Lecture 3: Morphology, Part 2

MIT 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics, Spring 2022
Instructor: Prof. Norvin W. Richards

This video discusses the forms morphemes can take, and how morphemes are combined to make words.

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Speakers: Prof. Norvin W. Richards

[paulsmc]

1:09:00 "Joe lost his lunch. I will never be able to unsee that."
Two things about this:
1) Unseeing is not changing Joe. [Though it is changing the viewer].

2) This statement is deliberately breaking the rule (of when "un" can be applied to a verb) for humorous effect, so it's not truly an exception to that rule.

Regarding Polish spelling, a Polish monk told my father that there are no spelling bees in Poland. That's because the pronunciation and spelling are so regular that all of the contestants would be able to spell every word. Further proof that Polish is not English. ;)

What a wonderful teacher.

[Trucmuch]

Divers can't unsink a ship. It doesn't feel like a proper verb. But in the context of time travel, I feel that "unsink" sounds like it's correct. "Let's go back in time and unsink the Titanic"

[karolkrzyzosiak]

Polish linguist here, there are mistakes around 1:00 in Polish examples: for debt, it is „dług” and „długi”, for pot, „garnek” and „garnki”… besides, a very instruktorem lecture

[intelliGENeration]

If the result of the verb’s action is irreversible (such as sinking, burning, wetting, etc)… then you cannot use “un-“, unless you’re pointing out the impossibility of the reversal, such as “you can’t unsink a ship”.

Un- means to “reverse”. You can amend some actions, but NOT reverse them.

Example, “submerge” desn’t carry the meaning of the change in the state of the object. Submerge is only a description of its position within the water. As such, you can then actually say “submerge” and “unsubmerge”.

[qwertychat]

Unsink is not the reverse process of sink in the way that unlock is of lock: you don't bring the cannon ball back the other way through the hole and wait for the ship to rise to the surface - it's a completely different operation involving salvaging equipment rather than weapons. Might just have to turn a blind eye to some paper getting torn, for example, when something is unwrapped, but I think even the most violent unwrapping would still at least be recognisable from a main part of wrapping played in reverse. Similarly, for me, "unbreak" (if we accept it as a verb) describes the specific process (e.g. in a film) of something breaking in reverse, but it's not the same as mending something in the real world (with our current technology!)

[PhoneticFluency]

I'm enjoying these lectures a lot.
But man, I was thinking "Just move on already!!" when the students couldn't drop the idea of verbs that can't be undone. 🙄😂

[lblearner]

I've noticed there might be a typo in the subtitles at 12:04. An unpredictable change like the 'go-went' change mentioned in the video should be called suppletion instead of depletion.

[roseh]

Slingshot is a noun. I think you would say, "He shot him with a slingshot".

[autentyk]

With "unsink", which does NOT exist as a verb, we are simply venturing into poetic license territory, where everything and anything goes. That is why it sounds right to say "You can not unsink a ship", as you are being creative with the language to the extent of intrinsically stating things that can not be from a linguistic point of view.

[percent]

On the whole "unsink" topic: "unsink" already exists as a verb: dredge

[thomasevans]

There might be a meta or auxiliary attribute of morphemes along the lines of 'superpositional', 'poetic', or 'hypothetical'. The reason that 'unsink' seems to work in some contexts but not others may be that 'unsink' doesn't have an established meaning, but has a sort of illustrative meaning based on a combination of our understanding of the morphemes 'un' and 'sink' that it contains.

In the simplest case, rejecting the new word (e.g., "You can't unsink a ship") is the easiest to accept, because the speaker is effectively declaring that 'unsink' is a nonsense word. There seem to be different levels of appropriateness to this sort of morpheme combination, because in some cases, even the negation statement sounds bizarre (e.g., "You can't unbear a loss").

In other words (!), this mode of morpheme combination occupies a liminal space between being a word and not being a word, maybe giving some insight into how morpheme combination can lead to the invention of new words and ideas.

[zeymort]

I would argue that "-s" is a free morpheme in the language of cats. They understand "-s" all by itself. 😄

[jarekzawadzki]

The plural of "garnek" i "garnki", the "e" is dropped.

[kimberlynorton]

I would love to watch this but too many "uh's" for me.