1. What are morphology and syntax?
1.3. Morphosyntax as a subfield of linguistics
Both morphology and syntax are related subfields of linguistics. Linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language. We will go deeper into the scientific aspects of morphosyntax in Chapter 2.
The study of natural human language
What do we mean when we say language? Linguists primarily study natural human language.
A natural language is a language that developed within a community without being planned or designed. Instead, a natural language evolves gradually over time based on how the community uses it. In contrast, constructed languages are designed intentionally. Constructed languages include languages designed for art, media, or fun, like Klingon for the Star Trek series, or for a communicative purpose, such as Esperanto, which was designed with the intention that it would be an international language that would promote peace.
Constructed languages and non-human communication systems are valid and interesting objects of study. However, depending on the kinds of questions you are asking, they may or may not be able to provide the evidence you need. For example, you may be studying the properties that languages around the world have in common. A constructed language, however, may have been constructed on purpose to sound alien or be unlike human language. Even if it wasn’t designed to be different on purpose, we cannot know whether the conscious choices of a language designer will result in the same kinds of patterns as subconscious language acquisition unless we study them separately and then compare. Some linguists hypothesize a genetic or biological component that underlies the human capacity for language. If this is the case, then we would expect there to be differences between human communication and the communicative practices of other species.
The place of morphosyntax within linguistics
Within the field of linguistics as a whole, morphology and syntax are the study of the mediation of form and meaning. The form of language — the possible speech sounds and signs — is determined at the level of phonetics and phonology. The meaning of language is determined at the level of semantics and pragmatics. In morphology and syntax, we study how to encode particular meanings with particular forms.
Let’s use the example in (1) to illustrate the relationship between form and meaning.
(1) | The toddler kicked the balls across the field. |
The form of the sentence in (1), if it is spoken, sounds similar to (2), when represented in an IPA transcription, and its meaning describes something like the image shown in Figure 1.
(2) | /ðətɑɾlɚkɪktðəbɑlsəkɹɑsðəfild/ |
![](https://pressbooks.openedmb.ca/app/uploads/sites/81/2023/10/4167105376_0fd30f161e_c-300x201.jpeg)
But how do we get from the form in (2) to the meaning in Figure 1? Well, we divide up the string of sounds in (2) into morphemes and words, each of which has its own meaning. But that, alone, is not enough. The order of the words and morphemes and how they are combined also matter. Look at the examples in (3). Notice how they all have the same words and morphemes as (1), but combined in different ways. The different combinations produce different meanings, some of which make no sense.
(3) | a. | The balls kicked the toddler across the field. |
b. | The field kicked the balls across the toddler. | |
c. | The kicker toddled the balls across the field. | |
d. | The toddlers kicked the ball across the field. |
In morphology and syntax, we are assigning a structure to a string of sounds or signs and using that structure to determine its meaning. This structure indicates the relationships between the morphemes and words. For example, the -s plural marker on balls in (1) indicates that there is more than one ball. On its own, -s just means more than one something, but we don’t know what that something is until it is part of a structure. Likewise, the morpheme kick indicates that an action of kicking is involved, but until kick is combined with the past tense marker -ed, we don’t know when it happened, and unless it is combined with a subject, object, and other modifiers, we don’t know who did the kicking, what was kicked, or where the kicking happened.
The subfields of linguistics
Linguistics is very broad and covers every aspect of language structure and use. The lines are fuzzy, but we could roughly divide linguistics into subfields that focus on the structure of language and subfields that focus on how the structure of language intersects with other aspects of the human experience. All of these areas of research are important for advancing our understanding of how language works. There are also interactions between all of the different subfields. For example, you could study how to train a computer to produce artificial speech with the correct pronunciation (phonetics, phonology, and computational linguistics), how children acquire morphology (morphology and first language acquisition), or how a word gains a special meaning within a particular community and then spreads outside of the community (lexical semantics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics).
Morphology and syntax, as well, can be studied in combination with any other subfield. Here are some examples:
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. One important idea in semantics is compositionality, which is the observation that the meaning of a sentence is derived by the meaning of its parts and the way that they are combined. This is very closely related to the study of morphosyntax since morphosyntax is what determines how they are combined.
