Changes within the word

Reduplication

Reduplication copies all or part of a base. The copied material may express number, aspect, intensity or another language-specific function; “repeated syllable” is not itself a gloss. WALS gives Indonesian rumah “house” and rumah-rumah “houses” as whole-stem reduplication. It also gives Ancient Greek gé-grapha “I have written”, with a Ce- prefix in the perfect. The same formal process therefore cannot be assigned one universal meaning.

To analyze reduplication, state exactly what is copied, where it appears, whether sounds are altered, and which grammatical contrast the paired forms establish. Distinguish productive patterns from fixed inherited words that only resemble reduplication.

Alternation and tone

A morphological contrast may be expressed by an internal vowel or consonant change rather than by an added segment. English mouse/mice is a modern example of a historically conditioned alternation now lexicalized in a small set. A tonal language may change pitch on the same segmental string. WALS gives Ngiti kamà “chief” beside kámá “chiefs”; a transcription that drops the accent marks destroys the evidence for the number contrast.

Do not assume every phonetic difference is morphological. Test whether the alternation follows an independent sound rule or occurs only in specific lexemes and grammatical cells. A script that omits vowels or tones may make an ancient alternation impossible to verify directly.

Suppletion and zero

Suppletion is a paradigm relation between forms with markedly different stems, such as English go/went. It is established by distribution and lexical identity, not by visible segmentation. Zero expression is an analysis in which a grammatical value has no overt exponent in a cell. It is useful only after other cells show that the category exists and the paradigm supplies a contrast; a blank in an ancient corpus may simply mean the form is unattested.

Absence of a visible suffix is not evidence that nothing grammatical is happening. The form may involve internal change, a separate particle, a stem class, or a construction. Record what the source shows and what the analysis infers.

Practice

Compare the sourced Indonesian, Ngiti and Ancient Greek forms. For each, name the formal operation and its particular function. Explain why a single label such as “plural marker” would fail across the three. Then identify which of the three contrasts would be invisible if diacritics were stripped.