1. P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language - UCLA
Introduction to Language - Lecture Notes 8
Form I: Morphology
☞ Goal: So far we have treated words as if they were unanalyzable units. Indeed they may appear to be so from
the standpoint of the Syntax. For instance we systematically -and correctly- assumed that a single word is always
a constituent, because no syntactic rule could target one part of the word only. However the fact that words are
unanalyzable from the standpoint of the Syntax does not mean that they have no structure at all and are simply
memorized as wholes. This is very far from the truth. As it turns out, words are created by rules; for this reason
there is no 'longest word' in the English language - a new word can always be produced by applying one of these
rules to an 'old' word. Furthermore, a word has a tree-like structure, and typically (though not always) has a head,
i.e. a component from which it inherits its semantic and syntactic properties (for instance, overeat is a verb just
like its head eat; and overeating is a kind of eating). Although morphology is driven by rules, it is also the
repository of irregularities, as seen for instance in the English past tense (the past tense of walk is walked, but that
of go is went, not *goed). The most basic component of a word, its root, is truly unanalyzable. It is an arbitrary
pairing between a sound and a meaning, and it often triggers exceptions to the rules. These exceptions are studied
from various angles in the second part of these Lecture Notes, devoted to a case study of the English past tense.
Note: The present notes build on Chapter 5 of Pinker's Language Instinct, which is required reading for the
course.
1 How to Build Words: Morphological Rules
1.1 There is no longest word in English
What is the longest word of the English language? Some have mentioned the following:
(1) a. antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters)
b. floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters)
c. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters)
As it turns out, there is no longest word in English. To see this, consider simply the following two series, each of
which can be continued without limit to create a potentially infinite number of new words:
(2) a. great-grandmother
b. great-great-grandmother
c. great-great-great-grandmother
...
(3) a. sensation
b. sensational
c. sensationalize
d. sensationalization
e. sensationalizational
f. sensationalizationalize
...

2. P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language - UCLA 2
1.2 Words have Structure
When we studied Syntax we took speakers' ability to generate a potentially infinite number of sentences as a sure
sign that they know syntactic rules (the argument was that they could not possibly have memorized an infinite
number of sentences, and thus that they must be using rules to create new sentences out of old elements). The
same conclusion applies in the case of morphology: speakers of English know a potentially infinite number of
words because they have mastered morphological rules. In Syntax rules created tree-like structures. The same
applies in morphology. In Syntax constituents typically contained a head, i.e. a word which gave them their
defining properties (a Noun Phrase contains a Noun in a designated syntactic position; similarly a Verb Phrase is
so-called because it must include a verb in a specific place, etc.). The same holds of most words as well (although
some words are headless).
In the following we use the term root to refer to the most basic component of a word or family of related words,
consisting of an irreducible, arbitrary sound-meaning pairing, as electr- in: electr-ic, electric-ity, electric-al,
electr-ify, electr-on.
♦ Compounding
The simplest way to form new words out of old elements is by compounding, a mechanism illustrated below:
(4)
V N N
N V N N A N
baby sit church yard black board
Compounding in English normally has the following properties:
(i) Compounds have a head, which gives them their main semantic and syntactic properties. Example:
-syntactically, the expression blackboard is a noun, as is its head board
-semantically, the expression blackboard refers to things that are kinds of boards, as the noun board.
(ii) The head comes last
(iii) The stress comes first
(iv) The meaning of the whole is not entirely predictable on the basis of the meaning of the parts.
In the following examples, the syllable with the main stress is indicated in bold. In each pair, a. is not a
compound because (a) it has its main stress on the final element, and (b) the meaning of the whole is entirely
predictable from the meaning of the parts (e.g. a black board is simply a board that is black). By contrast, b. is a
compound: the main stress is on the first element, and the meaning of the whole is not entirely predictable from
the meaning of the parts (a blackboard may not be black, but for instance green, as is the case in many
classrooms).

