CG 04: POLISH AND ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY

1. Aims of morphology:
a) “morphology is concerned with the relationship between the form of a word
and its meaning”
b) types of relationships: regular (e.g. manage, manager) and ‘natural’ in onomatopoeia
(miaow) or sound symbolism (slimy) vs. irregular (suppletive) (e.g. bad, worse, worst)
c) morphology is related to phonology (form), semantics (meaning), lexicon (lexical items)
and syntax (syntactic functions, morphosyntax)

2. Types of words:
a) a word – a meaningful unit that is distinct, internally stable and mobile, and is a building-block
of larger units. e.g. She performed beautifully.
b) a lexeme – a word denoting a distinct concept, e.g. perform
c) a word form – a grammatically conditioned variant of a lexeme, e.g. perform, performs,
performed

3. Types of categories:
a) lexical categories (parts of speech; parts of the lexicon), e.g. noun, verb
b) syntactic categories (sets of words or phrases with a similar distribution), e.g. noun, NP
c) grammatical categories (grammaticalized sets of features), e.g. number, tense

4. Types of morphemes:
1) morphemes and allophones
a) a morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit of a language, e.g. dog-s
‘morpheme’ can refer to either:
• an abstract sign (the plural morpheme -s) or
• a minimal sign (the variants of -s: [z], [s], [əz])
b) allomorphs – contextual realizations of a morpheme, e.g. [z], [s], [əz] are the allomorphs
of -s
2) roots and stems
a) a root – the simplest possible form of a lexical morpheme, e.g. English dog, Latin am- ‘love’
the same root is often found in related words, e.g. colorful, colored, colorless
b) a stem = a base – a simple or complex form to which an affix is added, e.g. sail-ed,
amuse-ment-s
3) roots and themes
in synthetic / fusional languages the stem (theme) may consist of a root and a thematic
morpheme:
Polish: [czyt- (root) + -a- (thematic vowel)] = czyta- (stem)
czyta- (stem) + -m (1 pers. sg. pres.) = czytam ‘I am reading’
 4) free and bound morphemes
free morphemes can stand alone, e.g. dog, while bound morphemes must attach
to a stem, e.g. dog-s, un-happy
roots differ with respect to independent use and distribution:
Germanic and Latin vocabulary in English, e.g. read-able (free) vs. leg-ible (bound)
cranberry morphemes (bound roots with a very restricted distribution), e.g. cran-berry
bound roots are more typical of fusional languages, e.g. Polish czyt- (cf. czytać ‘read’)
5) lexical and grammatical morphemes
a) lexical morphemes carry lexical information, e.g. amuse-ment-s
b) grammatical morphemes have a grammatical function, e.g. amuse-ment-s
lexical ad grammatical morphemes differ with respect to:
• openness (their number in a language) and
• obligatoriness (whether their presence is optional or obligatory), e.g. performs,
performed (obligatory) vs. performance (optional)
6) bound morphemes (affixes)
bound morphemes are divided into:
a) derivational morphemes (BDMs) – create new words
b) inflectional morphemes (BIMs) – modify stems to express grammatical meanings
main differences between BDMs and BIMs:
• adding a BDM changes the meaning of the stem in an overt way, e.g. un-successful
• only BDMs change the lexical category, e.g. sing-er
• only BIMs indicate relations between words, e.g. subject-verb agreement
in She like-s sushi.
• BDMs attach closer to the root than BIMs, e.g. agree-ment-s but not *agree-s-ment

