Background and Beliefs
This is a general introduction to morphology and morphological analysis from the point of view of a morphologist. The purpose is not to advocate any particular theory or to give the truth (whatever that is), but rather to get you, the reader, to where you can look for it by yourself. Still, it is inevitable that some of our remarks will be colored by our own beliefs and background. We would therefore like to present some of our foundational beliefs about linguistics and linguistic methodology.
First, we believe that languages differ from one another. You might be thinking, “Of course they do!” But we mean this in a very special way. Some linguists are always looking for ways that languages are similar, and at times, we do that, too. But we believe that if you focus only on the similarities between languages, you miss out on all of the exciting ways in which they differ. What’s more, you may find parallels and similarities where none really exists. We try to approach linguistic analysis with as open a mind as possible, and to do this, it is first necessary to appreciate the uniqueness and diversity of the world’s languages.
Our second foundational belief is that languages, which we can write with a small l, are different from Language, with a capital L. There are thousands of individual languages in the world. But we may also speak of language in general to mean the general phenomenon of Language that encompasses all individual languages. This Language is related to Noam Chomsky’s notion of Universal Grammar, which posits that all languages are alike in basic ways. Each of these two uses of the word language is equally important to linguistics. Individual languages have features that are not characteristic of Language in general. For example, one feature of English is that its regular way of forming plural nouns is to add /z/. We would never claim, however, that this is universally true, or that it is a property of Language. To tie this belief in with the preceding one, we strongly believe that morphological theory and morphological analysis must be grounded in morphological description. If we want to appreciate what morphology really is, it’s best to have some idea of what the morphology of individual languages is like. At the same time, we must have a reasonably well-thought-out general theory of the morphology of Language, so that we can compare our descriptions of individual languages within a wider context. In short, linguists need to pay equal attention to both small-l language and capital-L Language.
Our next belief is that morphology is a distinct component of languages or grammars. If you are not already familiar with some of the controversy surrounding morphology, this needs an explanation. The fact that some languages, such as Vietnamese, do not have morphologically complex words has led some people to conclude that morphology should not be a separate branch of linguistics. The reasoning is that linguistics is generally understood to deal with properties of Language. If there are languages that don’t have morphology, then morphology is not a property of all languages and of Language, and morphological phenomena should be treated in syntax or phonology. We disagree. It has been shown elsewhere (e.g., Aronoff 1994) that some aspects of morphology cannot be attributed to syntax or phonology, or anything else.
One piece of evidence that morphology is separate from syntax, phonology, and other branches of linguistics is that words in some languages are grouped into largely arbitrary classes that determine their forms in different environments. Latin nouns fall into five distinct classes, called declensions, which have little or nothing to do with syntax or phonology and cannot be explained by either. They are purely morphological in their significance. The uniquely morphological nature of these classes is truly brought home by the fact that Latin nouns also fall into syntactic agreement classes (usually called genders), and the two systems cross-cut one another: two nouns may belong to the same gender but to different declensions and vice versa. We’ll examine cases like these, but their mere existence in many languages shows that morphology must be given some independent status in linguistics. Morphology, probably more than any other component of language, interacts with all the rest, but it still has properties of its own.
We also believe that morphologies are systems. This is a very old observation. Because of it, it is impossible to talk about isolated facts in a language – everything holds together. This belief together with the second one, above, are the reasons why we’ll be looking carefully at the morphology of a particular language, Kujamaat Jóola. Considering the morphology of Kujamaat Jóola in close to its entirety will give us a valuable perspective that we would never gain if we only studied isolated facts from several languages.
So far, we have given you our beliefs about the nature of language and morphology. We also have some that pertain to methodology. The first is that we should take an attitude of skeptical realism. Albert Einstein said that a physicist must be both a realist and a nominalist, a realist in the sense that you must believe what you ultimately find will be real, but a nominalist in the sense that you must never believe you’ve found what you’re looking for. Martin Joos made a similar statement about linguistics. On the one hand, you should always believe that what you are looking for is God’s truth, but on the other, you should consider all that you have found so far as hocus-pocus. We believe strongly in the value of having a linguistic theory, but we believe equally strongly that you should never trust it completely.
Our other methodological belief can be summed up as a motto: anything goes. This methodological belief is associated with the Against Method of Paul Feyerabend, a twentieth-century philosopher who felt that if we insisted on a single rule of scientific methodology, one that would not inhibit progress, it would be “Anything goes.” We take a no-holds-barred approach to linguistics. We’ll use any tool or method that will tell us how language works. This attitude stems in part from our skepticism about particular theories. People who are wedded to individual theories tend to believe in using tools that are rooted in that theory. Our tools are not theory-based in that way. If a tool does the job, we are happy to use it, whether it is a traditional linguistic tool (e.g., native speaker consultants, dictionaries, written grammars), an experimental tool (e.g., imaging technology), or a statistical tool.
