… and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend, legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the morpheme passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared another bearer.

Reanalysis

Morphological Analysis is what we’ve been doing

• “Where are the boundaries between these morphemes?”

• “What does each of these morphemes mean?”

Morphological Analysis is something that happens over and over!

• … and anything that happens over and over, can change!

• Speakers will sometimes re-segment words to create new affixes

• Kids learn something as an affix that was once a part of a monolithic word

Morphological Reanalysis

“A change in the structure of a word that does not involve any immediate or intrinsic modification of its surface manifestation” (Paraphrased from Langacker 1977)

Resegmentation is the most common type of morphological reanalysis

• Re-evaluating the presence, absence, or location of morpheme boundaries within an existing word!

• “No, older generation, that’s analyzeable!”

Resegmentation

Cran-

This often happens with borrowings

• Pease -> Peas -> Pea

• Statistics -> Statistic

• Burglar -> Burgle

• Tamales -> Tamale

• Euthanasia -> Euthanize

Sometimes, these are modern words

• Babysitter -> Babysit

• Bookkeeper -> Bookkeep

• Dingy -> Dinge

• Mentor -> Mentee

• Taser -> Tase

• Typewriter -> Typewrite

Speakers can differ in their acceptance of these forms

• Uncouth -> Couth?

• Enthusiasm -> Enthuse?

• Disgruntled -> Gruntled?

• Disdained -> Dained?

An affix is born!

• Alcoholic

• Alcoholic

-oholic is now a productive affix

• Chocoholic

• Workaholic

• Enchiladaholic

• (Does this mean that Catholics really like cats?)

Arnold Zwicky coined a term for these: ‘libfix’

• -burger
• -tard
• -naut
• Cran-
• -gate

Wow, we’re really creative!

Indeed!

• This is why we’re teaching this class from a strongly analytic perspective!

• We can’t teach you faster than speakers can innovate

• Morphology is an active, ongoing process

  • You need to be active, ongoing linguists!

An alternative viewpoint

Reanalysis is the splitting of monolithic words into affixes

• We’re discovering affixes within whole words using analogy within the lexicon

• “These are usually stored and accessed as whole words, but I guess these parts all do the same thing”

  • “I’ll bet I could snap off that component alone and use it!”

What if that’s how all of morphology works?

Recall Split vs. Single Component Morphology

Both approaches make an assumption

Are words really ‘built to order’?

• “Let’s see, I need to talk about gluing this thing, again, in the past. That’s ‘glue’, plus ‘re-’, and ‘-ed’.”

• “OK! One ‘reglued’ coming up!”

Or are we just choosing from the vending machine?

Words may be grabbed whole from the lexicon

• “Let’s see, I need to talk about gluing this thing, again, in the past. Looks like ‘reglued’ is the meaning I need!”

  • “Comes with cheese, egg salad, and phonology”

• <inserts bills, punches A6>

We’ll talk more about this idea soon!

• … but be thinking about the possibilities and predictions

Wrapping Up

• Productive uses of words are easily interpretable and friction free

• Creative uses of words take a bit more effort, but we can get there

• New words can be created through many processes

• Existing words can be reanalyzed, allowing the parts to be usable

• … and maybe that’s how all of this works!

For Next Time

• We’ll talk more about a morpheme-based lexicon

Thank you!