Abstract morphological facts
Let’s move to some more abstract morphological facts. These are the kind of morphological facts that you don’t notice every day. They are so embedded in your language that you don’t even think about them. They are more common than the ones we have just looked at, but deeper and more complex.
If you speak English and are concerned about your health, you might say:
(2) I eat one melon a day.
Let’s imagine that we are even more concerned about our health than you are. We don’t just eat one melon a day, rather:
(3) We eat two melons a day.
It is a fact about standard American or British English that we cannot say:
(4) *We eat two melon a day.
However, if we were speaking Indonesian or Japanese, we would say the equivalent of two melon (three melon, four melon, etc.) because these languages don’t use morphological plurals in sentences like this.
(5) Indonesian:
Saiga makan dua buah semangka (se) tiaphari
I eat two fruit melon every day
‘I eat two melons every day.’
Japanese:
mainichi futatsu-no meron-o tabemasu
every.day two- GEN melon-obj eat.IMP
‘I eat two melons every day.’
The morphological grammar of English tells us that we have to put an -s on melon whenever we are talking about more than one. This fact of English is so transparent that native speakers don’t notice it. If we happen to be speakers of a language without obligatory plural marking, however, we will notice and may have trouble with it.
We have now observed something about English morphology. If a word is plural, it takes the suffix -s. Living creatures don’t eat only melons, however:
(6) The evil giant at the top of the beanstalk eats two melons, three fish, and four children a day.
Everyone agrees that fish is plural, even though there is no plural marker. Children is also plural, but it has a very unusual plural suffix, -ren, plus an internal change: we say [ʧɪld-] instead of [ʧajld]. We do not always mark plural words with an s-like thing; there are other ways in which we can mark plurals. Native speakers of English know this, and they do not need to think about it before making a plural.
Consider the following:
(7) Today they claim that they will fix the clock tower by Friday, but yesterday they claimed that it would take at least a month.
In this example, we use two different forms of the verb claim. One is present tense, and the other is past. Again, this is not true for all languages. If we were speaking Vietnamese, for example, we wouldn’t make any distinction between claim and claimed – we wouldn’t mark the verb at all. If we were speaking Chinese, we would not distinguish between claim and claimed in a sentence like this, because the adverb zuótian ‘yesterday’ is sufficient to indicate past tense:
If we were to leave out zuótia-n ‘yesterday’, we would need to use the particle le after the verb to show that the action took place in the past. Whether or not a speaker must indicate past tense in Chinese depends on context.
Notice what happens in English when we use some other verbs besides claim:
That these verbs and others do not add -t, -d, or əd to make their past tense is an elementary fact about English morphology.
The next observation about English morphology has to do with pronouns. Here is an exchange between an American mother, who has just watched a billiard ball break through a window, and her 6-year-old boy, who is standing inside:
(10) Who just threw a pool ball through the basement window? Not me.
In this context, a 6-year-old wouldn’t respond Not I, though if he were to answer with a sentence, the response would be I didn’t, not Me didn’t. Without formally knowing anything at all about subjects and objects, English-speaking 6-year-olds (and children even younger) master the pronoun system of the spoken language.
Given the following sentence, how many children does Joan have?
(11) All of Joan’s children are brilliant and play musical instruments surpassingly well.
From this statement you cannot know how many children Joan has, but one thing is certain: she has more than two. If Joan had only two children, we would normally say both of Joan’s children, because it is a fact about English that there is a morphological distinction among universal quantifiers between the one designating all of two (both) or all of more than two (all) of a particular type of entity. In some other languages, marking for dual is even more pervasive. This is the case in Ancient Greek, as shown by the following examples:
While English does not have special affixes to mark the dual, it keeps track of the distinction through words like all and both. There are even languages in the world like Manam (Papua New Guinea: Gregersen 1976) and Larike (Central Maluku, Indonesia: Laidig and Laidig 1990) that distinguish not only singular, dual, and plural, but also trial. The use of singular, dual, trial, and plural second person subject prefixes in Larike is illustrated below:
