Morphemes
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2014
- What are the parts of words that matter for meaning? They're not always as big as you might think. This week, the Ling Space talks about morphemes, the smallest bits of meaning: how to find them, where to dig for them, and how different languages deal with them.
This is Topic #7!
This week's tag language: Mandarin!
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Looking forward to next week!
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I have watched several of the Ling Space videos, and I find that you make the dry aspects of linguistics so much more palatable. You always inject a bit of wit into these videos, which I appreciate. In addition, one cannot help but be impressed by your incredible knowledge of dozens of languages. You have single-handedly resurrected my interest in linguistics. In addition, you are helping me prepare for an important certification test. Thank you!
you are every linguistics student's savior. Thank you! Subscribed!
9 years later, this is still fascinating, and very well explained!!
Thank you for simply explaining this concept of morphemes!
+Rebecka Leigh Sure! Glad to be able to help out. ^_^
Thank you for being the only TH-camr I've heard pronounce Mi'kmaq correctly!
+Yulex You're welcome! One of my best friends is part Mi'kmaq. He'd have killed me if I screwed up the pronunciation in a video. ^_^
Brilliance in morpheming this topic. Thank you my friend.
Excellently and beautifully explained! Thank you so much!
Glad to be able to help! ^_^
New to your channel and you are so helpful! You literally saved our assignment :) Thank you so much for posting these videos! Subscribed!
you´re a magician!!! thanks for your knowledge.
This was so helpful. I'm going to ace this section of my Anthropology exam! :)
+Clare O'Brien Great! Glad to be able to help. ^_^
This is great! Easy to understand. Really useful ;)
understood it perfectly.... thanks for putting this up. I'm a student of applied NLP
2:43 what about Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.
Wow... good stuff. And I super appreciate your GOT references in your lesson.
Thanks! We had fun with it - it's part of what makes script writing enjoyable. ^_^
I have a class on this later and I wanted to brief myself in advanced; Really good video! Also, I'm very tired and it took me a while to realise the GoT / ASoIaF references were intentional! haha :)
That was an awesome explanation. Thank you :)
+Keveen Mihdidin Thanks for the kind words! We're glad to be able to help. ^_^
Oh my, thank you!
thank you so much
i'm so curious about how u've made those video, it looks so cute and joy to look at. Hope to see your reply ^^ thank u for happiness you bring to us when watch your channel
This has a kind of CrashCourse-y vibe, except that you dont talk as quickly as hank or john :P
Divi As a long-time Nerdfighter, I think I have to take that as a compliment! We're going for our own style, but I can't say we don't have any influence from Crash Course on the project. DFTBA!
" Stark " strong in Norse Sterke , when I was young I did not know English well ,I knew 'star and ark 'in Noah's ark story they used the stars ! That is how I learned English by many funny ways , another word is ster n Norse Streng ster-ke , if you know other languages then you may understand your own well.
badass video
Really helpful! I have a good feeling about my Morphology exam now :)
Glad to be able to help! Hope it went well. ^_^
Luvly jubbly!👍😁
There is a software,where you can make combinations or anagrams out of words and some times it may tell you that a long time ago people made these words up , short abbreviations , but be careful about languages with Roman Latin script many words that were borrowed were changed either not to cause confusion but did when written bow bow bough of a tree , and it is possible that the bow resembled a bough and the bow was a action of a bow, to bend
THANK YOU I have an exam tomorrow and this helped me a lot
Awesome t-shirt!
Thanks! I do rather like that one. ^_^
What is the difference between a stem and a root ? can some please help and with easy way to under stand thank you all
Thank's
Great series, I'm catching up and just finished this one. I missed your "I heart something" bumper sticker in this one.
Just FYI though, Chinese is full of bound morphemes, not sure why you think it isn't. Any negation is prefixed with either 不, 未, 无, 非, 弗, 毋, or 没. Only 不 can sometimes be said a free morpheme, but it isn't said that much. Or the 吧 in 走吧 (let's go) is never said on it's own, it is only bound. Just like the 吗 in 走吗？(shall we go? are you going?) is as well.
Also, many words in Chinese are two or more characters, like 走路 (to go for a walk). Sure, you could break these apart and one would mean "walk" and the other "road" as free morphemes. There are a zillion examples of these types of words that have two or more characters. 肚子，公鸡，资源，快乐。。。So many!
回头见！
As a native speaker of Chinese, I have to respectfully disagree. The negation characters can stand alone just like how the word "not" can stand alone; I wouldn't consider them prefixes (even though, if they are on their own, they probably won't mean very much.) Particles such as 吧 and 吗 are never said alone, but they are not considered to be attached to other words, just like how the word "a" or "an" is never said alone, but it is not considered "attached" to other words. Words that have two or more characters are mostly comprised of two free morphemes like compound words in English, such as "firetruck" or "lampshade." Chinese is pretty much entirely composed of free morphemes. I do appreciate your interest in the Chinese language and your offering of a different point of view though. I think the "I heart" sticker says "I heart phonetics" in IPA.
Good discussion Andy. I can certainly concede on 吧 and 吗, but take 可 as an example - this is an entirely bound morpheme that denotes "can" or "possible" - 可以，可能，可是，等等。Chinese two character words, of which these represent a large part of the colloquial vocabulary for nouns, are comprised largely of one bound and one free morpheme. Test this across a wide array of nouns - 桌子，你们。。。
Andy, I was raised in China and graduated from 北大 - I appreciate your comments about my interest in Chinese, but I don't think I am who you think I am.
