The obligatory contour principle (frequently abbreviated OCP ) is a hypothesis in autosegmental phonology that states that (certain) consecutive identical features are banned in underlying representations . The OCP is most frequently cited when discussing the tones of tonal languages (stating for example that the same morpheme may not have two underlying high tones), but it has also been applied to other aspects of phonology. The principle is part of the larger notion of horror aequi , that language users generally avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.
31-429: A commonly held conception within phonology is that no morpheme is allowed to contain two consecutive high tones . If two consecutive high tones appear within a single morpheme, then some rule must have applied ( Odden 1986 ). Maybe one of the surface high-tone vowels was underlyingly high-toned, while the other was underlyingly toneless. Then, since all vowels must have tone at the surface (in this hypothetical language),
62-508: A certain word relates to other words in a larger phrase, or derivational , changing either the part of speech or the actual meaning of a word. Most roots in English are free morphemes (e.g. examin- in examination , which can occur in isolation: examine ), but others are bound (e.g. bio- in biology ). Words like chairman that contain two free morphemes ( chair and man ) are referred to as compound words. Cranberry morphemes are
93-404: A special form of bound morpheme whose independent meaning has been displaced and serves only to distinguish one word from another, like in cranberry, in which the free morpheme berry is preceded by the bound morpheme cran-, meaning "crane" from the earlier name for the berry, "crane berry". An empty morpheme is a special type of bound morpheme with no inherent meaning. Empty morphemes change
124-542: A word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as cat inside the word cats ), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes , may be added before or after the root, like the -s in cats , which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin , even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes. For instance,
155-588: A word. Per is a standalone word as seen in the sentence, "I go to the gym twice per day." A similar example is given in Chinese ; most of its morphemes are monosyllabic and identified with a Chinese character because of the largely morphosyllabic script, but disyllabic words exist that cannot be analyzed into independent morphemes, such as 蝴蝶 húdié 'butterfly'. Then, the individual syllables and corresponding characters are used only in that word, and while they can be interpreted as bound morphemes 蝴 hú- and 蝶 -dié, it
186-424: Is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme ) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form , and a free morpheme is a type of free form . A form is a free form if it can occur in isolation as a complete utterance, e.g. Johnny is running , or Johnny , or running (this can occur as
217-418: Is a general rule to determine the category of a morpheme: Roots are composed of only one morpheme, but stems can be composed of more than one morpheme. Any additional affixes are considered morphemes. For example, in the word quirkiness , the root is quirk , but the stem is quirky , which has two morphemes. Moreover, some pairs of affixes have identical phonological form but different meanings. For example,
248-436: Is a type of morpheme that carries semantic meaning but is not represented by auditory phoneme. A word with a zero-morpheme is analyzed as having the morpheme for grammatical purposes, but the morpheme is not realized in speech. They are often represented by / ∅ / within glosses . Generally, such morphemes have no visible changes. For instance, sheep is both the singular and the plural form of that noun; rather than taking
279-406: Is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes . The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology . In English, inside
310-484: Is identical in pronunciation (and written form) but has an unrelated meaning and function: a comparative morpheme that changes an adjective into another degree of comparison (but remains the same adjective) (e.g. small → smaller ). The opposite can also occur: a pair of morphemes with identical meaning but different forms. In generative grammar , the definition of a morpheme depends heavily on whether syntactic trees have morphemes as leaves or features as leaves. Given
341-477: Is more commonly considered a single disyllabic morpheme. See polysyllabic Chinese morphemes for further discussion. Linguists usually distinguish between productive and unproductive forms when speaking about morphemes. For example, the morpheme ten- in tenant was originally derived from the Latin word tenere , "to hold", and the same basic meaning is seen in such words as "tenable" and "intention." But as ten-
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#1732855240586372-456: Is not used in English to form new words, most linguists would not consider it to be a morpheme at all. A language with a very low morpheme-to-word ratio is an isolating language . Because such a language uses few bound morphemes, it expresses most grammatical relationships by word order or helper words, so it is an analytic language . In contrast, a language that uses a substantial number of bound morphemes to express grammatical relationships
403-415: Is the process of segmenting a sentence into a row of morphemes. Morphological analysis is closely related to part-of-speech tagging , but word segmentation is required for those languages because word boundaries are not indicated by blank spaces. The purpose of morphological analysis is to determine the minimal units of meaning in a language (morphemes) by comparison of similar forms: such as comparing "She
434-428: Is their function in relation to words. Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme that differ in form but are semantically similar. For example, the English plural marker has three allomorphs: /-z/ ( bug s ), /-s/ ( bat s ), or /-ɪz, -əz/ ( bus es ). An allomorph is a concrete realization of a morpheme, which is an abstract unit. That is parallel to the relation of an allophone and a phoneme . A zero-morpheme
465-464: Is walking" and "They are walking" with each other, rather than either with something less similar like "You are reading". Those forms can be effectively broken down into parts, and the different morphemes can be distinguished. Both meaning and form are equally important for the identification of morphemes. An agent morpheme is an affix like -er that in English transforms a verb into a noun (e.g. teach → teacher ). English also has another morpheme that
496-403: The "smallest meaningful unit" being longer than a word include some collocations such as "in view of" and "business intelligence" in which the words, when together, have a specific meaning. The definition of morphemes also plays a significant role in the interfaces of generative grammar in the following theoretical constructs: Bound and free morphemes In linguistics , a bound morpheme
