Today, we’re going to apply two principles within morphology to
memes: segmentability and
compositionality, with the hope of getting at the idea
of reanalysis in memetic language use online.
The first relevant idea here is segmentability,
which is a property of individual words, describing how readily speakers
of a language recognize its morphological complexity, that is, the
morphemes which make it up.
- ‘cats’, above, is easily seen to be two parts by most speakers.
- ‘independence’ is generally viewed as in+depend+ence, although some
folks might see de+pend (‘hang from’) as separate.
- ‘brethren’, for most people, is not ‘accurately’ segmentable to
‘brother+en’, as the form has changed, and the -en plural is very
rare.
The other idea, an important principle within linguistics is the idea
of ’compositionality’, that is, meaning of complex
chunks of language is comprised of the meaning of their subcomponents
plus grammatical knowledge. Although this is most often thought about in
sentences, it applies within words as well.
- In some cases, this is very transparent, like with the word ‘cats’,
where there is ‘cat’, the little furry beast, and there is ‘-s’, which
means there are (at least) two of them.
- In other cases, it’s more difficult to predict the meaning, as in
‘hooker’, which, in English, does not refer to a person who makes
hooks.
- There can even be ambiguity as to the compositionality of a word, in
that ‘unlockable’ can mean either ‘able to be unlocked’, or ‘unable to
be locked’
Task 1: Segmentable
memes? (Click in ‘A’ here)
With your group, identify two memetic linguistic forms in three
different categories:
- Very segmentable memes will have multiple
recognizable components (e.g. ‘refrigerators’ having
‘refrigerate-er-s’)
- Ambiguously segmentable memes will have at least
one component, but another element (or two?) which might be its
own morpheme
- Unsegmentable memes have only one component
(e.g. ‘eat’)
If you happen upon a more than two that meet the criteria, feel free
to save them.
Task 2:
Compositional Memes? (Click in ‘B’ here)
Now focus on what the meme means. Both in conversation, in
practice, and in the sense of how you’d explain it to your
minion-sending aunt on Facebook. With the meaning of your memes above in
mind, answer the following questions:
- Are the segmentable forms from above compositional?
- Do the morphological parts of these memes each contribute their
meaning to the whole in a predictable way?
- Or, is the meaning hard to predict based on the morphemes
present?
- If none of your forms from above are compositional, find one
that feels like it is!
- For the ambiguously segmentable forms, can you identify a potential
meaning for that ‘maybe a morpheme’ bit?
Sentences are only compositional by means of our knowledge of our
language’s grammar. In the sentence “The students judged Will”, we don’t
know the meaning of the sentence unless we know the syntactic
rules which tell us who did what to whom, etc. In light of
that…
- What grammatical knowledge did you need to understand the
compositional meaning of the forms above?
- Think about why your Aunt Ethel would not be able to
understand these forms, and what she’s missing
- e.g. Does it only make sense reading left-to-right? Do you need to
understand the separate meanings of top and bottom text?
Discussion: Reanalysis
(Click in ‘C’ here)
Reanalysis, as we discussed, is the process by which speakers
‘discover’ morphology where it perhaps previously existed, or in other
cases, where it never did, resulting in a new productive morpheme.
-aholic (from ‘alcoholic’) is a great example of this, or the doge
becoming productive, or the mid-2010s pixelated sunglasses being snipped
out of an original image.
With your group, discuss:
- How do the ideas of segmentability and compositionality interact
with reanalysis?
- Put differently, does segmentability and compositionality of a word
or morpheme make it more (or less?) likely to be reanalyzed?
- Think about this both in terms of memes, and words!
- Do you think any of the memes you selected above are good candidates
for reanalysis?
- If so, what morpheme would you break out
- Can you think of an example of a meme which had an element
‘reanalyzed’?
- Was it particularly segmentable? Or compositional?
- Can you think of a meme element which itself is a reanalysis of an
older meme?
- How segmentable and compositional is it now?
Once finished, please click in ‘D’