Problematic Cases

PROBLEMATIC CASES
Problems in morphological description arises in the analysis of different languages,

known as problematic cases.
For example:
 The relationship between law and legal - law (noun) - legal (adjective) plus Law is
the result of borrowing into old English (lagu) from a Scandinavian source over
1000 years ago. Legal was borrowed from the Latin from (legalis = of the law)
about 500 years.
 The relationship between mouth and oral - mouth (noun) - oral (adjective), Mouth
is from old English. Oral was borrowed from Latin.
Consequently, there is no relationship between the noun law and legal, mouth and oral.
A full description of English morphology will have to take account of both historical
influence and the effect of borrowed element.
The Peculiar Nature of Morphology:
From a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of the levels of linguistic analysis.
But morphology is basically complimentary, as well as complex and irregular: anything
that a language does with morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with
syntax; and there is always some other language that does the same thing with syntax.
For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: thus, dogs mean
"more than one dog". This inflection lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the
distinction between one and more-than-one. Of course, we could always say the same
thing in a more elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology:
more than one dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: one or more
dogs; a number of dogs greater than one; etc.
Modern Standard Chinese (also known as "Mandarin" or "Putonghua") makes exactly
the opposite choice: there is no morphological marking for plurality, so we can be briefly
vague about whether we mean one or more of something, while we need to be more long-
winded if we want to be specific.
As an example of another kind of morphological packaging, English can make iconify from
icon and -ify, meaning "make into an icon." Perhaps it's nice to have a single word for it,
but we could always have said "make into an icon." And many languages lack any general
way to turn a noun X into a verb meaning "to make into (an) X", and so must use the
longer-winded mode of expression. Indeed, the process in English is rather unpredictable:
we say vaporize not *vaporify, and emulsify not *emulsionify, and so on.
In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from syntax is its combinatoric
irregularity. Words are mostly combined logically and systematically. So, when you
exchange money for something you can be said to "buy" it or to "purchase" it -- we'd be
surprised if (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could only be "purchased," while
1
clothing, automobiles and pencils could only be "bought," and things denoted by words
of one syllable could only be "acquired in exchange for money."
Yet irrational combinatoric nonsense of this type happens all the time in morphology.
Consider the adjectival forms of the names of countries or regions in English. There are
at least a half a dozen different endings, and also many variations in how much of the
name of the country is retained before the ending is added:
-ese Bhutanese, Chinese, Guyanese, Japanese, Lebanese, Maltese, Portuguese,
Taiwanese
-an African, Alaskan, American, Angolan, Cuban, Jamaican, Mexican, Nicaraguan
-ian Argentinian, Armenian, Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, Egyptian, Ethiopian,
Iranian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Serbian
-ish Irish, British, Flemish, Polish, Scottish, Swedish
-i Afghani, Iraqi, Israeli, Kuwaiti, Pakistani
-? French, German, Greek
And you can't mix 'n match stems and endings here: *Taiwanian, *Egyptese, and so on
just don't work. To make it worse, the word for citizen of X and the general adjectival form
meaning as;sociated with locality X are usually but not always the same.
Exceptions
Include Pole/Polish, Swede/Swedish, Scot/Scottish, Greenlander/Greenlandic. And there
are some oddities about pluralization: we talk about "the French" and "the Chinese" but
"the Greeks" and "the Canadians". The plural forms "the Frenches" and "the Chineses"
are not even possible, and the singular forms "the Greek" and "the Canadian" mean
something entirely different.
It's worse in some ways than having to memorize a completely different word in every
case (like "The Netherlands" and "(the) Dutch"), because there are just enough partial
regularities to be confusing.
Despite these derivational anfractuosities, English morphology is simple and regular
compared to the morphological systems of many other languages.

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PROBLEMATIC CASES

Problems in morphological description arises in the analysis of different languages,

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