527-568: The Latin root reg- ('king') must always be suffixed with a case marker: regis , regi , rex ( reg+s ), etc. The same is true of the English root nat(e) — ultimately inherited from a Latin root meaning "birth, born" — which appears in words like native , nation , nature , innate , and neonate . These sample English words have the following morphological analyses: Every morpheme can be classified as free or bound: Bound morphemes can be further classified as derivational or inflectional morphemes. The main difference between them
558-552: The OCP was considered to be relevant to adjacent singly linked melodies but not to doubly linked melodies. The OCP in this "rules and constraints" era was no longer simply a constraint on underlying forms, but also began to play a role in the course of a phonological derivation . McCarthy (1986) proposed that the OCP can actively block the application of or repair the output of phonological rules, while in Yip (1988) , Moira Yip attempted to extend
589-530: The answer to a question such as What is he doing? ). A form that cannot occur in isolation is a bound form, e.g. -y , is , and -ing (in Johnny is running ). Non-occurrence in isolation is given as the primary criterion for boundness in most linguistics textbooks. Affixes are bound by definition. English language affixes are almost exclusively prefixes or suffixes : pre- in "precaution" and -ment in "shipment". Affixes may be inflectional , indicating how
620-420: The definition of a morpheme as "the smallest meaningful unit", nanosyntax aims to account for idioms in which an entire syntactic tree often contributes "the smallest meaningful unit". An example idiom is "Don't let the cat out of the bag". There, the idiom is composed of "let the cat out of the bag". That might be considered a semantic morpheme, which is itself composed of many syntactic morphemes. Other cases of
651-431: The grammatical function of indicating past tense . Both categories may seem very clear and intuitive, but the idea behind them is occasionally more difficult to grasp since they overlap with each other. Examples of ambiguous situations are the preposition over and the determiner your , which seem to have concrete meanings but are considered function morphemes since their role is to connect ideas grammatically. Here
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#1732855240586682-402: The high tone of the one vowel spreads onto the other. Alternatively, one (or both) of the vowels may have started out low-toned and become high-toned due to the application of some rule; or perhaps there was a low tone between the two high tones that got deleted at some point. Regardless, the OCP claims that there can not have been two consecutive high tones (nor two consecutive low tones, etc.) in
713-481: The local self-conjunction of markedness constraints (Alderete 1997). These and other issues related to the OCP continue to be debated in phonological theory. A particular instance of the OCP is Meeussen's rule ( Goldsmith 1984 ), named after the Belgian Bantu specialist A. E. Meeussen , which has been used to explain how a sequence HH tones becomes HL in various Bantu languages . Morpheme A morpheme
744-442: The phonetics of a word but offer no semantic value to the word as a whole. Examples: Words can be formed purely from bound morphemes, as in English permit, ultimately from Latin per "through" + mittō "I send", where per- and -mit are bound morphemes in English. However, they are often thought of as simply a single morpheme. Per is not a bound morpheme; a bound morpheme, by definition, cannot stand alone as
775-505: The role of the OCP to trigger the application of rules as well. However, there was also a strong opposition to the OCP as a formal constraint in phonological theory, headed by David Odden . Odden (1986) showed that, contrary to the contemporaneous assumption that constraints were inviolable, an examination of African tonal systems reveals many apparent surface violations of the OCP. A lively debate continued between John McCarthy and Odden for several years, with each adding an extra "anti-" to
806-415: The root cat and the plural suffix -s, and so the singular cat may be analyzed as the root inflected with the null singular suffix - ∅ . Content morphemes express a concrete meaning or content , and function morphemes have more of a grammatical role. For example, the morphemes fast and sad can be considered content morphemes. On the other hand, the suffix -ed is a function morpheme since it has
837-629: The suffix -er can be either derivational (e.g. sell ⇒ seller ) or inflectional (e.g. small ⇒ smaller ). Such morphemes are called homophonous . Some words might seem to be composed of multiple morphemes but are not. Therefore, not only form but also meaning must be considered when identifying morphemes. For example, the word Madagascar is long and might seem to have morphemes like mad , gas , and car , but it does not. Conversely, some short words have multiple morphemes (e.g. dogs = dog + s ). In natural language processing for Japanese , Chinese , and other languages, morphological analysis
868-406: The theory; near-identical sequences - many languages show an OCP-like resistance to sequences of segments that differ in just one distinctive feature ; there is a question of this being the effect of the OCP, or possibly some other constraint. If the latter, then there is the question of how this constraint formally relates to the OCP; status as an OT constraint - if the OCP is a single constraint, or
899-423: The title of the previous article of the other - e.g. "Anti anti-gemination and the OCP" ( Odden 1988 ), a reply to ( McCarthy 1986 ). In optimality theory (OT) ( Prince & Smolensky 2004 ), the OCP has been again redefined as a violable constraint. Yet many issues as to its precise formal character remain: locality - what is the domain of the OCP (i.e. strict adjacency, etc.) and how is the domain represented in
930-570: The underlying representation of the morpheme, i.e. in the morpheme's lexical entry . The locus classicus of the OCP is Leben (1973) , in which it was formulated as a morpheme-structure constraint precluding sequences of identical tones from underlying representations . In autosegmental phonology ( Goldsmith 1976 ), with articulated conceptions about associations between featural melodies and skeletal units (i.e. CV phonology, see McCarthy 1979 , McCarthy 1981 , Steriade 1982 , Clements & Keyser 1983 ), moraic phonology (Hyman 1985, Hayes 1989),
961-441: The usual plural suffix -s to form hypothetical *sheeps , the plural is analyzed as being composed of sheep + -∅ , the null plural suffix. The intended meaning is thus derived from the co-occurrence determiner (in this case, "some-" or "a-"). In some cases, a zero-morpheme may also be used to contrast with other inflected forms of a word that contain an audible morpheme. For example, the plural noun cats in English consists of