Morphology as linguistic discipline

Morphology is the branch of grammar which studies the structure or forms of words, primarily through the use of the morpheme construct. It is traditionally distinguished from syntax, which deals with rules governing the combination of words in sentences. It is generally divided into two fields: the study of inflections (Inflectional Morphology) and word formation (Lexical or Derivational Morphology). Inflectional Morphology is the result of applying processes to words while Derivational Morphology is the result of concatenating morphemes (Spencer, 1991: 9).

Mark Aronoff et al. (2005) states that a major way in which morphologists investigate words, their internal structure, and how they are formed is through the identification and study of morphemes, often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces with grammatical function.

The word as a unit in morphological description

Kosch (2006: 2) points out that although the discipline of morphology accepts the word as its unit of analysis, the word is by no means an ideal basis for universal grammatical description. For example, in one language you may need a sentence (consisting of a number of words) to express something, whereas in another you may need only one word to express the same information as in the following:

In the above examples, the English examples constitute a sentence in which one recognise three units corresponding to the two meanings. Each of the two units is an independent word. In the isiXhosa counterpart, we have sentences which consist of only one unit, namely, a single word. From the above examples it becomes clear that the concept word cannot be applied universally to describe meaningful units of different languages.

The morpheme as minimal unit

Traditionally, meaning bearing parts of a complex word that is, the different building blocks that make it up are called morphemes. It is held that morphemes are the meaningful units in a language. They can be broken down no further into meaningful parts. Words and phrases can be broken down into morphemes, but morphemes cannot. Morphemes are arranged in a particular order, much depending on the part of speech of that particular word. Each morpheme has a distinct grammatical function. As a whole, the word is a meaningful unit of sounds.

Most morphemes are meaningful in one way or another. They may be meaningful either by contributing lexically, (semantically) to the content of a word or in the sense of performing a grammatical function Kosch (2006).

• The classification of morphemes:

  Morphemes are commonly classified into free and bound morphemes.

• Free and bound morphemes:

  Free morphemes can occur as separate words as in the ideophones:

  • Shwaka! (sound for sudden disappearance)
  • Minxi! (sound for being trapped in a situation)
  • Gqi! (sound to indicate sudden appearance)

  Bound morphemes are morphemes which occur only in conjunction with one or more morphemes:

  • Siyadlala. < si+ya+dlal+a ‘We are playing.’
  • Bayancokola. < ba+ya+ncokol+a ‘They are conversing.’
  • Uyabona. < u+ya+bon+a ‘He/she sees’

Roots and stems

Morphemes are divided into two main types, namely roots and affixes. They are the minimal units of grammatical analysis which can be used to form words.

Root

According to Kosch (2006: 7), roots are those inomissible morphemes which carry the basic meaning of a word. They may occur as free or as bound morphemes. Free morphemes in the Bantu languages are limited. They have the status of autonomous words and do not require the assistance of affixes to complete a meaning.

Roots are single morphemes that carry the principal semantic load of a word. It is the most constant part of a word and gives the word its basic meaning though not complete as in the following where the root is presented in brackets:

• aba(sebenz)i < ‘workers’
• imi(theth)o < ‘laws’
• i(thamb)o < ‘bone’

The majority of roots are bound morphemes to which other bound morphemes are attached as shown above. As a bound morpheme, the root will not be independently meaningful, but will require one or more affixes to modify its meaning to form a complete word. In the following examples the root -bon- constitute the basic meaning ‘see’ in each of the given words, while the affixes serve to particularise the meaning:

• siya(bon)a ‘we see’
• siya(bon)ana ‘we see each other’
• siyaku(bon)isa ‘we show you’
• baza ku(bon)akala ‘they will be visible’
• im(bon)i ‘a seer’.

When words are formed, they will always be built around a root as the essential meaning-bearing element. The roots need not be currently existing ones. New words based on totally new roots can also be produced. There is no limit to the number of roots which can be created in a language and roots are therefore said to form an open category (Kosch, 2006: 7).

Stems

The stem of a word consists of the root plus all the suffixal morphemes in the word (Kosch, 2006: 10). Cole (1987: 66) writes that stems are those portions of words which remain when all prefixal (but not suffixal) formatives are removed. Doke (1930: 286) points out that: “In fact a stem is generally speaking, that part of a word which is shorn of its prefixal elements.” From the above-mentioned definition, there seems to be consensus what a stem is as in the following:

• Ndim(fundis-ile) ‘I taught him/her’
• Sim(bonis-ile) ‘we showed him/her’
• Bam(ngxolis-ile) ‘they scolded him/her’

In isiXhosa, the following processes play a role in word formation: affixation, substitution, reduction, reduplication, and compounding.

