Understanding Morphology (review)

Haspelmath’s book, like others in the series, is intended as a beginner-level text for students with little or no background in linguistics; it is written by a highly respected author and draws on examples from a wide range of languages to illustrate the principal issues involved in the study of a particular subdiscipline of linguistics. Such a book on morphology is particularly welcome to those of us who (like H himself) have confronted morphological problems in our own descriptive work and hope to introduce undergraduate students to the joys, frustrations, and rewards of applying theoretical principles to the analysis of language. Morphology these days has become—in North America, at any rate—something of a lost art and is frequently not even taught as a core component of undergraduate (let alone graduate) programs. A first-rate textbook would be just the thing to re-ignite in student and professor alike the passion our field once had for morphological analysis.

On the face of it, Understanding morphology seems to fit the bill. It begins with an overview of morphology and its place in the larger discipline (Ch. 1) and then gives an accessible introduction to basic concepts such as lexeme, morpheme, and allomorph (Ch. 2). The discussion also covers the lexicon and morphological rules (Chs. 3 and 9), derivation and inflectional paradigms (Chs. 4 and 7), compounding and morphological constituency (Ch. 5), means of distinguishing words, affixes, and clitics (Ch. 8), and productivity and frequency effects (Chs. 6 and 12). Morphophonology is dealt with in Ch. 10 and valence-changing morphological alternations are covered in Ch. 11. The discussion throughout is well illustrated with examples from over ninety languages (though the familiar Indo-European ones are still favored for argumentation), and data is presented in standard three-line interlinearized format, which is nicely explained for students in an appendix to Ch. 2 (34–36). Each chapter ends with a set of exercises, the majority of which are on-task and well constructed, although occasionally the instructions are a bit opaque (e.g. ex. 1.4, p. 12). As a teacher, one is left wishing for more—perhaps in the form of a workbook and an answer key for the exercises—but the problem here is simply quantity, not quality.

In terms of theory, H makes an effort to present a variety of points of view on most issues, though his presentation is by no means impartial. Much of the text is given over to the development of an approach that he refers to as the word-based model. In this model, morphological alternations are represented as bilateral relations between matrices containing schematic wordforms, their meanings, and their syntactic properties. These matrices (which bear an unacknowledged resemblance to de Saussure’s (1916) linguistic sign and to Mel’čuk’s (1993) extension thereof) are presented as in 1, a representation of the regular plural-formation rule in English (48).

(1)

The equation here represents an inductive generalization over the set of all English nouns whose bare root expresses the singular and whose plural is expressed by the root plus ‘s’. The meaning ‘plural’, however, is not carried so much by the ‘s’ itself as by the alternation /X/ ∼ /Xs/; novel forms are produced and processed based on analogy with previously learned forms showing the same alternation rather than by the rule-governed concatenation of an abstract morpheme, /-s/, with the root. The avoidance of traditional concatenative rules allows H to use the same formalism for the full range of morphological processes running from ordinary affixation to suprasegmental and reduplicative alternations. An analogy-based approach also allows us to account for semiproductive patterns that apply to only a few forms and, as H is quick to point out, seems consistent with what we know about diachronic change (analogical leveling and extension) and psycholinguistic processing. The idea of induction and analogy as a source of linguistic patterns has regained a certain currency in some sectors of our field recently (e.g. Van Valin...