniz “an ocean” evden “from a house”
denize “to an ocean” evimdem “from my house”
denizim “of an ocean” denizimde “in my ocean”
eve “to a house” elde “in a hand”
1. What is the Turkish morpheme meaning “to”?
2. What kind of affixes in Turkish correspond to English prepositions?
3. What would the Turkish word for “from an ocean” be?
4. How many morphemes are there in the Turkish word denizimde?

For your language profile:

1. Briefly introduce your language (1-2 paragraphs): What’s its family? Where is it spoken? How
many speakers are there?
2. Present the basic morphology of your language (2-3 paragraphs). Is it agglutinative, isolating,
. . . ? (What do these terms mean?) What types of words are inflected and for what cat-
egories? What types of agreement are there? Which morphological processes are used in
this language? Give one or two examples of sentences with glosses (i.e., each morpheme is
marked and translated). (You can probably find example sentences in linguistics papers). If
your language has very little morphology, don’t worry! That is also interesting.

Exercises taken from Sharid Loáiciga’s course, which in turn took some from Tatjana Scheffler’s
course, and some from Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams (2003).

References

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams (2003). An Introduction to Language. Boston,
USA: Thomson-Wadsworth.