Affixation

Affixation is the morphological process that consist of adding an affix (i.e., a bound morpheme to a morphological base (Van Goethem, 2020). It is cross-linguistically the most common process that human languages use to derive new lexemes (derivational affixation or to adapt a word’s form to its morphosyntactic context (inflectional affixation). According to Van Goethem (2020) suffixes (i.e., bound morphemes following the base) and prefixes (i.e., bound morphemes preceding the base) are the most common affixes, with suffixation being more frequently recorded in the worlds’ languages than prefixation.

Affixation is used in isiXhosa as a word forming process. Nominal derivation covers the formation of nouns from stems of other nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as in the following:

• Noun:
  • intloni ‘shame’
  • umona ‘jealousy’
• Verb:
  • ukuhlonipha ‘to respect’
  • monela ‘to be jealous of’
• Adjective
  • -ncinci ‘small/little’
  • -khulu ‘big’
• Verb
  • nciphisa ‘decrease’
  • khulisa ‘augment’

The following are instances wherein derivational affixation is used in isiXhosa:

• vala ‘close’ > valwa ‘be closed’
• luma ‘bite’ > lunywa ‘be bitten’
• umfazi ‘woman’ > abafazi ‘women’

Substitution

Substitution is a process whereby one morpheme is replaced by another in order to change a grammatical category such as the number (singular or plural) of a noun or the polarity (positive or negative) of a verb (Louwrens, 1994: 190). Consider the following:

• um-ntu ‘person’, aba-ntu ‘people’
• um-limi ‘farmer’, aba-limi ‘farmers’
• um-lenze ‘leg’, imi-lenze ‘legs’

Reduction

Reduction is a process whereby a morpheme is removed from a more complex word. This however is not a common process in isiXhosa.

Reduplication

Reduplication is viewed as the double occurrence of a morphological constituent meeting a particular morpho semantic description. It is a term that is used to refer to the process whereby a word or a part of a word is duplicated/repeated. This is done to achieve a particular semantic effect such as emphasis or to convey the idea that an action is carried out intermittently (Louwrens, 1994: 163).

Bantu languages show that verbs, nouns, and adjectives, numerals and even pronouns and demonstratives can be reduplicated with specific semantic effects (Gabriel et al., 2018). Consider the following:

• hlamba ‘wash’ and hlambisisa ‘wash thoroughly’
• sika ‘cut’ and sikelela ‘cut finely/minutely’
• izinto ‘matters’ and zinto-yinto ‘various matters’.

Compounding

Compounding refers to nouns formed by combining two or more words to represent one concept (a single unit of meaning (Mashauri, 2018: 3) Morphological, phonological and syntactic rules work together in forming nouns. A compound is pronounced as one word and considered morphologically as a simple unit of meaning. Most of the compounds created in the Bantu languages belong to the category of nouns as shown in the following:

• ikhaya ‘home’ + -khulu ‘big’ > ukhayakhulu ‘main house/home’
• ukusebenza ‘working’ + emigodini ‘in mines’ > umsebenzimigodini ‘mineworker’
• ukufa ‘death’ + ilizwe ‘country’ > imfazwe ‘war’
• ukutshona ‘going down/setting’ + ilanga ‘sun’ > intshonalanga ‘sunset’

According to Hendrikse and Poulos (2006: 252) the identification and classification of word categories in African languages are typically modelled on the classical word category approach in Western European languages (e.g., English, French, and German). The following main categories in African languages (including isiXhosa) are:

• Noun (Substantive)
• Pronoun (Substantive)
• Qualificative (Substantive)
• Verb (Predicative)
• Copulative (Predicative)
• Adverb
• Ideophone
• Interjection
• Conjunction
• Interrogative.

IsiXhosa word classes contain morphemes that can stand alone and others which cannot stand alone, they can only function as parts of words. Morphemes that can stand alone are called free morphemes. Xhosa word classes contain those that increase membership with ease referred to as open classes as well as others referred to as closed classes. The adoption of new nouns, verbs and qualificatives does not appear to be limited. On the other hand, conjunctives and pronouns tend to be closed, in other words new words are seldom added to a language in these categories.