Todd Main Ahh. I see what you mean about the 可 thing. After taking what you said into consideration, let me restate my thesis: Archaic Chinese was most likely comprised solely of free morphemes. Thank you for your input!
+Todd Main In some phrases, however, one may drop the word after 可。Would it then still be considered a bound morpheme?
@ The Ling Space - How many languages can you speak? sounds like you have the accents for Hebrew, Japanese and French!!
Thank you for this video. It was very helpful. I think there remains a question, however: does the categorization of morphemes into free and bound not contradict the very definition itself of morpheme i.e. "the smallest unit of meaning". If morphemes are literally a "unit" of meaning, how can some of them be bound by another morpheme if they are to have a meaning?
I hope this is helpful; some morphemes might have a direct meaning as in an easy definition. For example, "cat" refers to the animal we all know, whereas the morpheme "'s" in "cats" has a meaning in that we understand that the "'s" refers to plurality, even though the letter "s" doesn't necessarily 'mean' plurality in a simple definition. Both of these have meaning, but the meaning doesn't always mean a definition, per se. The meaning refers to an understanding of a grammatical function or context. I hope this clarifies your understanding.
@@kiraomernik9378 Thank your your kind and thoughtful reply. If I have understood you correctly, your point is that although plural s always has to follow a noun, it can be abstracted from any particular noun such as "cat". For this precise reason, it fits into the category of morpheme: plural s is a unit of meaning, because to understand its meaning one does not need to see it sitting with any particular noun. If I have guessed your meaning correctly, then I find your answer very convincing and should thank you again for kindly helping clarify my understanding.
You mentioned that "the" is a free morpheme in English but "ha" is a bound morpheme in Hebrew, but isn't that just due to the writing systems of English and Hebrew? "The" doesn't really mean anything on it's own, but the only reason why we write it as a separate word is just due to the writing system of English. If you were inventing a new writing for English. Hebrew or any other language (assuming they'd never been written down before), how would you decide if "the/ha" is a free or bound morpheme, since it's ultimately up to you whether to add a space or not?Anyway, thanks for the video!
When I was in a field methods class, the professor passingly discussed how to determine the word breaks in a stream of morphemes received from an elicitation session. Her work was mostly in Oneida, a language from the same family as Mohawk. If I remember right, she said that if you take two morphemes and you can put a word between them, then they are separate words. (I've somewhat botched that citation. Fact check me). If we apply that principle to your question we can arrive at the answer. In English we say and write, "The house". If we want to add an adjective we say and write, "The big house". If "the" were a bound morpheme, it would be attached to "big" in the second sentence. Essentially the second sentence would read more like "[The big]....[house]". That is a rather meaningless sentence. What is "the big"? What is "house" doing just dangling there? Adjectives aren't modified by articles like "the" or "a". This is where syntax begins to blend with morphology (conjuring memories of the quip: "Yesterday's syntax is today's morphology" or something along those lines). We know that "the" only modifies nouns. We know that a word can be inserted between "the" and the noun it modifies. Therefore, we know that "the" is not bound to the nouns it modifies, but in fact is a free morpheme. My knowledge of Hebrew grammar is fading, but I believe that nothing comes between "ha" and a noun it coincides with. We might be able to say that "the" doesn't mean anything on its own, but does any word in English mean anything on its own? The only example I can think of is the imperative form of verbs. "Yes", "no", and prepositions like "here" and "there" might stand on their own, but they are still meaningless if taken out of the context of a larger dialog. Of course, it is an interesting point you bring up about the independence of "the". It is a word that requires the presence of a noun in order to be realized in speech. You should read up on clitics. Perhaps English "the" is best analyzed as a clitic.
tl;dr In English we put other words between "the" and the nouns it modifies. In Hebrew they don't.
this guy bangs!
Do you notice that in most of your videos, when your first talking and the editing cuts to the next part, you almost always look weirdly to the left while still looking at the camera?
04:37 Isn't it that "the" is a bound morpheme? We cannot exactly use "the" as a stand-alone word :q It always goes with some noun. It doesn't have any meaning on its own. It only specifies that a certain noun is definite.
can someone explain to me how Princess has two morphemes?
Would field trip be one or two morphemes?
2
Nothing about Sound Symbolism??
A Haunter licks actually
my middle school made a gigantic mistake in teaching us latin, and then later trying to teach us how to divide words into morphemes lol. I remember all of us would keep on trying to divide the words into the latin meanings/morphemes instead of just stopping at english. Like if subduction is supposed to be divided into subduct - tion, we would try to divide subduct into latin (so we'd be like, "oh yeah! the verb subducere. divide sub and ducere."). Anyways i get it now but for a solid month there was a full classroom of frustrated twelve year olds lol.
How explainaton morphology and syntax
Is this series intentionally modeled after Crash Course? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just noticed a lot of production similarities.
Hello, I disagree with you about Mandarin Chinese. I believe that they also have free and bound morphemes. For example, 人民-rénmín- rén is a free morpheme(it can stand by its own) but mín is a bound morpheme (it cannot stand by its own)
good video, but could he have come up with a more common example than "rekillable" ? Is that a computer programmer word? Who uses that?!!!
"Rekillable" was probably just a joke, as in "Most zombies are rekillable"
please don't use these hard cuts.