A Brief History of Morphological Studies

The Stoic philosophers (Diogenes Laertes, Apollonius) first defined the word as a bilateral association of “the signifier” (τ ò σ η μ α î ν ο ν) and “the signified” (τ ò σ η μ α î ν ο μ ε ν ο ν). The Greeks did not analyze the word; they considered the word the smallest indivisible meaningful linguistic element. They used the formal regularities existing between words only as clues to grammatical and semantic categories. They defined the lexical classes, noun and verb (including adjectives among the former), and undertook the first investigations into Gender. Aristotle advanced these studies with his definition of words other than nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as “conjunctions” or “connectives” (σ ύ ν δ ε σ μ ο ι). He defined this latter class in terms of their relational functions and their lack of referential meaning in isolation. This distinction is an important one that will be restored and refurbished in the next chapter.

The Classical Greek philosophers then focused on the categories expressed in words without formally analyzing words. This fascination with semantic categories continued in Alexandria even though the Alexandrian grammarians are credited with converting language study from a subdiscipline of philosophy to an independent “technical” discipline. The Alexandrians expanded the number of recognized grammatical categories, defining them in terms of the formal characteristics of their inflectional paradigms as well as their referential properties.

Aristarchus and Dionysius Thrax categorized words into the canonical eight parts of speech, but their categories, too, were restricted to whole words, and did not include any analysis of sublexical elements. By the time of Dionysius, the Alexandrians had identified three Tenses (Present, Past, Future), two Aspects (Perfective, Imperfective), and three Voices (Active, Passive, Middle) among verbs. Dionysius reported 22 subclasses of nouns: proper, collective, generic, specific, appellative, and so forth; three Genders: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter; three Numbers: Singular, Dual, Plural; the five Cases: Upright, Generic, Dative, Causal, Vocative; two species: primitive and derivative, which had seven subspecies: patronymic, possessive, comparative, superlative, hypocoristic, denominal, and deverbal; and three shapes: simple, compound, and double compound. The Alexandrians did not associate these categories with distinct morphemes; rather, they simply sorted out whole words with inflectional variations expressing these categories. However, the individuation of all these categories laid the foundations of our understanding of lexical behavior across the succeeding centuries.

The Latin grammarians continued the Greek tradition with greater dexterity. In De Lingua Latina (47–45 BC), Marcus Varro classified the major parts of speech according to two properties: Case or Tense. Assuming much like Chomsky (1981) that either of these properties could be absent or present in a form, he came to the very modern conclusion that Latin has four major categories, not the N, V, A, P yielded by [±N, ±V], but (i) nominals (Ns and As), which he might have symbolized as [+Case, –Tense], (ii) verbs, [–Case, +Tense], (iii) participles, [+Case, +Tense], and (iv) adverbs, [–Case, –Tense].

Varro also distinguished attested from potential paronyms, noting that unguentum “perfume” has a Plural unguenta because of the existence of several kinds of perfume. Were similar differences in the kinds of olive oil and vinegar to arise, so would Plurals olea “olive oils” and aceta “vinegars”. However, Varro is perhaps best known for his discussions of the extensive violations (anomalia) of derivational regularity, for instance, the indeclinable nouns, the irregular Comparatives like bonum, melius, optimum, and derivational irregularities like those of (1.1):

Instead of the expected carnaria, the word for “butcher shop” in Latin is laniena. So the discovery of lexical exceptions to morphological patterns is ancient, indeed.

Despite their interest in paradigms, the Latin grammarians, like their predecessors, explored sublexical derivational properties only minimally and focused most of their efforts on the categories and etymologies. Problems such as those listed in (1.1) were not discussed in terms of differences in affixation; rather, the major categories were seen as whole words with “flexible ends”, the concept which underlies the current term, “inflection”. Not until Priscian (Institutiones grammaticœ, Books 9–10) do we find rules predicting inflected forms. Even here the rules predict the form of a whole word from that of another whole rather than from the behavior of sublexical elements. For example, Priscian’s rule for the Past Imperfective is as follows (from Kiel, 1857–1870, II, 457 – 58: quoted here from Matthews 1972: 10–11, my translation):

prœ teritum imperfectum... a prœ senti fiery sic: in prima quidem et in secunda coniugatione et quarta in “eo” desinente a secunda persona ablata “s” finali et addita “bam”: “amas amabam”, “doces docebam”, “is ibam”; in tertiœ vero omnibus verbis et quartœ in “io” desinentibus prima persona mutat “o” in “e” productam et assumit “bam”: “lego legebam”, “facio faciebam”, “venio veniebam”.

