Morphophonemic Behaviour of the Past Tense and Past Participle Morphemes of English (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of English Language Studies, 2020
This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can, therefore, be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.
The basic inflectional structure of verbs (I): aspect, tense, mood and agreement
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology. 2021. Antonio Fábregas, Víctor Acedo-Matellán, Grant Armstrong, María Cristina Cuervo and Isabel Puyol. ISBN 9780367331573, 2021
The inflectional structure of the Spanish verb is complex due to the confluence of several grammatical categories: tense, aspect and mood on the one hand, number and person on the other. Spanish, however, is not a language with concatenative inflectional morphology and does not present specific morphemes for each of these categories. Because of this, there are mismatches between the semantic categories and the morphs that represent them; in other words, there is less phonological material than semantic categories. This problem means that segmentation in morphemes is not systematic and that there are various ways to analyse the structure of the verbal word, depending on the analytical model or the methodological posture assumed. In this chapter I will show, briefly, the problems that come with segmentation into morphemes, the most common generalizations that have been found and the different solutions proposed. Also, after careful analysis of the behaviour of verbal paradigms, I will propose a split of the tenses according to the way of representing grammatical categories in inflectional morphemes: on the one hand, tenses where a homogeneous and differentiated segmentation of inflectional marks is possible; on the other, those where it is not possible to segment those categories. This analysis allows identification of the regularities that exist in verbal inflection and explains, to some extent, the exceptions.
On Rules and Exceptions: An Investigation of Inflectional Morphology.
1993
Abstract: This thesis examines two theories of the acquisition and representation of inflection (eg English past tense formation), focusing on children's overregularization errors such as goed and wented. On the" rule" view, suggested by Pinker and Prince (1988), regular forms (eg walk-walked) are created by the on-line application of symbolic, default rule (added to form the past tense), while irregular forms are retrieved from an associative memory.
THE IRREGULARITY OF WEAK VERBS WITHOUT VOWEL ALTERNATIONS IN MODERN ENGLISH
Weak verbs in Modern English are sometimes mistakenly identifi ed with regular verbs. Although most weak verbs are indeed regular, there remain some which belong to the irregular group, for example spend, put, make, burn. Apart from drawing a clearer distinction between strong and weak verbs in relation to the regular and irregular division, the aim of this paper is to explain where the irregularity of these irregular weak verbs comes from and to gather possible relicts still present in Modern English. The paper discusses 56 such irregular weak verbs without vowel alternations and 9 archaisms preserving traces of such infl ection. The 56 irregular weak verbs are divided into groups according to the patterns they display and they are additionally marked depending on whether: (1) they have less common irregular preterite and past participle forms, which can be labelled as "literary" or "poetic," (2) they are literary themselves, (3) they have irregular preterite and past participle forms chiefl y in North American English, (4) they have regular variants. The initial plan included all irregular verbs but the extent of the problem coupled with the editorial limitations as to the size of the paper led to the following decisions: fi rst, to exclude the irregular strong verbs and save them for later analyses, and then, in the remaining irregular weak ones, to remove all those with vowel alternations (like keep, seek, lose, say) and to concentrate on the verbs without vowel alternations (investigated in the present paper). It is hoped that the aims of this paper as well as their realization can serve to make the content of the historical grammar course more meaningful to students by linking it to the problems present in Modern English and to the why-questions related to the subject of their studies.
Morphological Change of Verb and Noun in Old, Middle, and Modern English
Eltics Journal, 2014
This library research aims to (1) identify effects of various colonialism on the change of morphological aspects of English Language and (2) explore the morphological change of verb and noun. Those two aims will give the readers a perspective of how language changes through the time. This is a library research which is conducted by collecting and processing data of various lexicons from a book entitled 'A History of English Language'. The data processing is entirely based on some rules in a book entitled 'Sejarah Bahasa Inggris' written by Tarjana (1991). From the data processing, it is revealed that various colonizers 'demand' a language change, especially morphological aspect, in order a language understanding between colonizers and the colony will grow. Besides, morphological change will give us a clear description about natural characteristics that a language will always experience a change to accomodate the need of communicating effectively and efficiently.
From pure phonology to pure morphology the reshaping of the romance verb
Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes, 2009
This study deals with a significant morphological difference between Latin and Romance, namely that the latter has pervasive patterns of root-allomorphy absent from the former. Of particular interest here is the emergence of such allomorphy correlated with arbitrarily intersecting parameters of person, number, tense and mood in the verb. The alternations in question are, initially, the predictable consequences of regular sound changes. I argue that the phonological causation of this allomorphy is rapidly lost, and that the paradigmatic distribution of the resultant alternations is 'morphomic' in the sense of Aronoff (1994), lacking both phonological and morphosyntactic conditioning. These patterns provide an abstract paradigmatic template for wide-ranging and formally heterogeneous subsequent morphological changes across the Romance languages. But many scholars seek to analyse the resultant alternations in synchronically phonological terms, and some of the arguments adduced are powerful. This study reviews attempts to analyse in terms of phonological conditioning what I believe to be 'morphomic' alternations. While I defend the 'morphomicity' of the phenomena at issue, I also admit that the boundary between 'morphomic' and phonological phenomena may be less sharp than has usually been recognized.
Word Structure, 2015
This reference work on English morphology can be qualified as the (for a long time needed) successor to Marchand's famous handbook The categories and types of present-day English word formation, of which the second and last edition was published in 1969 . The book to be reviewed here, however, has a larger scope, as it does not only deal with word formation but also with inflection. Hence, it is a comprehensive book on English morphology. The authors of this book are all senior researchers in the domain of English morphology, with an individual track record of important publications on English morphology. So it was a good idea of these authors to work together to produce an authoritative volume on English morphology. What are the main features of this book compared to Marchand's book? First of all, it incorporates the results of decades on research on English morphology since the 1960's. Second, it is based on huge corpora, of a size that was unthinkable in the time that Marchand wrote his book. The main corpus used are COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English), the British National corpus, CELEX, and the Google Book Corpus. In addition, various dictionaries and reverse dictionaries were used. Many examples of complex words are