Phonetics and phonology
The subfields of phonetics and phonology intersect with morphology through the phenomenon of allomorphy. A morpheme may be pronounced in different ways depending on its phonological context. We will learn more about this in Chapter 12.
The subfields of phonetics and phonology also intersect with syntax through prosody. Many syntactic structures in various languages affect the prosody of the sentence. For example, in English, questions have a special rising intonation.
Sociolinguistics
In sociolinguistics, different dialects and language varieties are studied. Any language variety is a valuable object of study within the subfields of morphology and syntax. Some critics of morphosyntax point out that we do not adequately account for variation in language.
Psycholinguistics
In the subfields of psycholinguistics and acquisition, linguists study the processing and acquisition of morphosyntactic patterns. Some critics of morphosyntactic theory argue that there is a mismatch between morphosyntactic models of grammar and the ways we seem to process language.
Anthropological linguistics
Anthropological linguistics is the study of the interaction between language and culture. Different languages encode different aspects of the world directly into the grammatical structure of language. For example, some languages have grammatical categories that can be used to indicate formality or respect, while others do not.
Discourse analysis
In discourse analysis, linguists study how different sentences or utterances are combined into wider texts or conversations. Sometimes this involves the use of morphological or syntactic discourse markers, like oh, well, so, y’know, etc… Some syntacticians work on integrating discourse markers into syntactic structure, while morphologists might analyze their morphological structure.
Computational linguistics
A computational linguist might study how to program a computer to produce and interpret language in a human-like way. Although the ability of computers to manipulate language has improved by leaps and bounds, there are still some areas of difference, if you look closely.
Crip linguistics
Crip linguistics is not so much a subfield, but more a critical reflection on linguistics as a whole from the perspective of disability studies, challenging us to not consider any attempts at communicating to be deficient or defective. The term crip linguistics was coined by deaf linguists Octavian Robinson and Jon Henner (e.g., Henner and Robinson 2023) based on the reclaimed usage of crip in critical disability studies (e.g., McRuer 2006, Kafer 2013). In morphosyntax, we may investigate how various communicative behaviours exhibit morphological or syntactic patterning.
Key takeaways
- Linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language.
- The primary object of study in linguistics is natural human language.
- In both morphology and syntax, we study how to encode particular meanings with particular forms.
- Morphology and syntax interact with all of the other subfields of linguistics.
Check yourself!
References and further resources
For a general audience
🎉🔍 Okrent, Arika. 2010. In the land of invented languages: Adventures in linguistic creativity, madness, and genius. Toronto: Random House.
Academic sources
📚 Henner, Jon, and Octavian Robinson. 2023. Unsettling languages, unruly bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics manifesto. Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability 1 (1): 7–37. https://criticalstudycommunicationdisability.org/index.php/jcscd/article/view/4
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press.
The study of the structure of words; the study of the systematic co-variation of form and meaning.
The study of the structure of sentences and phrases; the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.
The scientific study of language.
The study of the structure of words, phrases, and sentences. The intersection of the fields of morphology and syntax.
Language that arose out of use in a community, rather than a language that was designed or constructed.
A language designed for a particular purpose, as opposed to a natural language.
An internationally recognized set of symbols developed in order to transcribe speech sounds with a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol.
The study of the conventional meaning of language, including the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and how meaning is derived from their combination (compositional semantics).
The observation that the meaning of a sentence is derived by the meaning of its parts and the way that they are combined.
The study of the physical properties of language, including how it is produced and perceived.
The study of the systematic rules and constraints that characterize human speech sounds and signs in and across languages.
When the form of a morpheme varies depending on context.
The patterns of stress and intonation in a language.
The study of how language is used in its social context, including variation based on broad social categories like age, gender, and region, and the intersection of language and identity.
The study of how language is processed and planned.
The study of how children and adults acquire and learn language.
The study of the relationship between language and culture.
The study of how multiple sentences are combined and interact, including turn-taking in conversation.
Words or morphemes used to manage the structure and flow of discourse.
The study of how we can model and process language with computers.
A critical approach to the study of linguistics from the approach of disability studies, studying how people with differing abilities communicate, without taking a deficit approach.