The Past Imperfective... is formed from the Present like this: for the 1^st and 2^nd Conjugation and the 4^th Conjugation ending in eo, the final s is deleted from the 2^nd Person and bam is added: amas amabam, doces docebam, is ibam; for all verbs in 3^rd Conjugation, however, and [those of] the 4^th in io, o is changed into e and bam is added: lego legebam, facio faciebam, venio veniebam.

Primary interest here focuses on disambiguating the categories themselves rather than on the allomorphy of the “accidents” of ending which symbolized them.

The study of the word strayed little beyond the accomplishments of the Latin grammarians throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. From a contemporary perspective, one might question how much morphological study had in fact been conducted up to this point, since the means of signaling categories generally remained all but wholly beyond the pale of interest. Reuchlin (1506) finally introduced the analysis of words in terms of roots and affixes to European audiences, a practice he had observed in the works of the Hebrew grammarians. In a more influential work a century and a half later, Schottelius (1663) extended Reuchlin’s division by distinguishing stammwö rter (stems), hauptendungen (main (= derivational) endings), and zufä llige endungen (accidental (= inflectional) endings), thereby recognizing differences in inflection and derivation for the first time.

Schottelius’ work began a shift toward a balanced study of the signified and the signifier. By and large, however, morphological research did not advance beyond the work of Reuchlin and Schottelius until the turn of the 19^th century, when the discovery of the Hindi grammarians generated an interest for formal decomposition. The Indian grammars from Pā nini’s Astā dhyā yī (ca. 500 BC) on distinguished derivation and inflection. They contained formal rules governing the behavior of sublexical elements, for example, Pā nini’s affixes (pratyaya) and augments. Pā nini’s affixes could be replaced before the surface level or deleted to accommodate zero morphology; empty realizations were also possible. All these wonders began to emerge in European word study on the wave of proofs that Sanskrit was related to the languages of Western Europe, which culminated in William Jones’ famous report to the Royal Society in 1786.

Von Humboldt (1836) turned attention outside the IE family, introducing infixation and incorporation to European theoreticians. Since these new types of morphology are formally, not categorially, distinguished from other types of morphology, von Humboldt was led to conclude that the variation in the sound form (Lautform) is the primary element distinguishing languages. Thus the first language typology, von Humboldt’s isolational, agglutinative, and inflectional types, is based exclusively on formal distinctions. Morphology had become a fairly clear component of grammar and its formal side, an accepted fact. Schleicher (1859) next produced the first formal theory of morphology. A forewarning of things to come, it dealt solely with the possible structural relations of affixes and stems as a basis for predicting language typology.

The influential work of von Humboldt and Schleicher, however, did not spell the end of categorial studies. Neogrammarians like Brugmann and Delbrü ck consistently discussed both the form and the grammatical functional categories associated with them in their monumental works at the end of the 19^th century. The Neogrammarians, in fact, first distinguished lexical classes (N, V, A, Adv) from the categories of grammatical functions, for example, Number, Person, Gender. Indeed, the brief Neogrammarian period represents the apogee of morphological studies balancing concern for content with that for form. The phenomenon was short-lived, however, for the Structuralist school accelerated the shift away from the study of morphological categories to the exclusive study of the allomorphy.

The Structuralists’ point of departure was the Classic assumption that the relation of all lexical and morphological sound to meaning is direct, mutual implication; Saussure even adopted the Greek terms, “signifier” and “signified”. Baudouin then combined the Greek concept of the sign with the newly discovered sublexical units to reorient the definition of the sign from the word as a whole to its sublexical elements. Baudouin placed roots, affixes, and inflectional endings into a single natural class, which he called, for the first time, “morpheme”. He originally defined his new concept as “the simplest psycho-linguistic elements in the guise of sound” (Baudouin de Courtenay 1889). But in Baudouin de Courtenay (1895), he refined this definition to “that part of the word which is endowed with psychological autonomy and for that reason is not further divisible”. Baudouin, therefore, not only distinguished sublexical units; he raised the status of affixes to that of the stems that bear them, defining both identically.

