Assignment 3: MorphologyAssignment 3: MorphologyPosted 9/18/97. Hand in by class time on Tuesday 9/23/97. As usual, e-mail or hard-copy is fine.
Answer to an e-mail question on this assignment (posted 9/21/97, 9:45pm).
Reading for week of 9/23 and 9/30 is Chapter 3 of the textbook, 'Syntax'.
In this assignment you will use some of the morphological concepts discussed in class this week to analyze words in English and other languages, to figure out whether a morpheme of English is productive or not, and to determine when different allomorphs of the English past tense morpheme are used.
Resources that may help you in doing this assignment include (i) the chapter on Morphology in your textbook, (ii) your class notes and the on-line lecture notes. Also, remember that the instructors and the LING 101 tutors are available to answer your questions and help you.
The first few questions are taken from the exercises in your textbook (Fromkin & Rodman), chapter 2.
1. Chapter 2, exercise 1. In addition to listing the morphemes, you should justify your analysis by giving one other word formed using the same morpheme. For example, in order to justify the analysis of greatly as great+ly you could point out that 'great' can occur on its own (i.e. it is a free morpheme) or in greatness, and that -ly also occurs in the word quickly.
2. Chapter 2, exercise 2. Tip: we recommend that you work through all of this exercise before writing up your answer.
3. Chapter 2, exercise 5. (brief answer)
4. Chapter 2, exercise 7.
5. Consider the following two English affixes:
Briefly state the rule for what each of these morphemes combines with (e.g. what category) and what category is produced. Also state whether the morpheme can be used productively in English. Provide examples of possible (or impossible) words to justify your answer.
6. Allomorphy. In class we saw that the plural morpheme in English has the basic (or 'underlying') form -s, but that it is pronounced in different ways when it is attached to different words.
These examples show that the plural morpheme -s has three different surface forms or allomorphs. Now consider the English regular past tense suffix, written as -ed. Try adding it to a number of different verbs (e.g. hinted, grunted, washed ...): does the regular past tense morpheme always have the same surface form, or are there are a number of allomorphs? If there are different allomorphs, attempt to give a brief description of when each of them is used.
[Note: for this question, you should ignore the many irregular past tense forms in English, e.g. run/ran, sing/sang, hit/hit, bring/brought, go/went etc. Just consider verbs that have a regular past tense ending.]