Taznuba Afreen
For the intents and purposes of studying Morphology as means of analyzing word structures, discovering patterns and establishing goals concerning languages around the world. The Morphological processes exist to serve as one of the fundamental branches in the linguistic field; an approach which best demonstrates the grammatical relationships in between lexical units of word families, and accomplishes this by modifying stems to alter meanings that better fit the syntactic-communicational context of words. With the aim of doing so, it introduces Inflectional Morphology as one of its formal and central subdivisions which, according to Haspelmath (2002), “describes the relationship between the word-forms in a lexeme’s paradigm” (p. 34).
Such a phenomenon in which the syntactic category of a word remains unchanged, and it functions to generate a foreseeable, non-idiosyncratic conversion in meaning, whilst further shedding light onto the root-base-stem criteria of a word in a language. To elucidate, the stem is the base of an inflected word-form which “may consist solely of a single root morpheme” (Crystal, 2008, p.452). Furthermore, the root is one that serves as the irreducible core of it; a distinct type of a base form that is morphologically simple, whereby no cases of affixes are evident to be found.
On another note, the grammatical contrast and principles implemented by these notions can be used in the identification of Morphological constituents and their meanings across languages, in which the lesser-spoken ones prove to be no exception, as can be seen in the case of the Tzutujil language, one that is native to roughly 83,800 speakers in Guatemala of Central America. Such analysis can further assist in the translation, deduction, and interpretation of a language to other diversities, as demonstrated below, whereby English phraseologies such as ‘I left’, ‘he or she sleeps’ and ‘we sleep’ are represented in the Tzutujil language by using a combination of Tzutujil verbs and its patterns of subject-verb agreement:
| xinwari neeli ne7eeli nixwari xateeli natwari | ‘I slept,’ ‘he or sheleaves,’ ‘they leave,’ ‘you(pL) sleep,’ ‘you(sG) left,’ ‘you(sG) sleep’ | xoqeeli ninwari xixwari xe7eeli xwari | we left,’ ‘I sleep,’ ‘you(pL) slept,’ ‘they left,’ ‘he or she slept.’ |
To begin with,
xinwari = ‘I slept’ ninwari = ‘I sleep’
nixwari = ‘you (pL) sleep’ xixwari = ‘you (pL) slept
natwari = ‘you (sG) sleep’ xwari = ‘he or she slept’
∴ wari = represents the verb/root ‘sleep’
Next,
neeli = ‘he or she leaves’ xoqeeli = ‘we left’
ne7eeli = ‘they leave’ xe7eeli = ‘they left’
xateeli = ‘you (sc) left’
∴ eeli = represents the verb/root ‘leave’
Then,
xinwari = ‘I slept’ xixwari = ‘you (pL) slept’
xateeli = ‘you (sc) left’ xe7eeli = ‘they left’
xoqeeli = ‘we left’ xwari = ‘he or she slept’
∴ x- = past tense of the verbs
Hence, it can be deduced that ‘x-’ represents the past tense of the verbs ‘wari’ and ‘eeli’, i.e. ‘sleep’ and ‘leave’ respectively.
Also,
neeli = ‘he or she leaves’ natwari = ‘you (sG) sleep’
ne7eeli = ‘they leave’ ninwari = ‘I sleep’
nixwari = ‘you (pL) sleep’
∴ n- = present tense of the verbs
Hence, it can be deduced that ‘n-’
represents the present tense of the verbs ‘wari’ and ‘eeli’, i.e. ‘sleep’ and
‘leave’ respectively.
Moreover,
xinwari = ‘I slept’ ninwari = ‘I sleep’
∴ -in- = represents the pronoun ‘I’
Lastly,
xoqeeli = ‘we left’
∴
-oq- = represents the pronoun ‘we
| ‘I left’ | ‘he or she sleeps’ |
| If, -in- = ‘I’ x- = past tense of ‘leave’eeli = base form of the verb, ‘leave,’’ then, ‘I left’ = x- + -in- + -eeli = xineeli | If, n- = present tense of ‘sleep’wari = base form of the verb, ‘sleep.’ Following the examples of, neeli = ‘he or she leaves’xwari = ‘he or she slept,’ then, ‘he or she sleeps’ = n- + -wari = nwari |
| ‘we sleep’ | |
| If, n- = present tense of ‘sleep’ wari = base form of the verb, ‘sleep’ -oq- = ‘we,’ then, ‘we sleep’ = n- + -oq- + -wari = noqwari Then, ‘we sleep’ = n- + -oq- + -wari = noqwari |
References
Haspelmath, M. (2002). Understanding Morphology. London: Hodder Education.
Crystal, D. (1985). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (6th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.