Glossar-English:Morphology and Syntax
Sub-Item to: Sign theories: Overview
Original: Morphologie und Syntax
Grammar versus MorphologySince the idea of grammar in the form of generative syntax[1] has been very fruitful in the field of language, various proposals have been made to study image syntax using an analogous picture grammar. However, these approaches were not very successful because the compositional syntax is primarily interested in syntactically correct compositions of words – as the elementary verbal signs – to form sentences – the complex verbal signs. A convincing pictorial analog of words in such a way that images could be understood as “sentences” formed from them has not yet been proposed. With morphology, however, there is another area of syntactic studies of language that examines words themselves as complex structures:[2] How should the inner structure of words and the relationship between different grammatical forms of a word or the relationships between related words be described in a meaningful way? Here, too, a generative approach is usually assumed, which, however, differs significantly from the grammatical sentence structures. One of the reasons for this is that the morphological analysis does not depend on the distinction between sentence and word. In other words, while grammatical compositionality only makes sense for sign systems organized in a word/sentence language, morphological considerations can be carried out more generally for any sign system with complex signs.[3] From a philosophical point of view, the question arises as to whether the morphological perspective is better suited than the grammatical one to grasp syntactical connections in images. A closer look at the morphological structures of linguistic sign systems in the narrower sense (2) and at related considerations of general language types (3) makes sense to answer this question.
Language: morphemes and morphological operatorsIn morphological analysis, a word is understood to be composed of segments that contribute to the meaning or grammatical function of the word, called ‘morphemes’.[4] For example, the suffix ‘-ed’ in English, the prefix ‘pré-’ in French, or the stem ‘-wend-’ in German are typical examples of morphemes. Morphological elements are primarily identified and classified by the substitution rule: For instance, some French words beginning with ‘pré-’ can be transformed into other French words by replacing the prefix with ‘re-’, ‘con-’, and ‘de-’, among others. Morphemes do not necessarily consist of a specific sequence of sounds or letters. In English, for example, the morpheme indicating the plural of a noun can appear in two variants, the so-called allomorphs: ‘-s’ or ‘-es’.[5] Although many morphemes are meaning-modifying, they do not necessarily have a meaning of their own: Most morphemes are not themselves words. Morphemes that are also words and, therefore, have their own meaning are called free morphemes or lexemes; the others are called bound.The semantic or grammatical function of a morpheme can also be ambiguous and differ in different compositions (e.g., the morpheme ‘-(e)s’ as an inflectional suffix or as a plural suffix in English). It is primarily the stem morphemes that convey a core meaning that morphological operations can modify. Morphological operations play a central role in the formation of new words. In general, they can be differentiated into internal modifications, which essentially involve vowel changes (e.g., ‘come’ to ‘came’), and external modifications by adding so-called affixes – in addition to prefixes and suffixes, this includes circumfixes (simultaneous use of prefixes and suffixes) and infixes (insertion of a syllable in between) – or by compound formation, which, for example, is responsible for many spontaneous word formations in German (e.g. ‘Bankenschutzschirm’). While internal modifications effectively change the “color” of a word, so to speak, external modifications change its shape and size. Morphemes are best understood as carriers of unsaturated sub-actions of an overall sign act without an independent pragmatic function, which in a more or less specific way influences the meaning or grammatical function (and thus the way it is used) of the whole word, but cannot themselves be considered sign acts.[6]
Isolating, polysynthetic, fusional, and agglutinative language systemsFormal sentence formation grammar and word-forming morphological contexts are two polar organizational principles between which the various (natural) languages can be classified on a scale. If one compares the average number of morphemes used in a language (or more generally in a verbal sign system) with the main type of grammatical sentence structure, then natural languages essentially arrange themselves along a diagonal:[7]
Languages in which grammatical sentence structures dominate the structure are called isolating languages. If a language dispenses almost entirely with grammatical rules of sentence formation and relies primarily on morphological rules of word formation, then one speaks of fusional languages. The extremes range, for example, from case formation only via prepositions on the one hand to a case system marking the word itself with significantly more than four cases on the other. Most languages fall between these two extremes (referred to here as ‘agglutinative’).[8] On the other hand, languages whose words consist of many morphemes on average are called polysynthetic. In contrast, languages in which words are formed from very few morphemes, often just a single lexeme, are called analytic. Synthetic languages occupy an intermediate position. As indicated in the table, human languages are arranged essentially along the diagonal between analytic-isolating systems and polysynthetic-fusional ones. Comparing German with English, for example, both are more in the middle. However, English is based on shorter words (more isolating) that are used in a more fixed sentence order, while German tends more towards compound formations, relies to a much greater extent on word inflections (more fusional), but at the same time allows a much more unrestricted word order. In extremely analytic-isolating languages such as Chinese, words composed of very few morphemes are never morphologically altered. All grammatical relations are expressed by special words[9] or determined by the word's position in the sentence (e.g., SPO). Sentences are direct groupings of words, usually in a fairly strict order. In contrast, an extremely polysynthetic-agglutinative language would consist of only one-word sentences. However, the words usually derive from a large number of morphemes that are fused to modify the whole meaning accordingly. Many Native American languages, such as Náhuatl, come very close to this extreme.[10] For example, the morphological structure of the one-word sentence ‘matgībulhahumš’ in Egyptian Arabic literally translates roughly to ‘not-ye-should-bring-her-thing’ (i.e., ‘You shouldn't bring them to her’). The word consists of the two circumflexes ‘ma...š’ (‹not … thing›, negation) and ‘t(i)...u’ (a marker for imperfect tense of the second person plural in jussive mode: about ‹You should do›), the two morphemes ‘l(ī)ha’ (dative of the third person singular feminine: ‹(to) her›), ‘hum’ (accusative of the third person plural ‹them›), as well as, as a stem, an internally modified lexeme ‘gīb’, which takes the imperfective form of ‘gāb’ and corresponds to the stem of 'to bring' in English:
All these morphological elements are amalgamated into a single word used as a sentence. The schema of such a complex combination by fusing morphemes with partial phonemic omissions together with the use of enclosing and inserting affixes can, indeed, evoke the idea of pictorial syntactic structures much more than the schema of formal grammars.
Transfer to imagesObviously, the geometric elements of a picture carrier and their relative arrangement are decisive for the meaning and pragmatic function of a picture, without each being able to be assigned a clearly defined meaning of its own, independent of the picture as a whole. A small orange-red filled circle can serve – among other things – as a snowman's nose or setting sun. Flatly fused together, these elements form a self-contained morphological unit that is clearly analogous to the one-word sentences of a polysynthetic language. Since such a merging of function-modifying components into a single sign does not depend on the word/sentence distinction constitutive of language (in the narrower sense), a morphological consideration of image syntax does not commit itself in the same way to basic elements and compositional rules, which have so far prevented the success of image-grammatical analyses. This idea is discussed in the article ⊳ Image Morphology in more detail.[11] |
Notes
Literature
[Bloomfield 1933a]Bloomfield, Leonard (1933): Language. Henry Holt and Co, New York.[Haase 2007a]Haase, Martin (2007): Sprachtypologie: Eine Einführung in die Erforschung der Vielfalt der Sprachen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen.[Lehmann online]Lehmann, Christian (2012): Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung.[Schleicher 1859a]Schleicher, August (1859): Zur Morphologie der Sprache. Mémoires de l'académie impériale des sciences de St. Pétersbourg, 1?, 7. Version 1: 2013 Responsible: Editing: Contributions by: Joerg R.J. Schirra und Marcel Lemmes — (Note) Quote as: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||