Week 5 構詞

謝舒凱 台大語言所

2023-05-22

本週主題

  • Morphology

語言結構

  • 構詞學 (Morphology) the analysis of internal structure of words

  • 句法 (Syntax) the analysis of the internal structure of sentences/utterances

注意【界面】問題

題型設計上（語言使用上也是），常常放在一起討論。

  • 構詞句法 (Morphosyntax) the analysis of the internal structure of utterances, both above the word level and below it.

例子：English Numeral Modification

one tree, two trees, three trees, etc.

同時涉及句法 (名詞於數量詞的次序) 和 構詞 (名詞的單複數變化)。

構詞學

Morphology

  • The study of word-making, morphological process and morphological types of world Languages.
  • Rules underlying our knowledge of structured of words.

Word

knowing a word

岔開做一個實驗

  • Content words (open class) vs function words (closed class).
    • Any psychological or neurological evidence? (count the number of F’s in the following text)

有幾個 F 字母？

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Morpheme

  • The minimal units of Meaning (a linguistic hypothesis)
    • one morpheme: boy
    • two morphemes: boy-ish
    • three morphemes: boy-ish-ness
    • four morphemes: gentle-man-li-ness
    • five morphemes: un-gentle-man-li-ness
  • not to confuse morphemes with syllables
    • Mississippi has more than one syllable but is only a single morpheme
  • Every word in every language is composed of one or more morphemes (bold hypothesis of discreteness!)

Morphemes: Bound and Free

  • can be used alone (i.e., as a word) or not.
  • Affix (prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix,…)
  • Morphologically complex words consist of a root and one or more affixes.
    • A root is a lexical content morphemes that cannot be analyzed into small parts.
    • When a root morpheme is combined with an affix, it forms a stem, which may or may not be a word.

semitic

English morpheme

English morphology

Infix

  • The Inuktitut language of Western Canada, a member of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, has an infix, -pallia-, which must be inserted into a verb root, resulting in a distinct form of the verb.

    • nungup + pallia + jut = nungupalliajut (“They are gradually disappearing”)
    • ilinniaq + pallia + jugut = ilinniapalliajugut (“We are gradually learning”)

Exercise: Expletive Infixation

  • The most common infix in America is the word fuckin’ and all the euphemisms for it, such as friggin, freakin, flippin, and fuggin, as in in-fuggin-credible, un-fuckin-believable. In Britain, a common infix is bloody, an obscene term in British English, and its euphemisms, such as bloomin’. (as in the movie and stage musical My Fair Lady, the word abso + bloomin + lutely)

  • Native speakers (with some dialectal variations) have intuitions about where to insert the (expletive) infix.

absolutely ?

basketball ?

Morphemes identification

Flowchart for identifying morphemes

練習

構詞與詞義的界面

why is ‘unlockable’ ambiguous?

不可解的還是可解的

歧義練習

  • 歧義 (ambiguity) is a property of language that arises when a word or phrase can be interpreted in more than one way.
  • types of ambiguity:
    • lexical ambiguity
    • syntactic ambiguity

中文詞彙網路

Basic categories

(NOUN): Number, Gender, Case, (VERB): Tempus, Modus, Genus verbi,..

語奧必考知識

Grammatical Category 或 Grammatical features

推薦語奧推廣影片

Morphological Processes

  • The (main) process of forming words
    • Affixation
    • Compounding
    • Reduplication
    • Alternation
    • Suppletion
    • ….

Sign languages make use of affixation as well.

Morphological Typology

用構詞特徵來把人類語言分成兩大類

  • Analytic language: made up of sequences of free morphemes. Each word consists of a single morpheme, used by itself with meaning and function intact.
    • Purely analytic languages, also called isolating languages, do not use affixes to compose words.
    • E.g., Chinese has a highly analytic structure.

  • Synthetic language: made up of sequences of bound morphemes.

    Hungarian

Synthetic language 再分三類

  • Agglutinative language: have several morphemes that attach to a root morpheme, and each morpheme has only one meaning that is clearly distinct. (e.g., Turkish, Swahili, Japanese).

swahili

  • Fusional language
    • words are formed by adding bound morphemes to stems, just as in agglutinating languages, but in fusional languages the affixes may not be easy to separate from the stem.
    • in fusional languages a single affix more frequently conveys several meanings simultaneously. (e.g., the following sentence in Russian, the suffix [-l] means singular, masculine, and past tense, simultaneously.)
    [[ʧital]  `he was reading’

  • Polysynthetic language

    • highly complex words may be formed by combining several stems and affixes; this is usually a matter of making nouns (subjects, objects, etc.) into parts of the verb forms.

    • e.g., Sora, a language spoken in India, allows such incorporation of objects (subjects, instruments, etc.) into verbs

    sora

練習：這是什麼類型的語言？

Yup’ik

Challenging yet unresolved morphological issue: Word/Wordhood

  • What are words / lexicon (a mental dictionary you store your ‘words’) like?
    • the lack of pauses between ‘words’ in speech
    • the lack of boundary between ‘words’ in (some) writing systems
    • note that no spaces when we speak

Iwonderifyoucanreadthiswithoutspacesaseasilyasyoucanwhentherearespacesbetweenthewords.

What about Chinese?

  • less than 80% agreement in word counts experiment
  • Character = morpheme = syllable ???

The indeterminacy of word boundaries shows that “word” is far from a simple concept, and possibly not possible to define in a consistent way cross-linguistically. (Haspelmath, 2011)

以下句子中有幾個字

(今天聯合報即時新聞)

柯文哲說，他卸任這一陣子，就是當老百姓，每天坐公車、騎YouBike，不過柯也忍不住抱怨，在台北市騎 YouBike真危險，「騎人行道怕撞到人，騎到慢車道怕被車撞」，

繼續玩一下

(隨機在 Dcard 上選了這篇)

Word segmentation

對「正規」文本看似沒事，但問題很大。（不是新詞表、停用詞表可以解決的）

  • ptt、社會媒體
  • 口語對話
  • 語言障礙

Applying Morphology: Emoticon

       http://emojitracker.com/

顏文字

◢▆▅▄▃崩╰(〒皿〒)╯溃▃▄▅▇◣

emoji

迷因

Applying Morphology: Neologism

  • what is the underlying word formation process?

  • productivity? chance of survival?