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(5) a. a black board: a board that is black
b. a blackboard: a board for writing on with chalk in front of a class. It may or may not be black.
(6) a. a dark room: a room that is dark
b. a darkroom: a room from which daylight is excluded so that photographs can be processed.
As was the case in Syntax, there are sometimes instances of structural ambiguity in morphology. Thus a
California history teacher may be someone that teaches California history, or it may be a history teacher from
California. The first meaning is obtained by making California history a morphological constituent, as on the left-
most tree below. The second meaning is obtained by the morphological tree found on the right.
(7) a. California history teacher
b. N N
N N N N
N N N N
California history teacher California history teacher
♦ Derivational Morphology
A second way to create new words out of old elements is by adding suffixes or prefixes to existing words to
modify their meaning and often their syntactic category. This process is called 'derivational morphology', and it
also typically yields headed constituents (i.e. constituents with a head, which gives them their main syntactic and
semantic properties). In the following example the suffix -ness is specified as taking as its sister an adjective, and
produces a noun. Thus happiness is the property of being happy, unhappiness is the property of being unhappy,
etc.:
N
N
A -ness
A -ness
A
un-
happy
happy

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♦ Inflectional Morphology
We note for completeness that inflectional morphology is the process by which suffixes or prefixes are added to a
word to fit its role in the sentence. The new word has the same syntactic category and the same meaning as the
old one.
Examples: walk, walk-s, walk-ing, walk-ed, etc; dog, dog-s; cat, cat-s.
Often irregularities may be triggered by a given root. Thus although the regular way of forming the past tense of
a verb is by adding -ed to it, as in walk-walked, certain roots do not conform to this pattern:
(8) a. eat - ate
b. go - went
c. sing - sang
d. come - came
Similarly the plural is normally formed by adding -s to a noun, as in dog - dogs. But the following are exceptions
to this rule:
(9) a. fish - fish
b. man - men
c. ox - oxen
As was observed earlier, a word which is headed inherits its main semantic and syntactic properties from its head.
Overeat has eat as its head, and as a result: (i) the expression overeat is a verb, just like the expression eat; (ii)
overeating is a kind of eating; and (iii) the past tense of overeat is overate, not overeated. Similarly workman is
headed and has as its head man. As a result: (i) workman is a noun, just like man; (ii) a workman is a kind of man;
and (iii) the plural of workman is workmen, not workmans).
1.3 Headless Nouns
Interestingly, certain complex nouns do not have any head. This is the case of walkman, since a walkman is
certainly not a kind of man, and certainly not a kind of walk either (rather, it is small electronic device that plays
CDs). Similarly a lowlife is not a kind of life, which suggests that life is not its head. Since low is an adjective, not
a noun, and since lowlife is a noun, it also can't be the case that low is the head of the construction. Thus it is
reasonable to assume that walkman and lowlife have no head at all.
This makes a surprising prediction. Remember that (i) irregularities are triggered by roots, and that (ii) a complex
word inherits its main properties from its head. This explains why the past tense of overeat is overate: the head is
eat, it transmits to the entire word the information that its past tense is irregular, and should thus be overate, not
overeated. But now consider walkman and lowlife. True, man takes an irregular plural, i.e. men rather than *mans.
And by the same token life takes as its plural lives, not *lifes. But since man is not the head of walkman, this
information cannot be transmitted to the entire word, and thus the plural of walkman has no choice but to be
regular, i.e. walkmans. This is the correct result. Similarly the plural of lowlife should according to this theory be
lowlifes, not *lowlives. Again this is the right result. Notice, by contrast, that since man is the head of workman,
we predict -correctly again- that the plural of workman should be workmen.

