Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Nonconcatenative morphology
Summary
Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.
Apophony Ablaut and Umlaut (linguistics)
In English, for example, while plurals are usually formed by adding the suffix -s, certain words use nonconcatenative processes for their plural forms:
foot /fʊt/ → feet /fiːt/;
Many irregular verbs form their past tenses, past participles, or both in this manner:
freeze /ˈfriːz/ → froze /ˈfroʊz/, frozen /ˈfroʊzən/.
This specific form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as base modification or ablaut, a form in which part of the root undergoes a phonological change without necessarily adding new phonological material.
In traditional Indo-Europeanist usage, these changes are termed ablaut only when they result from vowel gradations in Proto-Indo-European. An example is the English stem s⌂ng, resulting in the four distinct words: sing-sang-song-sung. An example from German is the stem spr⌂ch "speak", which results in various distinct forms such as spricht-sprechen-sprach-gesprochen-Spruch.
Changes such as foot/feet, on the other hand, which are due to the influence of a since-lost front vowel, are called umlaut or more specifically I-mutation.
Other forms of base modification include lengthening of a vowel, as in Hindi:
/mər-/ "die" ↔ /maːr-/ "kill"
or change in tone or stress:
Chalcatongo Mixtec /káʔba/ "filth" ↔ /káʔbá/ "dirty"
English record /ˈrɛkərd/ (noun) ↔ /rɨˈkɔrd/ "to make a record"
Consonantal apophony, such as the initial-consonant mutations in Celtic languages, also exists.
Transfix
Another form of nonconcatenative morphology is known as transfixation, in which vowel and consonant morphemes are interdigitated. For example, depending on the vowels, the Arabic consonantal root k-t-b can have different but semantically related meanings. Thus, [kataba] 'he wrote' and [kitaːb] 'book' both come from the root k-t-b.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related publications (7)
Related concepts (7)
Semitic root
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals" (hence the term consonantal root). Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowels and non-root consonants (or "transfixes") which go with a particular morphological category around the root consonants, in an appropriate way, generally following specific patterns.
Broken plural
In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as the Berber languages. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form. They contrast with sound plurals (or external plurals), which are formed by adding a suffix, but are also formally distinct from phenomena like the Germanic umlaut, a form of vowel mutation used in plural forms in Germanic languages.
Apophony
In linguistics, apophony (also known as ablaut, (vowel) gradation, (vowel) mutation, alternation, internal modification, stem modification, stem alternation, replacive morphology, stem mutation, internal inflection etc.) is any alternation within a word that indicates grammatical information (often inflectional). Apophony is exemplified in English as the internal vowel alternations that produce such related words as sng, sng, sng, sng bnd, bnd bld, bld brd, brd dm, dm fd, fd l, l rse, rse, rsen wve, wve ft, ft gse, gse tth, tth The difference in these vowels marks variously a difference in tense or aspect (e.