Nonconcatenative morphology
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Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.[1]
Types
Apophony (including Ablaut and Umlaut)
In English, for example, while plurals are usually formed by adding the suffix -s, certain words use nonconcatenative processes for their plural forms:
- foot /fʊt/ → feet /fiːt/;
Many
- freeze /ˈfriːz/ → froze /ˈfroʊz/, frozen /ˈfroʊzən/.
This specific form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as base modification or
Changes such as foot/feet, on the other hand, which are due to the influence of a since-lost front vowel, are called umlaut or more specifically I-mutation.
Other forms of base modification include lengthening of a vowel, as in Hindi:
- /mər-/ "die" ↔ /maːr-/ "kill"
or change in tone or stress:
- Chalcatongo Mixtec /káʔba/ "filth" ↔ /káʔbá/ "dirty"
- English record /ˈrɛkərd/ (noun) ↔ /rɨˈkɔrd/ "to make a record"
Consonantal apophony, such as the initial-consonant mutations in Celtic languages, also exists.
Transfixation
Another form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as
Reduplication
Yet another common type of nonconcatenative morphology is
/k̠ɨhɨl/ "red" ↔ /k̠ɨp-k̠ɨhɨl/ "flaming red"
Truncation
A final type of nonconcatenative morphology is variously referred to as truncation, deletion, or subtraction; the morpheme is sometimes called a disfix. This process removes phonological material from the root. In French, this process can be found in a small subset of plurals (although their spellings follow regular plural-marking rules):
/ɔs/ "bone" ↔ /o/ "bones"
/œf/ "egg" ↔ /ø/ "eggs"
Semitic languages
Nonconcatenative morphology is extremely well developed in the
See also
References
- ISBN 0-340-76026-5.
- ^ ISBN 9780199812790.
- ^ McCarthy, John J. (1981). "A Prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Morphology". Linguistic Inquiry. 12: 373–418.
- ^ "WALS Online – Chapter Fusion of Selected Inflectional Formatives". wals.info.
- S2CID 145307357.
External links
- Alexis NEME and Eric Laporte (2013), Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plural |year=
- Alexis NEME and Eric Laporte (2015), Do computer scientists deeply understand Arabic morphology? – هل يفهم المهندسون الحاسوبيّون علم الصرف فهماً عميقاً؟, available also in Arabic, Indonesian, French