Definition of onomatopoeia:

1: the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (such as buzz, hiss..)

In cases like these there is a natural (not arbitrary, motivated) connection between the signifier and the
signified. In other words, the signifier “mimics” the signified.

Exercise: Are the English words “meow” and the Spanish words “miau” instances of onomatopoeia?
Why?
Yes, as they mimic the real sound that cats make (natural connection). However, the words are different
because each language abides by their own phonological rules, which are different.

“Meow” — signified “Sound that the cat makes”

— signifier /mjau/
“Miau” — signified “sound that the cat makes”
— signifier /mjau/

Exercise: provide a morphemic analysis of the following words:

A) underachievers b) unreadable c) nothingness

A) Underachievers
INPUT: “achieve” (v) + “under-“ (class-maintaining derivational prefix)
OUTPUT: “underachieve” (v)
INPUT: “underachieve” (v) + “-er” (class-changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “underachiever” (n)
INPUT: “underachiever” (n) + “-s” (class-maintaining inflectional suffix)
OUTPUT: “underachievers” (n)

Gloss: ‘more than one person who Xs below the expected level’

B) Unreadable
INPUT: “read” (v) + “-able” (class-changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “readable” (adj.)
INPUT: “readable” (adj.) + “un-” (class-maintaining derivational prefix)
OUTPUT: “unreadable” (adj.)

Gloss: ‘not having the property of being easy to X’ / ‘not having the property of being Xed2’. — best one

C) Nothingness
INPUT: “nothing” (n) + “-ness” (class-maintaining derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “nothingness” (n)

 Gloss: ‘the abstract state of being X’

Objectives:
- Phonaesthemes: linguistic symbolism at the crossroad between morphemes and phonemes.
- Synchrony vs Diachrony in morphological analysis.
- Productivity

Exercise: provide a morphemic analysis of the following words. If this is not possible, state to which group
the word(s) might belong and justify your answer.
A) Empowerment
INPUT: “power” (n) + “em-” (class-changing derivational prefix)
OUTPUT: “empower” (v)
INPUT: “empower” (v) + “-ment” (class-changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “”empowerment” (n)

Gloss: ‘the result of the action of causing to have X’ /‘the result of the action of giving X’

B) Reactivation
INPUT: “act” + “-ive” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “active” (adj)
INPUT: “active” (adj) + “-ate” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “activate” (v)
INPUT: “activate” (v) + “re-“ (class maintaining derivational prefix)
OUTPUT: “reactivate” (v) + “-ion” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “reactivation” (n)

Gloss: ‘the result of the action of making someone or something have the property of X-ing again’

C) Childhoods
INPUT: “child” (n) + “-hood” (class-maintaining derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “childhood” (n)
INPUT: “childhood” (n) + “-s” (class-maintaining inflectional suffix)
OUTPUT: “childhoods” (n)

Gloss: “more than one abstract state of being a X”

D) Inert
Smallest: in, ert
Meaningful: not *ert
Recurrent: ‘impossible’ and ‘incorrect’, *ert.

 Unique morpheme: the word doesn’t fulfil the three criteria, but *ert is relevant anyway in that word, even if
it has no meaning by itself. When we look and compare inert to other negative adjectives, we find that inert
is different from them, but it has one element in common: in. But because it is different, we must assume that
meaning difference must come from *ert.

The prefix: “in” has a negative meaning while the unique morpheme is meaningful but is not recurrent, as it
does not happen in any often words in the English language.

E) History
This word cannot be divided into morphemes. It is a single word.

F) Inept
Smallest: in, *ept
Meaningful: NOT, *ept — unique morpheme
Recurrent: *inexact, *impossible; *ept
NEGATIVE + ept (unique morpheme)
Mismo caso que inert.
G) Unkempt
Smallest: un, *kempt
Meaningful: not + unique morpheme
Recurrent: “unfaithful”, *kempt
H) Unfuckingbelievable
INPUT: “believe” (v) + “-able” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “believable” (adj)
INPUT: “believable” (adj) + “un-“ (class maintaining derivational prefix)
OUTPUT: “unbelievable” (adj)
INPUT: “unbelievable” (adj) + “-fucking-“ (derivational infix)
OUTPUT: “unfuckingbelievable” (adj)
Gloss: ‘not having the possibility of being Xed at all’.
“Fucking” has been grammaticalised.
I) Computer
INPUT: “compute” (v) + “-er” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “computer” (n)
Gloss: ‘a device that Xs’

“[…] productivity is the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process for the
formation of novel structures. A productive grammatical process defines an open class, one which admits
new words or forms. Non-productive grammatical processes may be seen as operative within closed classes:
they remain within the language and may include very common words, but are not added to and may be lost
in time or through regularisation converting them into what now seems to be a correct form.

