Morphological structure variation - Italian, English, Swahili and Chinese the languages considered

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Practice essay:

Explain, with reference to appropriate examples, how morphological structure can vary between languages.

  1. Introduction

According to Bauer (1988 : 248), morphology is “the study of the ways in which lexemes and word-forms are built up from smaller elements, and the changes that are made to those smaller elements in the process of building lexemes and word-forms”. In morphology, the words of a language are classified into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and a few other classes.

In this paper, I will concentrate more on the structure and on the properties of nouns and verbs in order to analyse, depending on the type of language, how morphological structure vary between languages.

I will also take a look, regarding nouns, to morphological variation, and, regarding verbs, to verbal inflection.

But before doing so, I must say that languages are classified on the basis of their morphological characteristics, even though there can always be exceptions [overlappings]: hence, we have isolating, agglutinative and fusional languages. Chinese, Swahili and Italian belong respectively to each one of these categories, while English represents a “particular case” in its morphological characteristics.

Languages as Chinese do not have a morphology, because there are no changes in the internal form of a Chinese word: thus, there is no distinction between a word and a morpheme.

The case of agglutinative languages, instead, is the opposite: in Swahili, one of the most widely spread languages of Africa, for example, a single word is characterized by more morphemes, which can be easily separated.

Italian, as well as other Indo-European languages, belongs to the category of fusional languages, where a single morpheme can express more than only one meaning and where there are plenty of examples of allomorphs, (two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments).

  1. Nouns

According to Gibbon, English nouns are composed by a stem and an inflection.

A stem, like “table” or “hand”, has a lexical meaning, and relates a word to its syntactic (through subject-verb agreement) and semantic context. It can be simple or complex, like “beautiful” (stem + derivational affix), “armchair” (stem + stem), “bus-driver” (stem + stem + derivation).

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Inflexions of English words are suffixes, like the “–s” of the plural, stem vowel changes, as in “foot-feet” and prefixes, as in “unhappy”.

In Italian, as Ranta points out, nouns have the parameter of number. Each noun has two forms, the singular and the plural. Italian has a small number of noun declensions: if a noun ends with “-e”, as piede (foot), its plural form will end with “-i”, piedi (feet); if a noun ends with “–a”, as testa (head), its plural form will end with “–e”, teste (heads); finally, if a noun ends with “-o”, as testo (text), its plural form will end with ...

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