Introduction to Morphological Analysis
Two basic approaches: analysis and synthesis
There are two complementary approaches to morphology, analytic and synthetic. The linguist needs both.
The analytic approach has to do with breaking words down, and it is usually associated with American structuralist linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century. There is a good reason for this. These linguists were often dealing with languages that they had never encountered before, and there were no written grammars of these languages to guide them. It was therefore crucial that they should have very explicit methods of linguistic analysis. No matter what language we’re looking at, we need analytic methods that are independent of the structures we are examining; preconceived notions might interfere with an objective, scientific analysis. This is especially true when dealing with unfamiliar languages.
The second approach to morphology is more often associated with theory than with methodology, perhaps unfairly. This is the synthetic approach. It basically says, “I have a lot of little pieces here. How do I put them together?” This question presupposes that you already know what the pieces are. Analysis must in some way precede synthesis.
Say that you’ve broken a clock and taken it apart, and now you have to put all the little pieces back together. There’s a catch: you don’t know how. You could always go by trial and error. But the most efficient way would be to have some theory of how the clock goes together. Synthesis really involves theory construction.
From a morphological point of view, the synthetic question you ask is, “How does a speaker of a language produce a grammatically complex word when needed?” This question already assumes that you know what kinds of elementary pieces you are making the complex word out of. We think that one of the real problems of a morphological theory is that we don’t always have a good idea of what the pieces are. Syntacticians can supply us with some tools: case and number, for example, are ancient syntactic notions that we can use in our morphology. But the primary way in which morphologists determine the pieces they are dealing with is by examination of language data. They pull words apart carefully, taking great care to note where each piece came from to begin with.
We have described analysis and synthesis in terms of the morphologist studying language, but the two notions are equally applicable to speakers of a language. Speakers apply morphological analysis when they read or hear a complex word they have never encountered before. In order to understand it, they pull it apart and ask themselves whether they recognize any of the pieces. Speakers use synthesis whenever they create new forms from pre-existing pieces.