Saussure, mindful of the problems with Baudouin’s definitions, carefully avoided the term “morpheme” in his lectures and associated his definition of the sign only with words. Bloomfield, however, carried Baudouin’s definitions even further. Having shifted the classical definition of the word as a bilateral sign to the morpheme, Bloomfield then took the next logical step, to place all morphemes in the lexicon, previously the storage component of words. Bloomfield’s overall vision of morphology included (i) Baudouin’s Single Morpheme Hypothesis, which unifies all sublexical elements under the single rubric “morpheme”; (ii) the Sign Base Morpheme Hypothesis, which defines all such morphemes as signs, directly related associations of form and meaning; and (iii) Bloomfield’s own Lexical Morphology Hypothesis, which locates all such morphemes in the lexicon, where they are subject to the same selection and copying processes, without distinguishing the behavior of stems from that of affixes. This cluster of independent assumptions will be referred to throughout this book as the Lexical Morpheme Hypothesis (LMH), a hypothesis that dominates the contemporary language sciences.

Simultaneous to listing grammatical morphemes in the lexicon, Bloomfield denied any relevance of semantics to the study of linguistics. This step led to an abrupt shift of interest away from morphological categories altogether to Trubetskoi’s morphophonemics, allomorphy pure and simple. When Nida completed the first structuralist treatise on morphology, it represented little more than a set of discovery procedures for isolating affixes and determining their allomorphy. It simply ignored the categories that affixes express.

Not all thinkers were unaware of the problems with the structuralist assumptions. Saussure (1916) pointed out the fundamental contradiction of zero morphs to his theory of the linguistic sign and the complications in defining the word raised by compounds and contractions (one word or two?). In 1929 Karcevskij discovered morphological asymmetry in Russian inflection: the same ending may mark more than one grammatical function, while any given function may be marked by more than one ending. The inflectional ending -a in Russian, for example, marks NomSgFem, GenSgMas/Neu, and NomPlNeu. It is therefore multifunctional. On the other side, each of these Case functions, say, NomSg, is marked not by one, but by a set of endings: NomSgFem = -a, NomSgMas = -ø, NomSgNeu = -o. Karcevskij saw a major problem for sign theory in this since such patterns are not found among stem morphemes.

Bazell examined many problems with the structuralist approach to morphology: asymmetry, zero morphology, the bias in favor of form. His most enlightened criticism identified the correspondence fallacy, the presumption that an analysis at one linguistic level isomorphically corresponds to the analysis of the same object at other levels. Examining the problem of morphological asymmetry discovered by Karcevskij, Bazell (1949, 1952) argued that it follows neither that the phonological analysis of a word will isomorphically correspond to the semantic, nor that, because of this, no analysis is possible. Bazell chided attempts to conceive of such morphemes as the English Past Tense marker in sang as an ablaut variant of the suffix -ed. It does not follow from the fact that these two markers express the same grammatical function, he reasoned, that they are identical at any other level. It is quite possible that each level is defined in its own terms (in which case a set of principles mapping one level to the other will be required of linguistic theory).

Despite the catalogue of problems facing sign-based morphology compiled by Bazell, Saussure, and Karcevskij, neither Structuralism in its decline nor Generativism in its rise addressed the shortcomings of Bloomfield’s assumptions. In its first two decades, the Generative Revolution ignored morphology. Aronoff’s dissertation on derivational morphology was published 19 years after Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. It is true that the Natural Phonology movement of the late 1970’s was a response to the level of abstraction allowed by the allomorphy of Chomsky and Halle. However, initial concern focused primarily on phonological issues of allomorphy rather than the elementary questions of morphology. Recent schools of GB morphology, such as Lexical Morphology and Autosegmental Morphology, started out as Kiparsky’s Lexical Phonology and the Autosegmental Phonology of Goldsmith, respectively. Neither of these theories deals with meaning explicitly, though meaning is curiously the basis of the determination of formal units. Both theories assume Bloomfield’s three principles on the nature and place of morphemes in grammatical theory (LMH).

The history of morphological studies, in conclusion, teaches us that the critical objects of morphological research are lexical and grammatical categories, sublexical phonological constituents and, crucially, the relation between the two. The course of this history has witnessed a shift from the exclusive study of categories to an exclusive study of formal elements. Only very recently, and only in the work of a handful of contemporary morphologists, has morphological research returned to a balanced study of both form and function; however, the question of the relation between categories and exponents remains largely unexplored terrain.