 - Open class (content word): noun, adjective, verb and ‘-ly’ adverb.
- Closed-class (structural word): prep, conjunctions, tense, number, aspect…)

Productivity is, as stated above and implied in the examples already discussed, a matter of degree, and there
are a number of areas in which that may be shown to be true. As the example of “-en” becoming productive
shows, what has apparently been non-productive for any decades or even centuries FALTAN COSAS

In this connection, it is important to bear in mind the distinction between (i) lexical (content or “open-class”)
words and (ii) structural (functional or “closed-class”) words. The former consists of words with lexical
meaning that can be freely added to the lexicon, such as (a) nouns, (b) adjectives, (c) verbs and (d) adverbs
formed through derivation by “-ly” (e.g. “quickly”, “slowly”, “suddenly”, “gently”). The blaster consists of
words that cannot be freely added to the lexicon, such as (a) prepositions FALTAN COSAS

Some patterns are only very rarely productive, others may be used by a typical native speaker several times a
year or month, whereas others (especially syntactic processes) may be used productively dozens or hundreds
of times in a typical day. It is not atypical for more than one pattern with similar functions to be comparably
productive, to the point that a speaker can be in a quandary as to which form to use —e.g., would it be better
to say that a taste or color like that of raisins is “raisinish”, “raisiny”, “raisinlike”, or even “raisinly”?

It can also be very difficult to assess when a given usage is productive or when a person is using a form that
has already been learned as a whole. Suppose a reader comes from across an unknown words such as
“despisement” meaning “an attitude of despising”. The reader may apply the verb + “-ment” noun-
formational process to understand the word perfectly well, and this would be a kind of productive use. This
would be essentially independent of whether or not the writer had also used the same process productively in
coining the term, or whether he or she had learned the form from previous usage (as most English speakers
have learned government, for instance), and no longer needed to apply the process productively in order to
use the word. Similarly a speaker or writer’s use of words like “Raisinish” or “raisiny” may or may not
involve productive

1) That is so good/*atomic (it is wrong because atomic is not gradable)

2) That is so Ross.
3) That is so you
4) That is so Cuba (silly)/Helsinki (cool)
5) That is so there!
6) That’s so Madonna — metonymy (celebrity for an attribute, whether positive or negative, of that
celebrity)

Unanalysable
INPUT: “analyse” (v) + “-able” (class changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “analysable” (adj)
INPUT: “analysable” + “un-“ (class maintaining derivational prefix)

OUTPUT: “unanalysable” (adj)

Gloss: ‘not having the property to be Xed2’.

Negative + analyse + able - morpheme

‘Un-‘ + ‘analys(e)’ + able - morphs

Copulative (“dvandva”) compounds (1)

- Copulative compounds or (“dvandva”) are compounds where the lexemes involved name separate entities,
neither of which is a hyponymy of the other and either of which might seem to be the grammatical head,
lexemes that have two (contrary) attributes that classify he compound. Example: “bitter-sweet” (a
conglomerate of the two elements).

Type Description Examples

Endocentric A+B denotes a special kind of B Darkroom, smalltalk

Exocentric A+B denotes a special kind of an Skinhead, paleface (head:

unexpressed semantic head, ‘person’)
usually metonymically derived.
A+B does not denote a special
kind of B; B can be taken to
stand for something else (usually
through some sort of metonymic
inferencing, i.e. PART FOR
WHOLE, etc.)

Appositional A a n d B p r o v i d e d i e r e n t Actor-director; maidservant

descriptions for the same referent

Copulative A+B denotes ‘the sum’ of what A Bittersweet, sleepwalk.

and B denote

How to analyse compounds (I)

3. Consider, for instance, “darkroom”:
For practical reasons, the first thing you should do is, as in the case of any other word, to provide an example
of the given word:

“Traditional photography relies on dark rooms”.

You need to know the category of the compound before doing its morphological analysis.

How to analyse compounds (2)

3.1. MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
- Note that the initial element in the input should be the head. If the head is morphologically complex (e.g.
“school teacher”), then specify the root of the head (e.g. teach), followed by any affixes (-“er”) and then
any modifiers (e.g. “school”).

ff

 - Input: “room” (noun) + “-dark” (adjective)

- Output: “darkroom” (noun)

3.2. SYNTACTICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS:

- This is an endocentric compound. There is clearly a hyponymy relationship between the head of the
compound “room” and the overall meaning of the compound. In other words, a darkroom is a type of
room.

3.3. MEANING OF THE COMPOUND:

- The meaning of the compound can be glossed as follows:
- ‘A room with no light or with a safelight for developing light-sensitive photographic materials’ (for other
slang meanings, please see the Urban Dictionary).

3.4. ARGUMENT STRUCTURE:

- There is an underlying SVCs pattern here: “The room is dark”.

Compounds - (Exam mock question)

1. Identify the type of compounds instantiated in the following words. Please specify the argument structure
and the meaning of the compounds. Do not forget to back up your answer with appropriate evidence.

“Churchgoer”
Ex: My cousin is a Christian but not a churchgoer

1. Morphological analysis:
INPUT: “go” (verb) + “-er” (class-changing derivational suffix)
OUTPUT: “goer” (noun)
INPUT: “goer” (noun) + “church-“ (noun)
OUTPUT: “churchgoer” (noun)

2. Syntactico-semantic analysis:
This is an endocentric compound. There is a clear hyponymy relationship between the overall meaning of the
compound and the head of the compound “goer”. In other words, a churchgoer is a type of goer. Other words
with a similar pattern are “moviegoer” and “theatregoer”.

3. Meaning
The meaning of the compound can be glossed as follows: ‘a person who attends church’.

4. Argument structure
“Someone goes to church” — SVA
S V A/place