In linguistics, morphology is the study of words and how they are formed - their structure. So far, we have mainly focused on Syntax (How words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences). This post is an introduction to morphology (Study of words & how they change with role) before we move on to look at inflection in Pāli.A word can be deconstructed down into it's components parts, or 'morphemes', which are the smallest meaningful units of letters. Thus a word can be broken down into building blocks - morphemes - which in turn can be classified traditionally as roots, affixes and stems.
Bits of words
A 'root' is morpheme, which forms the basis of a word. It carries the basic meaning - which may be very vague and general. They are marked by the √ symbol as in the Pāli verb root √gam = 'to go'. A word has only a single root morpheme.
When a morpheme occurs by itself, it is considered a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an 'affix' (e.g. -tion, -ation, -ible, -ing). Thus some roots can stand alone but most require the addition of affixes.
An affix is basically what your traditional Pali grammars may call an ‘ending’, though the term affix is more general, as it can refer to bits of words that come at the beginning (a prefix), or in the middle (an infix) or at the end (suffix) etc.
There has traditionally been a distinction drawn between two types of affixes:
- 1 inflectional and,
- 2 derivational.
1 Inflection
Inflection is the uses of affixes to derive different grammatical forms from the same root. Another way of saying this is to attach affixes to convey grammatical category like, number, gender, person tense etc. In English, the suffix -s at the end of 'opens' shows that the subject is in the 3rd-person singular 's/he opens' rather than 'I or you open'. The suffix -ed is often used to indicate the past tense, changing 'walk' to 'walked' and 'open' to 'opened'.
Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes:
- Inflecting a noun, pronoun, or adjective is known as 'declining'. The affixes may express number, case, or gender.
- Inflecting a verb is called 'conjugating'. The affixes may express tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, or number.
An organized list of all the inflected forms of a given word stem, is called its paradigm. E.g.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nom | rūpaṃ | rūpāni, rūpā |
| Gen | rūpassa | rūpānaṃ |
| Dat | rūpassa, rūpāya | rūpānaṃ |
| Acc | rūpaṃ | rūpāni, rūpe |
| Ins | rūpena | rūpehi, rūpebhi |
| Abl | rupā, rūpasmā, rūpamhā, rūpato |
rūpehi, rūpebhi |
| Loc | rūpe, rūpasmiṃ, rūpamhi | rūpesu |
| Voc | rūpa | rūpāni, rūpā |
| Present Indicative | ||
| Active Voice. | ||
| pers. | Sing. | Plur. |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | pacāmi | pacāma |
| 2. | pacasi | pacatha |
| 3. | pacati | pacanti |
2 Derivation
Derivation refers to an affix that indicates a change of word class (also called Part of Speech). Common English parts of speech include: noun, verb, adjective, adverb etc. For instance:
- the prefix en-, transforms the noun 'gulf' into the verb 'engulf'
- the suffix -er transforms the verb 'read' into the noun 'reader'
- nation: nation-al, national-ise, de-nationalise...
- sect (to cut): inter-sect, dis-sect, sect-(t)ion, sect-or, section-al,
Stems & bases
Grammar guides tend to diverge at this point, not everyone agrees on the definitions or even on the names of the terms like stem & base. Many Pāli grammar guide use them interchangeably. But for our purposes:
- a 'Stem' is a root with some modification done, usually derivational in nature, while
- the term root indicates the morpheme carrying the basic meaning
Consider the words: 'refer, infer, prefer, differ, offer', they share the same root '-fer'. They are stems consisting in 'derivational prefix + root'. To these stems inflectional suffixes may be added: 'refer-ed, refer-ing, refer-s'; 'infer-ed, infer-ing, infer-s' etc.
In languages with very little inflection, like English, the stem is usually not distinct from the "normal" form of a word e.g. 'run'. However, in highly inflected languages like Pāli, stems rarely or never occur in this form in a sentence, and always require an inflectional suffix or ending.
In it's simplest meaning a 'Base' is a unit to which other morphemes can be attached, thus a root can be a base, as can be a stem. But on this site the term base is reserved for stems with the addition of other derivations infixes.
With this in mind the reader can now move on to consider noun declension in the Pāli language. Which we will cover in the next post.
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