Chapter 4 - Dissembling words

Summary

Chapter outline

The chapter discusses morphological patterns that are either very rare or very frequent across languages. Crosslinguistic generalizations regarding the forms, meanings, co-occurrence patterns, and orderings of morphemes will be presented, followed by a discussion of the crosslinguistic validity of some of the key terms of morphological typology,

Introduction

In Chapter 3, we discussed how words come together to form sentences. In the present chapter, we will take the reverse view: how morphemes are joined to form words. Examples of words composed of smaller meaningful units were already given in Chapter 2, but in what follows, we will take a more systematic view of morphological composition. The basic question is: what combinations of morphemes make well-formed words in various languages?

The best way to begin to answer this question is by considering ill-formed words and identifying the sources of their failures. In (1), examples of English words that miss the mark are given with the correct forms on the right.