Morphology

Morphemes

Two Types of Morphology

Examples

What is morphology?

Morphology

A morpheme is a form/meaning unit that cannot be split into smaller units.

Example – house vs. houses

# and type: 1 free 1 free + 1 bound

Form: House House + Plural (-s)

Meaning:

The study of the smallest meaningful units in language (morphemes)

How a language uses smaller meaningful units to build larger ones.

Free morphemes

English: ‘House’ – has meaning

ASL: ‘TEACH’ – has meaning

Bound morphemes

English: -ed, -s, -ness - must attach to a free morpheme i.e. ‘walked’, ‘dogs’, ‘happiness’

ASL: WEEK (the location, movement, and orientation) - must attach to a numeral handshape i.e. 2-WEEK

Derivational morphology

A new word derived from another word that creates a new unit in the language.

• ASL: SIT CHAIR
• English: teach teacher

Inflectional Morphology

Process of adding grammatical information to units that already exist.

• ASL: SIT SIT-FOR- A-LONG-TIME
• English: walk walks

Verbs to Nouns

Compounds

ASL Compounds

Ways ASL creates new signs

Verbs to Nouns - Derivational

Verbs become nouns

Lexicalized fingerspelling

Loan Signs

Compounds

Classifiers

Numeral Incorporation

Aspect

Happens in English and ASL

ASL: reduplicated movement OR adding –ER (PERSON)

Verb Noun

FLY PILOT (FLY+PERSON)

SIT CHAIR

English: change in emphasis OR adding -er:

Verb Noun

Convict Convict

Dance Dancer

English: Black + Board = Blackboard

ASL: 3 morphological compounding rules

• First contact rule: first or only contact is kept
• Single sequence rule: repeated movement is eliminated
• Weak hand anticipation rule: weak (non-dominant) hand anticipates the second sign

BELIEVE

GIRLFRIEND

SELL

STORE

Movement Reduplicates

8 Changes in Lexicalization Process

Numeral Incorporation

Loan signs - Borrowing

Lexicalized Fingerspelling

1. Deletion of signs - #YES

2. Location may change - #BOYS (on the forehead)

3. Handshapes may change - #CAR

4. Movements added - #BACK

5. Orientation change - #JOB

6. Reduplication of movement - #HA

7. 2nd hand added - #WHAT

8. Addition of grammatical info - #BACK

Examples illustrating 8 changes. Record 1 video of all 8.

When a language borrows a word or sign from another language

• English: “taco”, “feng shui”, “karaoke”
• ASL: JAPAN, ITALY, CHINA

There are several signs in ASL that involve numeral incorporation:

• Hours (TWO-HOUR)
• Time (TWO-O’CLOCK)
• Dollars (TWO-DOLLAR)
• Weeks (TWO-WEEK)
• Months (TWO-MONTH)

…etc.

Signs involving numeral incorporation are composed of 2 bound morphemes

• The numeral handshape
• The location, orientation, movement, and NMS (if any)

Check out the video for a comparison of the full fingerspelled version and the lexicalized version of these examples.

• Full fingerspelling represents symbols of written English with ASL signs
• Lexicalized fingerspelling is fast and processed by the brain as a whole sign
• The gloss of a lexicalized fingerspelled sign is preceded by #
• Ex. #JOB vs. J-O-B vs. JOB

(Pardon my horrible facial expression here!)

Numeral Incorporation

Summary

We discussed:

• Inflectional and derivational morphology in English and ASL
• That signs can be created by:
• Nouns being derived from verbs
• Compounding
• Lexicalized fingerspelling
• Loan signs
• Numeral incorporation

LOUSY

THREE-DAYS