Morphological Change

Abstract

Morphology is the subdiscipline of linguistics that deals with the structure of words. The study of word structure comprises two domains: inflection and word formation. Inflection deals with the formal expression of morphosyntactic properties of words (such as number, case, and tense), whereas word formation concerns the ways in which words are made. Both types of morphology can be studied from a historical perspective. Commonly, the study of changes in inflection and word formation is referred to as diachronic morphology, or morphological change. Such changes are the effects of various form of language behavior (such as acquisition, processing, variation, storage, and lexicalization) or of language contact. The historical study of inflection focuses on three issues: how inflectional systems arise, how and why they change, and how they erode. The rise of inflection through the grammaticalization of words into inflectional affixes is an important domain of historical research. The historical study of word formation considers the emergence of and changes in word formation patterns. Syntactic structures may develop into morphological structures, and compound constituents may develop into affixes. Word formation processes may lose their productivity or completely disappear from a language. New morphological patterns may arise through the morphologization of once phonological patterns. For instance, the German umlaut, the alternation between back vowels and front vowels, was once triggered by the presence of suffixes with high vowels but, can be used in present-day German as a morphological process, as in the plural form of the German Vater “father,” Väter. Language contact can have all kinds of effects on the morphology of a language. For example, Germanic languages have borrowed greatly from French in the domain of word formation. Inflectional systems may simplify, owing to their being obtained in second-language acquisition. Creole languages and their morphology arise through contact between speakers with different native languages. Morphological change may also occur at the level of the individual word. The inflection of a word may change (e.g., from irregular to regular), and complex words may lose their morphological transparency (lexicalization). Morphological change functions as a testing ground for various theories of the nature and architecture of the grammar of natural languages; for providing a framework in which morphological changes can be properly interpreted and explained.