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2 Rules and Exceptions
2.1 Productivity of Rules
Even without an argument based on speakers' potential knowledge of an infinity of new words (as in (2) and
(3)above), it is easy to show that adults apply morphological rules productively, i.e. to words that they have never
heard before. If I introduce to you a new object that I call a wug and then go on to show you two objects of the
same sort, you will have no difficulty in telling me that these are two wugs. You will thus have applied the rule of
plural formation to a word you had never heard before.
At a certain stage of their development children do this too. This can be shown experimentally (they then pass the
wug test, i.e. they apply a morphological rule to words they have never heard before). But production data (i.e.
data obtained simply from listening to what children say) make the same point. The following are from Pinker,
'Why the Child Holded the Baby Rabbits' (An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd edition, Volume 1, MIT Press,
p. 109)
(10) a. My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
b. I finded Renée
c. I love cut-upped egg.
d. Once upon a time a alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur was eating the alligator and the
dinosaur was eaten by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk.
It is very unlikely that the children who uttered these sentences had ever heard anyone say 'holded', 'finded' or
'goed'. The fact that they nonetheless created these words indicates that they learned -and overapplied- a rule. The
phenomenon in (10) is called overgeneralization. It has a paradoxical consequence: when children have not yet
learned the morphological rule, their performance on the forms they utter tends to be better than the one they
attain immediately after they have learned the rule. This is because before they learn the rule they memorize
plurals as unananalyzable units, and are thus in no danger of overapplying a rule... which they have not mastered
yet. By contrast, when they learn the rule they tend to apply it incorrectly to cases that require an exceptional
treatment, such as 'hold', 'find' or 'go'. Only later do they learn that holded, finded and goed are ungrammatical.
This entire sequence is called by psychologists 'U-shaped development", because the child's performance starts
out very high, and then dips down before rising again.
2.2 Exceptions and the Blocking Principle
But how do children ever learn that there are exceptions to the rules? The problem has in fact two sides:
(i) How do children learn that held, went or found are possible past tense forms? This by itself is not particularly
challenging, since these are words they hear uttered around them.
(ii) More challenging, however, is the second part of the question: how do children ever learn that holed, goed or
finded are not possible forms? Or to put it differently, how do they ever recover from the mistakes they make in
sentences such as (10)?
Concerning (ii), one hypothesis would be that children need to have access to negative evidence, i.e. to be
corrected by their parents. As far as is currently known this is not the case - children recover from
overgeneralizations even in the absence of any corrections. An alternative hypothesis is that Universal Grammar
has a principle, called the Blocking Principle, which forbids a rule from applying to a word if the word already
has a corresponding irregular form.

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Blocking Principle: A rule may not apply to a word if the word already has a corresponding irregular form.
If the Blocking Principle is indeed part of Universal Grammar, the children may recover from their
overgeneralizations without having access to any negative evidence. For as soon as a child has learned that went
is a possible past tense for go, the Blocking Principle will immediately entail that the normal rule of past tense
formation could not apply to go to form go-ed (since the Blocking Principle specifies that a rule -here past tense
formation- may not apply to a word if the word in question already has a corresponding irregular form - in this
case went).
The details of the acquisition of past tense morphology are somewhat more subtle, however. The present theory
predicts that at any point in time children should either use only goed, or only went, but not both (since went will
block goed as soon as went is learned). But in fact there is a period in which children use both forms. A possible
hypothesis is that the Blocking Principle applies only to the extent that the irregular form can be successfully
retrieved from the speaker's memory. This additional assumption is stated by Pinker as follows ('Why the Child
Holded the Baby Rabbits', An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd edition, Volume 1, MIT Press, pp. 113-114):
"The extra needed assumption comes from an uncontroversial principle of the psychology of memory, known for
over a hundred years. People do not remember an arbitrary pairing (like a name with a face, or a treaty with a
date) perfectly on a single exposure. It often takes repeated encounters, with the probability of successful retrieval
increasing with each encounter (presumably reflecting an increase in the 'strength' or clarity of the trace of the
pairing as it is stored in memory). Now children, by definition, have not lived as long as adults. So children have
experienced everything in life fewer times than an adult has, including hearing the past tense forms of irregular
verbs. If children have heard held less often, their memory trace for it will be weaker, and retrieval less reliable.
Some of the time, when they are trying to express the concept of holding in the past, held will not pop into mind
(or at least, not quickly enough to get it out in that sentence). If they are at an age at which they have already
acquired the regular past tense rule, they will apply it to hold, creating holded, so as to satisfy the constraint that
tense must be maked in all sentences. Prior to that age, when they failed to retrieve held, they had no choice but to
say hold."
The course of acquisition of past tense by children can be summarized as follows (Pinker, 'Why the Child Holded
the Baby Rabbits'):
I. (i) "When learning a language, children have to generalize from a finite sample of parental speech to the
infinite set of sentences that define the language as a whole. Since there are an infinite number of ways to do this
but only one is correct, children must be innately guided to the correct solution by having some kinds of
principles governing the design of human language built in.
(ii) We can catch children in the act of generalizing when they use one of the general rules of English to
create a form that they could not have heard from their parents. Children must be generalizing such a rule when
they apply it to irregular verbs, as in holded (...)
II. (i) Children command not just rules but memorized words, like held; they use the memorized irregular
forms both prior to, and simultaneously with, the overgeneralized, rule-created forms.
(ii) Children's simultaneous use of correct and incorrect forms poses the puzzle of how they unlearn the
incorrect forms, given that the incorrect forms are expressive and useful, and are not reliably corrected by parents.
(iii) The puzzle can be solved if children command one of the basic design features of language: the
"Blocking" principle, whereby a rule is prevented from applying if there is a grammatically equivalent irregular

