A DESCRIPTIVE COURSE IN

MORPHOSYNTAX

A course for IInd year,

undergraduate students
CLEARING THE GROUND OF MORPHOSYNTAX

INTRODUCTORY NOTIONS
Key concepts and issues

1. Language units

2. The domain of Morphology

3. Morphological units and processes

4. Lexical classes

5. Grammatical categories
Language units

text
[paragraphs]
sentences
clauses
phrases
words
morphemes
phonemes
The domain

MORPHOLOGY

Lexical Inflectional
morphology morphology
 Types of morpheme

Free vs. Bound

Lexical(derivational) vs. grammatical (inflectional)

e.g.
likelihood
faithfulness
subconsciousness
shamelessly
rewrites
writings
misunderstandings
taller
Inflectional morphemes…

… do not change the lexical class (cf. tall/taller/tallest are all

adjectives)

… they are required by syntax: they typically signal

syntactic or semantic relations between different words in
a sentence

… they are highly systematic: they combine with large

classes of words, but not with each other

… they follow derivational morphemes and occur at the

very end of the word: in English, they are suffixes only
syncretism vs. suppletion

partial total
 Verb paradigm

{play} {tell} {cut} {go} {be}

V play tell cut go be/am
V-s plays tells cuts goes is/are
V-ed1 played told cut went was/were
V-ed2 played told cut gone been
V-ing playing telling cutting going being
Types of inflection

 external: called, burnt, known

 internal: foot/feet, meet/met,

ring/rang/rung

 zero (Ø): cut/cut, sheep/sheep

 suppletive: boy/girl, go/went/gone

 word order (case relations)

Lexical classes

‘open’ vs. ‘closed’

NOUN PRONOUN
VERB ARTICLE
ADJECTIVE PREPOSITION
ADVERB CONJUNCTION
INTERJECTION NUMERAL
Grammatical categories

aspect
case
comparison
gender synthetic/
mood analytical
number markers
person
tense
voice