When Latin's word order drives you batty

Latin's got a well deserved reputation among English speakers for having a complex word order. I can't argue that it isn't complex from an English point of view. But I'm going to throw out this bit of English song. (If you know the source, fine. But no Google if you don't!)

You can fix this fixer-upper
Up with a little bit of love!

What's going on with the verb fix up? It's been split up with the determiner phrase this fixer-upper, which in turn is derived from the verb it is splitting. 

To make the matter more tangled, there are patients in -er. For example: My wife is a keeper. But keep is hardly a phrasal verb. In deverbal agent in -er, like bricklayer, there's only one -er added to indicate that the word is a noun. But fixer-upper? Both morphemes in fix up get the -er.

English, what's wrong with you? How could you put linguistically complex stuff like this in a kids' movie like Frozen? 

Teaching morphology

So last night I was working with a student, and I realized that we teach inflectional morphology but not derivational morphology.

In fact, the bulk of Latin instruction is inflectional morphology. It's the guts of the grammar for Latin. Sure there's stuff like making sure that adjectives agree with their antecedents, but even that's just inflectional morphology. More to the point, inflectional morphology is regular and has grammatical effect.

Derivational morphology is another story. You'd have to be a dull student of Latin to not catch the similarity between these two:

cīvitās, cīvitātis – citizenship
auctōritās, auctōritātis – authority
pietās, pietātis – sense of duty

But there's something fishy here. The -tās ending is obvious. It forms an abstract noun. But look at the roots.

cīvis, is – citizen
auctor, ōris – a do-er (more literally, an increaser)
pius, a, um – dutiful 

Cīvis is a noun. Auctor is a noun. So far so good. Pius is an adjective. How are we supposed to teach that? What's worse is that it's not freely productive.

*imperātōritās – ain't no such thing

Even though someone who knows Latin can analyze that word. So you can't even predict that it will work at all times. About the only thing we can say about the -tās ending is that it is the abstract noun that deals with the attached root.

Anyway, the potential non-productivity of derivational morphemes is a frustrating feature of language.  

The odd morphology of remembering and forgetting

I realized that the verbs for forgetting and remembering have odd morphology.

oblīvīscor, ī, —, oblītus sum – to forget
—, —, meminī – to remember

That forgetting should be deponent doesn't surprise me given the origins of Latin's deponent. It is somewhat a folly that happens to you by you. Easily explainable with the stop at middle voice before heading off to deponent. But why on earth should the verb for remembering be odd? It's only perfect?

Yeah, I've seen the explanation in Gildersleeve's. I'm not sure I buy it 100%.

Anyway, just one of those I was in the shower realizations.

Building a crane to the vocabulary spurt

In the third chapter of Becoming a Word Learner, Linda Smith talks about how children build a crane (her term) to make themselves better word learners.

The notion is that when children learn their first words, they start to notice patterns about those words and create templates for future learning. Her main point is that children seem to fix on shape, rather than some other property, to signal an object's class. For example, chairs—prototypically anyway—have four legs, a seat and a back. This shape cues children in that a CHAIR is a chair. What's interesting is that when researchers cue very young children in on the shape bias by training them, their vocabularies grow faster.

So whatever the exact mechanism may be, children are learning how to learn words by—and this is truly shocking—learning words. Once they get to a certain point, the biases and patterns they've developed seem to take on a life of their own.

How might this relate to learning a second language? I'm not wholly sure, but allow me some speculation. One of the things that foreign language learning materials seem to focus on is inflectional morphology, which makes enough sense. You can't speak the language if you don't know how speakers expect things to be ordered. Latin wants case inflection on nouns. English wants word order. Spanish wants you to be clear about which object you are talking about via definite and indefinite articles. Russian couldn't care. And so on.

But one thing that foreign language materials, so far as I've seen anyway, don't worry too much about is derivational morphology. How do you get from civil to civility? And why can't you go from polite to politity? I'll be reading a paper—and thus blogging about it later—about this subject exactly.  I could be wrong, but I suspect that adult learners are given vocabulary lists that they then create a derivational morphology from. Or at least that's how it felt to me when I was learning Latin all those years ago. Civis became civitas. Aestus became aetstas. Could moralis become mortalitas? And the connection is made, though not without flaws. I think it was then that my grasp on Latin vocabulary started to really firm up from a list of words to memorize to things that behaved in similar way. In other words, I had made a derivational morphology crane for myself. 

Show of force

In the morphology class the professor dropped the first two lines of the Aeneid on me to analyse for morphology. And I realized a few things in the process.

1. I don't use a consistent parsing order. Case, number and gender were never ordered the same way twice.
2. I'm not sure how transparent compounds were to native Latin speakers.
3. I have absolutely no idea how to analyse qui.

For #1, that's probably just me being put on the spot. I don't think I'd do that in writing. For #2 I suggested a morphological breakdown of profugus as follows.

pro-fug-us

But would a Latin speaker say that pro- had some specific meaning in the same way that re- or ad- had when prefixed to a verb? I know we're taught about Latin compounds as being this way, so I suspect so. I'll leave it at that. #3 was by far the most interesting. The professor was trying to get me to analyse qui (nom, s, masc). Now, if it had been qui (nom, pl, masc), I'd have had it. Obviously.

qu-i
who-nom.pl.masc

But how does the singular version break up? One possible solution.

qu-i
who-nom.s.masc

But it's not very satisfying. After all, how does -i signal nom.s.masc? I'm not thinking of anything off hand. So the solution I took in class was to not analyze it. Qui (nom, s, masc) is qui is qui. The professor pushed a bit, but I couldn't justify it so it stood as unanalyzable. 

Spring semester 2013

I'm taking First Language Acquisition and Morphology. Excitement. Well, maybe not, but I've got small children so I'll have informants at hand. In fact, I administered the one and only Wug Test to Little Girl. Even though I explained what she was supposed to do, some items were really vexing. Others were "Daddy, why are you asking such obviously easy questions?" sorts of questions.

So anyway. Get ready for me to blather on about those two fields. I'm still somewhat stumped by the whole v-deletion thing in Latin, so maybe I'll do more with that. I've also got a student project I want to work up for the research symposium in April. Fun times.