According to Berg (2018: 160) tokenisation is the segmentation of running text into tokens as words, numbers, punctuation marks, parentheses, and similar entities. Hendrikse and Poulos (2006: 246) point out that traditionally, the classification of word categories (or parts of speech) in African languages has been modelled on Western European languages without taking cognisance of the fact that European languages and the African languages belong to different language types. Moreover, the classification of word categories in the European languages has been typically based on the highly questionable classical view of categorisation in general. These historical factors have had rather adverse implications for the various word categories which have been distinguished in the African languages Hendrikse and Poulos (2006: 246). Except for a few minor word categories that are free morphemes in the lexicon, words in the African languages cannot simply be tagged as a specific word category, N(oun), Adj(ective), etc. as is the practice in the tagging of word categories in isolating languages as English. Neither can the morphemes in a word construction in African languages simply be linearly tagged with a tag assigned to each morpheme. The same argument holds for isiXhosa as well.

According to Kosch (2006: 131), typologically, languages can be classified according to various principles, such as:

• Ranges of sounds (phonetic typology: ways in which sounds, and sound features are organised into phonological systems),
• phonological systems and syllable structures (phonological typology),
• grammatical systems to mark syntactic relationships (grammatical typology), and
• word-structure patterns (structural or morphological typology).

Kosch (2006: 131) refers to four classical types which are distinguished within morphological typology as the following:

1. Isolating
2. Agglutinating (or agglutinative)
3. Fusional (also called (in)flectional, (in)flective or inflecting)
4. Polysynthetic (or incorporating).

Agglutinating characteristics of isiXhosa

IsiXhosa is a multi-syllabic words’ language which are made of several morphemes combined to form several syllables (Canonici, 1993: 30). Words are composed of a root morpheme to which other formative morphemes are attached as affixes to indicate inflectional or derivational categories.

Each formative morpheme maintains a distinct and fixed meaning. It can be used with different stems and still maintain its original meaning. It usually keeps the same phonological shape, except for changes resulting from regular phonological rules of the language as in:

• indlu ‘house’ > e-n-dlw-ini ‘in the house’
• izindlu ‘houses’ > e-zi-n-dlw-ini ‘in the houses’

Isolating characteristics of isiXhosa

Canonici (1993: 29) points out that most words are monomorphemic i.e., they are made up of only one morpheme and therefore invariable. They undergo no modification to express grammatical categories such as gender, number, person, mood, tense, etc. They do not present inflectional and derivational affixes. Nouns can take suffixes to show differences in various aspects:Example

• isisu ‘stomach’ > isiswana ‘small stomach’
• umfazi ‘woman’ > umfazana ‘young woman’
• indoda ‘man’ > indodakazi ‘sister-in-law’.

Fusional characteristics of isiXhosa

Words contain formative elements which cannot be recognised as separate roots and cannot be used on their own. The root and the formatives have merged, and the added parts have no independent meaning. A word or morpheme undergoes a change in the form when its grammatical function relations of words are modified by affixes and internal changes. Thus, a fusion or inflectional language is described as one in which morphemes or affixes are joined in a way that it is often difficult or slightly impossible to read and understand the derived word especially for people who are not at all familiar with the morphemes of the language. Consider the following:

• u-lal-ile > u-lel-e ‘asleep’
• uhlal-ile > u-hleli ‘awake’
• vuk-a > vusa ‘wake up’
• suk-a > susa ‘remove’

Inflection can also be used derivationally:

• funda ‘learn’ > fund-isa ‘teach’ > fund-is-ana ‘teach each other’
• funda ‘learn’, umfundi ‘student’, and imfundo ‘education’
• fundisa ‘teach’, and umfundisi ‘teacher’

Polysynthetic characteristics of isiXhosa

Polysynthetic languages are languages which are characterised by long words which are created by the combination of a large number of morphemes (Kosch 2006). Words in polysynthetic languages are by nature morphologically complex and contain numerous bound morphs. The words tend to be long, displaying extensive agglutination and/or fusion.

Kosch (2006:141) states that one would probably conclude that Nguni languages exhibit polysynthesis if one looks their long words, the equivalents of which need a whole sentence in English. The long words, however, stem from the fact that the Nguni languages follow a conjunctive writing system as in the following:

• Kusenjengangoko ‘It is just as it was before’
• Sesingasevenkileni ‘We are nearer to the shop’

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