Morphology

LIGN 42 - Will Styler

Today’s Plan

• What is morphology?

• How can we identify the components of a word?

• What kinds of morphology exist?

• How does this apply to memes?

Morphology is a major subfield of Linguistics

• … and is probably the one most applicable to meme analysis

Morphologists ask lots of questions

• What is a word?

  • … and is this the same everywhere on Earth?

• What components make up words?

  • What are the best strategies for finding the relationship between a word’s form and its meaning?

• How are new words formed?

  • … and how do we figure out their meanings?

• How are words stored in the mind?

Let’s start with a simple question

• How many parts does the word ‘recreated’ have?

• How do we know?

We find out about word subparts through finding form/meaning relationships

• Let’s explore that idea

Word Set 1

cat, feline, lion, leopard, kitty, pspspspspsps, paw, neko

• These are related only in meaning

  • They don’t tell us anything about the composition of words

Word Set 2

cat, scatter, catastrophic, scathing, uncategorizable, catcher, catholic

• These are related only in form

  • They don’t tell us anything about the composition of words

Word Set 3

cat, kittycat, catty, catlike, cathouse, cat-and-mouse game, cattery, catio, catnap

• These are related both in form, and in meaning!

  • All contain the form ‘cat’, and all involve 😺

When form is related, and meaning is related, then we’ve found a chunk!

• ‘cat’ is a meaningful chunk of a word

• We use the term ‘morpheme’ to mean the smallest meaningful chunk which can be or be part of a word

• Some words have one morpheme (‘cat’), and some have many (‘unrecognizable’)

Word Set 4

start, stop, restart, past, lapsed, static, steady, still

• These have similar meanings, and all have /st/

  • Is this a morpheme?

  • Why not?

Identifying Morphemes

How can we tell ‘Will’ from his clothing and accessories?

• Why do you say I’m wearing gray pants, rather than them being a part of me?

• Is my watch a part of Will?

• How can you tell his wedding ring isn’t just Will?

• How can you tell his torso is an inherent part of Will?

How can we tell the morphemes in ‘unrestartable’?

We need evidence that a piece can be re-used elsewhere for it to be a morpheme!

• You can use the plural -s or -ly or cat in a bunch of different words, including ones you’ve never heard before

  • Make up a new word using ‘cat’

• You can’t use ‘st’ in a new context and preserve the ‘temporal boundary’ meaning

  • Go ahead, make my day

What are the steps to this analysis?

• Group the data by shared elements of meaning

• Within those groups, look for recurring patterns of form

• Build hypotheses, then use them to make guesses about other bits of the data

  • “This also has the morpheme. Does it also mean X?”

• Try to break your analysis with other forms from the language

  • “What words, if any, don’t follow this pattern?”

Meaning changes often come from adding new chunks of form

• This is called ‘concatenative morphology’

  • You’re adding onto what already exists

• Things which get ‘stuck on’ to base words are called ‘affixes’

  • Prefixes and Suffixes are both common in English

• cat, kittycat, catty, catlike, cathouse, cat-and-mouse game, cattery, catio, catnap

Not all morphology adds more chunks of form

• Sometimes, changes to what’s already there mark the difference

  • Remember the changing tones changing meaning in Otomí?

  • Also think about ‘run’ vs. ‘ran’, ‘sing’ vs. ‘sung’

  • ‘record a song’ and ‘make a record’

• This is referred to as non-concatenative morphology

Morphology helps us understand the components of words

• … and how we can figure out the meaning of a new word we’ve not heard before

OK Will, we get it, morphology is a thing

• Why do we care in LIGN 42?

This works for memes too!

• If you can change just one component of a meme and modify the meaning, you know something about the meaning of the components

• Memes have morphemes!

  • Morphmemes?

For each example, let’s ask:

• What changed about the form?

  • Was it concatenative or non-concatenative?

• What changed about the meaning?

(Thanks, Yuri)

… and by the way

Think of other elements of style

• What does a given audio add to a TikTok?

• Why does cat color matter in a cat meme?

• Why add a particular song to a video?

Morphology works for memes!

• … and you’ll spend the weekend feeling out just how that works

Thank you!

Important Terms

Morphology: The study of words, word formation, and word storage, among other elements of linguistics

Morpheme: The smallest contrastive unit of meaning in a language, or, put differently, the smallest analyzable and usable unit of form and meaning.

Concatenative Morphology: Adding or changing meaning by adding or removing additional chunks of linguistic forms (e.g. prefixes, suffixes)

• ‘throw’ -> ‘thrown’ or ‘throwing’

Non-Concatenative Morphology: Adding or changing meaning by modifying the existing form of the word

• ‘yeet’ -> ‘yote’, ‘ring’ -> ‘rang’, ‘record a record’

Extra Note!

• Sets of words like ‘glimmer’, ‘glitter’, ‘gleam’, ‘glamorous’, ‘glowing’, ‘glance’ which share form and meaning, but no morphemes are often called phonaesthemes

• This is awesome!