5. Morphological processes:
1) affixation:
suffixes, e.g. amuse-ment-s and prefixes, e.g. un-happy
also: infixes, e.g. fan-fucking-tastic, interfixes, e.g. editor-in-chief and circumfixes,
e.g. German ge-frag-t ‘ask Past Participle’
2) cliticization:
clitics attach to a word / phrase / clause to form a single prosodic unit and modify larger
stretches of discourse, e.g. I’m, The Queen of England’s house
3) compounding:
combining already existing roots, e.g. blackbird
(noun) compounds have a conventionalized meaning and initial stress, e.g. black 'board
‘board that is black’ vs. 'blackboard ‘board for writing on’
stump compounds are formed from initial syllables of words, e.g. Pan Am (Pan American
World Airways)
 4) blends:
combinations of two stems with one or both stems reproduced partially, e.g. brunch
(breakfast + lunch) (both truncated)
5) reduplication:
‘reduplicative compounds’ in English, e.g. mish-mash (partial), Is he a friend friend or are they
going out? (complete)
6) types of modification of the root:
a) modification – change of stem vowel or consonant or addition of a sound, e.g. man : men
(cf. umlaut); br- : bierz ‘to take’ (cf. ablaut)
b) suppletion – presence of different roots within the inflectional paradigm of a lexeme,
e.g. be : am : was: been (cf. ‘be’)
c) conversion – change of the word class without addition of an affix, with or without stress
change, e.g. bottle (n.) vs. bottle (v.), per'mit (v.) vs. 'permit (n.)
7) acronyms and abbreviations:
a) acronyms – formed from initial sounds, letters or strings of words, e.g. NATO
b) abbreviations – formed as above but are not pronounced as words, e.g. MBA
8) clipping:
involves the shortening of a polysyllabic word, e.g. advertisement > ad, advert
9) back-formation:
a word resembling a derived form undergoes ‘deaffixation’, e.g. edit (from editor),
on the analogy with words like act vs. actor
back-formation is similar to clipping but results in a form with a different meaning and lexical
category

6. Grammatical categories in Polish and English:

7. Number, case and gender in Polish and English
1) number:
in English, number is expressed by:
• (an allomorph of) the plural morpheme -s (cf. ‘regular’ inflection)
• other irregular (but common) ways: suffixes (children, data, kibbutzim), stem
alteration (mouse : mice), suppletion-like forms (person : people), zero form
in Polish, the plural form depends on the gender and declension of the noun, e.g. dom-y
‘houses’, dam-y ‘ladies’, kośc-i ‘bones’
2) case:
in English, case inflection occurs in
• nouns to mark genitive / possessive case, e.g. Hannah’s book
• pronouns to mark genitive case (my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose)
and objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom)
in Polish, case is used to convey a range of syntactic relations, e.g. with nom. and acc. cases
specifying the subject and object
3) gender in English:
English has a natural (pronominal) gender system, where gender agreement is only found
in the choice of anaphoric pronouns
gender assignment is semantic (masc. for male human beings and higher animals,
fem. for female human beings and higher animals, and neuter for inanimates)
inanimate nouns can be used with an animate pronoun in cases of personification and emotional
coloring, e.g. she for ships, the Earth, names of countries and vehicles
gender in Polish:
Polish has grammatical gender, with masculine, feminine and neuter agreement found
in adjectives, participles, demonstratives, pronouns, verbs and numerals
assignment is based on semantic (sex), phonological (e.g. type of final sound)
and morphological criteria (inflection, derivation and compounding)
subgenders are “agreement classes which control minimally different sets of agreement”
• accusative = genitive in sg. masc. animate nouns and pl. masc. personal nouns,
e.g. kupiłem pięknego psa, zobaczyłem starych przyjaciół
• accusative = nominative in other masculine nouns, e.g. kupiłem piękny obraz,
zobaczyłem stare psy

8. Conclusions:
1) Different types of morphemes reflect the different roles they play in language structure,
e.g. in grammar (inflection) and lexicon (derivation).
2) The variety of morpheme types found in a language reflects its historical development
(diachrony) and allows comparisons with other languages (synchrony)
3) While differences between Polish and English morphology often reflect the typological
profiles (as more or less synthetic / fusional), there is considerable variation in word structure
and expression of lexical / grammatical meanings.