Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Lauren Porter
All languages consist of phonemes, which are the distinct units of sound that are
heard in words. These units of sound are combined to express meaning and become
1981). However, different languages treat morphemes differently. This paper briefly
describes the the morphology of the English and Spanish languages, focusing on the verb
forms in each language. The main focus will be on Spanish verb morphology, with
English verb morphology touched upon as a familiar reference for readers. For the ease
of understanding the general concepts of this paper, the language and description will be
in reference to regular verbs, unless otherwise stated. The goal is not to create an
exhaustive list of the morphology of the verbs in both languages, but to provide clear
examples of English and Spanish verbs that can highlight some of the major differences
in the verb morphology of both languages. The overall question is, what are the
similarities and differences in Spanish and English verb morphology? Additionally, how
Morphemes
It is important first to understand the morpheme as the most basic unit of meaning
in a word. Morphemes are classified depending on their type and location; the two types
of morphemes are content morphemes and function morphemes. Table 1 below shows the
types of morphemes. Content morphemes convey meaning, and can further be broken
down into free or bound morphemes, meaning they can act as a word on their own or act
as a root on their own. Function morphemes tell about relationships, and they are also
broken down into free and bound morphemes. Free function morphemes are function
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
words, such as prepositions, whereas bound functions are broken further down into
markings.
Table 1
Types of morphemes
roots or affixes. Roots can be free or bound, and act as the base of the word. Affixes are
further broken down into prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and circumfixes, depending on where
Location of morphemes
Type Name/Location/Example
can indicate:
Meaning
Person (who)
Tense (when)
Number
Mood/degree of certainty
Possession
Direction/spatial relation
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
how they treat morphemes. Analytic languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, have no
internal word structure, and are made up of free morphemes; in short, they do not have
morphology. On the other hand, synthetic languages, such as Hungarian, all have some
level of internal structure, and are categorized as isolating, agglutinating, and fusional.
their treatment of fusion and synthesis. On the index of fusion there are isolating,
agglutinating, and fusional languages. This index describes how easy it is to find a
morpheme boundary; with isolating languages one word can be one morpheme,
agglutinating languages have fairly clear boundaries, and fusional languages are the most
complex as there is less clarity with each morpheme boundary and there can be multiple
meanings per morpheme. On the index of synthesis there are analytic, synthetic, and
have morphology, meaning each morpheme is a word. In synthetic languages, there is one
content morpheme and other morphemes, and in polysynthetic languages, there can be
more than one content morpheme per word, meaning one word could be one sentence.
English is an isolating, synthetic language, meaning one word could be a morpheme, but
also that there are content morphemes and other morphemes. On the other hand, as a
Given that morphemes can describe so many different things, and there are many
different ways to treat morphemes, it is not a surprise that English and Spanish
morphology is very different. In English, verbs can tell number, tense, and aspect.
Spanish verbs can tell much more: person, number, tense, aspect, probability, and mood
(Montrul, 2004).
Spanish has a much more complicated morphology than English in that verbs can
be inflected for: aspect, tense, mood, probability (the subjunctive), person, and number
(Serpa, 2005). Unlike English, the Spanish verbs themselves are changed to reflect the
changes. Sometimes this is true in English, but overall English does not have as many
morphological changes to the verbs, merely to pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc. In Spanish,
there are 46-47 verb forms, whereas English only has 4 or 5 (Serpa, 2005).
English verbs will be described first in order that the complexity of their Spanish
paper. English verbs can describe number, tense, and aspect. The most important use of
tense is to differentiate past and present time (Palmer, 1988). Tense is the expression of
an event relative to the time that the verb is being spoken. Aspect is different in that it
English present-tense, regular verbs show number with the inflectional morpheme
s, added as a suffix to the verb. Table 3, below, is an example with the regular verb
walk. In present tense verbs, -s indicates the third person singular form of the verb.
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
Note that in English, a subject pronoun is necessary in order to clarify who did the action,
because the morphology of the verb stays the same in most cases; this demonstrates how
English is an isolating language. However, when the verb stays in the same form for most
of the conjugations, it only indicates present tense. It cannot indicate number (who) as
well.
