Syntactic meaning

The other principal kind of meaning, syntactic, has less to do with content or reference and more to do with what we might call internal traffic directing. A morpheme that has syntactic meaning — a syntactic, or structural, morpheme — tends to direct other, more lexical morphemes, to signal relationships within a syntactic unit, to indicate what is subject and what is predicate, for instance.

Frequently, a syntactic morpheme is attached to a lexical one, in which case the attachment is called an inflection. The plural allomorphs are inflections, as are the tense markers, possession markers, and comparison markers. Such inflections as these do not have much lexical meaning themselves; the {ed} that signals the past tense in English does not have the content-meaning of a lexical morpheme like the word “apple”. But the inflections are necessary to show how one lexical morpheme is related to another, as in the phrase “John’s book”, where the possessive inflection {’s}[3] indicates that the book belongs to John. Similarly, tense signals a relationship: the word “pour”, which lacks an inflection, indicates action going on right now, in the present, whereas the word “poured”, composed of the lexical morpheme {pour} plus the inflection {ed}, signals a condition that has already occurred in the past. The relationship here is of time rather than of possession. Just as frequently, however, a syntactic morpheme is not attached to a lexical one, but occurs alone. Separate forms that primarily serve a syntactic rather than a lexical function are called function words, or sometimes operators. Examples of such words include “and”, “there”, “because”, “or”, “but”, “so”, “than”. Like inflections, these words are low in lexical meaning but high in traffic-directing or relationship-signaling function. The operator {and}, for example, primarily serves to connect two or more lexical words in a way that shows the two to have equivalent weight: “cats and dogs”, “red, white, and blue”. (Note that the connection is not “cats and dog” or “red, white, and cow”. Like other function words, “and” does not mean much, as we ordinarily use the word “mean”, but it does much in those phrases. If we changed “and” to “or” in each phrase, the relationship signaled among the words would be quite different.

Often it seems nearly impossible to distinguish lexical from syntactic meaning; there is much overlap between the two. Thus, almost any given morpheme may be classed as lexical or as syntactic, depending on how it is functioning in an utterance.