Chapter 2 English MorphologyMORPHEMES et us begin by assuming that we are archeologists who wish to make inferences about the three primitive drawings and strings of geometric shapes contained in figure 2.1. Examine each one carefully; the three illustrations are not intended to form a sequential narrative.’ Let us hypothesize that the geometric aon o4n sno Figure 2.1: Some primitive drawings accompanied by geometric symbols, shapes are symbols which comment on the drawings and that we can provide rough meanings for the three sequences of symbols as follows: 21a A O CH ‘man bites dog’ b © A 1 ‘dog bites man’ ca ‘man bites camel’ Linguists call the preliminary statements of meaning glosses and place them in single quotation marks. Each word is said to be a gloss for a ‘This use of geometric shapes is an adaptation of a problem discussed by Cook (1967, pp. 21-22).ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY given geometric shape; the string of words can likewise be called a gloss for the string of shapes. The data in 2.1 constitute a corpus, or a text. Examine ‘the corpus carefully. Which geometric symbol occurs only once in the corpus? Which gloss occurs only once? The star must there- fore mean ‘camel’. Which geometric symbol occurs in but two of the three strings? Which gloss occurs only in the two corresponding lines of glosses? The circle must therefore mean ‘dog’. The triangle and rectangle occur in all three strings but the position of the triangle is dif- ferent in 2.1b; the position of ‘man’ likewise changes. The triangle must therefore mean ‘man’ and, by elimination, the rectangle must mean ‘bites’. We have thus assigned a gloss to each symbol. But what in fact does mean ‘dog’ or ‘man’ in the communication sys- tem we have been examining? I have said that a circle means ‘dog’. But in a technical mathematical sense there really are no circles in figure 2.1. Even the naked eye can detect that the “circles” are imperfectly drawn and that the two figures perceived to be circles are different in size and shape. Must we therefore retract our inference that a circle symbolizes ‘dog’? Must we. say that there are two, and maybe even more, symbols for ‘dog’: a small circle-like figure with an indentation on the upper right and a slightly larger circle-like figure with a protrusion on the upper right? What of different colored circles? Circles drawn with chalk? Circles traced in sand? Is each a different symbol for ‘dog’? It seems not. A circle symbolizes ‘dog’. This means that anything perceived to be a circle can be a symbol for ‘dog’ in the communication system we are considering. Thus the meaningful unit that symbolizes ‘dog’ is not any particular circle but the abstraction “circle.” Let us move on to another attay of data that will shed more light on the abstract nature of linguistic symbols. Let us consider a corpus from a hypothetical human language. The data in 2.2 look more like the kind of data that linguists usually work with—only the specialist needs to decode archeological inscriptions, as we had to in the previous example. We can assume that the data and the glosses have been elicited from someone who knows the language and who also knows enough English to provide us with glosses. Lin- guists call such a person an informant. Examine carefully the corpus below. 2.2a tekpasi ‘birds sang’ datpasi ‘children sang’ datsi ‘a child sang’ lobasi ‘robins sang’ areaoe losi ‘a robin sang’ rofsi ‘a boy sang’ disi ‘a girl sang’ 23