Table 3
Person Verb
I Walk
You Walk
He/She Walks
They Walk
We Walk
The simple past-tense of regular English verbs is created with the inflectional
morphemes ed or t. These are added as a suffix (an affix morpheme added at the end)
of the verb. Table 4 below is an example of the verb describing tense. Table 4 uses the
same verb, walk, which uses the ed suffix, to demonstrate this. Again, it is important
to notice that the subject pronoun is necessary to clarify who did the action; the verb
morphology for all pronouns in this case is the same so the verb itself cannot tell who did
the action.
Table 4
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
Person Verb
I Walked
You Walked
He/She Walked
They Walked
We Walked
There are many aspects that an English verb can describe, including: present
perfect, past perfect, present progressive (present continuous), and present perfect
added. In the progressive tenses, the inflectional morpheme ing is added. However,
when describing aspect, the verb needs an auxiliary verb to make complete the meaning.
This paper will not include an exhaustive list, but merely provide examples in order to be
compared to Spanish verbs. Table 5 below provides examples of aspect/tense with the
verb walk.
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
Table 5
Walk: aspect/tense
Now that a basis of understanding for English verb morphology has been set, it is
pertinent to look closer at Spanish verbs. As mentioned above, Spanish verbs indicate
person, number, tense, aspect, probability, and mood (Montrul, 2004). The following two
figures were taken from (Montrol, 2004, p. 89) and are good visuals to help understand
Spanish verb morphology. Figure 1 Example 1A is the basic equation for the verb
conjugation, and Example 1B is an example with the verb cantar, which means to
sing.
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
(1A) [root+thematic vowel]stem+suffix1(tense/aspect/mood)+suffix 2(person/number)
is able to understand the tense, aspect or mood, and the person or number based on one
Additionally, all Spanish verbs are categorized into three classes: -ar, -ir, and er
verbs. These are dependent on the thematic vowel of the infinitive ending of the verb
(Montrul, 2004). For example, caminar (to walk) is an ar verb, vivir (to live) is an ir
verb, and tener (to have) is an er verb. For regular verbs, the way in which a verb is
Below, in Table 6, is an example of the verb caminar (to walk), in its present tense
form. As the example shows, in each conjugation of a Spanish verb, there are six possible
forms (Mackenzie, 2001). Note that the changes made to the verb, via the change in
suffix, denote the number and person. This is an example of how Spanish is a fusional
language; the single morphemes on the verbs give two meanings. In English, a subject
pronoun is required to clarify. However, in Spanish, the subject pronoun may only be
needed to clarify for emphasis, depending on the context, or to describe if the third
person is male or female (l, ella) respectively, or if the group is all female
ustedes).
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
Table 6
Person Verb
I (Yo) Camino
We (Nosotros/Nosotras) Caminamos/Caminamos
Moods that a Spanish verb can indicate are the imperative, indicative, or
subjunctive mood (Lewis & Chavez, 1940). The imperative is equal to a command in
English. The indicative mood is similar to all English modes of describing past or present
tenses, or present or past continuous aspects. However, the subjunctive is a mood that
Spanish verbs describe that is rarely used in English. Additionally, the subjunctive mood
conjugations and combinations of verb morphology. The subjunctive mood is, from the
necessity of what is stated (Montrul, 2004). In other words, the subjunctive is used to
in Spanish, but those will not be addressed in this paper. In English, the affix can be
useful to define regularity. However, in Spanish this is not the case. Many of the irregular
Spanish verbs still take the same affix as the regular ones (Bowden et al. , 2010).
So far, there have been specific examples of verb morphology in both English and
Spanish. However, to fully demonstrate the complexity of the Spanish verb conjugations
simply for the yo (I) form of the verb caminar (to walk). Note the following, which
further complicates the morphology: for each of these examples, there are five other
conjugations for the five other number/person denotations, for each tense. Also, not all
tenses will be represented in this table; this is an ar verb, and conjugations are different
for the er and ir classified verbs. Additionally, Spanish also uses the verb haber,
which acts similarly to have in English. However, in English, if have, has, or had
is used, the verb conjugation stays the same. For example, I have walked/I had
walked/He has walked, etc. However, note that in Spanish, a conjugated form of haber
Conclusion
Language begins with phonemes, but the meaning, and therefore understanding,
morphology differences exist between languages can promote understanding that literal
translations do not exist. Though an exhaustive list has not been given, this paper has
References
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Palmer, F.R. (1988). The English verb (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Serpa, M. (2005). ELL assessment for linguistic differences vs. learning disabilities:
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SPANISH VERB MORPHOLOGY
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