Analytic principles
Before we try out some problems, we would like to give you some basic analytic principles used in morphology. They are taken from Eugene Nida’s (1949; revised edition 1965) textbook Morphology.3
The first principle is given in (14):
(14) Principle 1
Forms with the same meaning and the same sound shape in all their occurrences are instances of the same morpheme.
Step one in morphological analysis is to look for elements that have the same form and the same meaning. This is the basic type-token problem. Let’s say that we have a bunch of coins. Each is a token, a form. If we look at them carefully, we see that three of them look very much the same (they are all nickels), and two of them are identical (they both say 1997). These two coins are tokens of exactly the same type: they have identical forms and identical values. We may further say that the three coins are all tokens of a larger type that includes all nickels, not just those minted in 1997. But five pennies, though they have the same value as a nickel, do not together comprise the same type as the nickel, because, although identical in value to the nickel, they are different in form.
To apply this distinction between types and tokens to the morphological analysis of words, consider the Spanish words buenísimo ‘very good’ (< bueno ‘good’), riquísimo ‘very delicious’ (< rico ‘delicious’), and utilísimo ‘very useful’ (< útil ‘useful’). In each case, the suffix -ísimo contributes the same superlative meaning, and it has the same shape. We logically conclude that the suffix is the same for all three words. Note that we presented three words, all with the same suffix. It is not enough to look at one form when attempting to break it up into its smaller parts. One thing that makes a morpheme a morpheme is that it recurs, and thus speakers are able to identify it and give it a meaning.
This isn’t the whole story, as Principle 2 tells us:
(15) Principle 2
Forms with the same meaning but different sound shapes may be instances of the same morpheme if their distributions do not overlap.
In Kujamaat Jóola, the stem /baj-/ has two possible shapes, [baj-] and [bəj-], but their distributions don’t overlap. [bəj-] occurs in the presence of a morpheme with an underlyingly tense vowel, but [baj-] does not. This non-overlapping distribution allows us to conclude that the two forms are instances of the same morpheme. When two or more instances of a given morpheme occur with different shapes, we call them allomorphs. Allomorphs were introduced in Morphemes.
The regular plural marker in English has several allomorphs – voice less alveolar fricative /s/, voiced alveolar fricative /z/, schwa plus voiced alveolar fricative /z/, syllabic alveolar nasal /n̩/, and Ø – as shown in (16):
(16) seat-/s/
shade-/z/
hedg-/əz/
ox-/n̩/
fish-Ø
As in the previous example, the distributions of these forms do not overlap, and they all have the same meaning. We can infer that they are instances of the same morpheme.
(17) Principle 3
Not all morphemes are segmental.
Normally, when we think of morphemes, we think of forms that can be pronounced in some sense, e.g., chicken, the, un-, -ize. But some morphemes can’t be pronounced on their own. They are dependent on other morphemes for their realization. In English, for example, vowel alternations may serve to differentiate basic and past forms of the verb. We refer to these alternations as ablaut (as in 18):
(18) run ran
speak spoke
eat ate
We know that there is a past tense marker distinguishing the words in the second column from those in the first. But what is it? It is not the /æ/ of ran or the /o/ of spoke but rather the difference between these vowels and the vowels of the basic verb, which is not segmental at all. We must look at both the present and past tense forms of these verbs, because it is the contrast between them that is important. Another type of non-segmental morpheme in English is shown in (19):
(19) breathN breatheV
clothN clotheV
houseN houseV
In each pair, the noun ends in a voiceless fricative ([θ, s]), while the verb ends in a voiced fricative ([ð, z]). Assuming that the noun is basic, we say that the morpheme that marks the verbs consists of the phonological feature [+voice].
Although Principle 3 says that we can apply the term morpheme to the non-segmental alternations seen in (18) and (19), doing so is awkward. Pairs like run∼ran or breath∼breathe are more easily explained as processes than as concatenations of morphemes. We will further address this issue. In Morphemes, we briefly mentioned classical problems with morphemes in the context of infixation and circumfixation. The existence of non-segmental alternations such as those in (18) and (19) is another classical problem.
The contrast between forms was crucial in (18) and (19). The notion of contrast can be further extended, leading to Principle 4:
(20) Principle 4
A morpheme may have zero as one of its allomorphs provided it has a non-zero allomorph.
Fish generally displays no special marking in the plural: one fish, ten fish-Ø. We can say that it has a zero plural, and that this zero plural is an allomorph of the usual plural [z], because other words in the language, like frogs, have non-zero plurals. This is an analytic procedure, not a theoretical point. We cannot posit a zero unless it contrasts with some non-zero variant. In Japanese, where sakana means both ‘fish (sg)’ and ‘fish (pl)’, we cannot posit a zero plural (*sakana-Ø) because nowhere in the language does -ØPL contrast with a non-zero allomorph.
3 Nida has six principles; we present four here.