7. P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language - UCLA 7
form in the memorized mental dictionary. As long as they can remember an irregular, they can stop producing the
overregularized version.
III. The course of language development in this area can be explained straightforwardly, as an interaction
between the innate organization of language (rules, words, and the Blocking principle that relates them) and the
child's experience with parental speech. Early on, children just memorize words (held), though not perfectly.
Later they formulate the regular past tense rule "add -ed" from memorized regular pairs like walk-walked. Now
equipped with the rule, whenever they fail to retrieve an irregular past form from memory, they can apply the
rule, resulting in an overregularization error. As they hear the irregular more and more often, they remember it
better and better, block the rule more and more reliably, and make the errors less and less often"
2.3 Cases of Dissociations
It is plausible that irregular forms are stored as units in memory. By contrast, regular complex forms are built 'on
the fly' by speakers. If this hypothesis is correct one could expect regular and irregular forms to be computed in
very different ways by the brain. Several cases of dissociations have been investigated - for instance Selective
Language Impairment (SLI) patients have difficulty applying rules, and as a result SLI children have a very poor
performance with the wug test. The opposite situation is found in Williams patients. These, it will be recalled,
have almost entirely normal linguistic abilities. There are some subtleties, however. Their use of the vocabulary is
often slightly off-target - they may for instance say evacuate the glass for empty the glass. Interestingly, Williams
patients tend to overapply rules, saying catched and sleeped for caught and slept. Where SLI patients have
trouble learning the rules, Williams patients appear to have difficulties with the exceptions. [Experiments
discussed in class are not reported here].

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Appendix. Contents of Chapter 5 of Pinker's Language Instinct
Chapter 5. Words, Words, Words (=Morphology)
I. The Creativity of Morphology (120)
-Inflections (120)
-Derivations (122)
-Compounding (122)
II. How Morphology Works: Rules (124)
Morphological Trees (124)
1. Putting together stems and inflections (124)
2 Forming new stems
-Compounding (126)
-Derivations (127)
-Heads in morphology(128)
3. Roots and root affixes (128)
III. How Morphology Works: Irregularity (129)
Why headless nouns are regular
Why you can say mice-infested but not rats-infested
IV. The Lexicon (141)
What is a word? (word as syntactic atom vs. word as rote-memorized chunk) (141)
Acquisition of the lexicon (143)
-Arbitrariness of the sign
-Induction