Can foreign words be reduced into English morphemes?

Question

In class today, during an activity when we were given the task of breaking down a list of words into morphemes, I had a disagreement with a professor who tried to convince me that the word "companionship" was composed of four morphemes: com-pan-ion-ship.

I argued that there were only two in the word (companion and ship), and that since companion is a borrowed word, it is irreducible in English. "Companion" was taken directly from French, as it is, and not derived in English. The morphemes "com", "pan", and "ion" are Latin, meaning nothing in English, and cannot be used freely to make other words.

Take for example the borrowed word "origami" (Japanese). Origami is just origami, it is irreducible. It was taken whole, as it is; there are no morphemes in that. However, someone who knew Japanese might be able to break that down into ori-gami, but that would be ridiculous because those are Japanese morphemes that mean nothing in English. We don't speak Japanese, just like we don't speak Latin or French.

What do you say?

Answer 1

I suppose it depends on how you define the two terms "foreign words" and "English morphemes." I would not call the English word "companion" a foreign word; to me that is just its etymological origin.

I think morphemes are generally considered a little more abstract and general than what you have in mind. In particular, I don't know of any requirement that they have to be apparent to linguistically naive native speakers. But in fact, Latin-derived morphemes such as the prefix com- are so common in modern English vocabulary that I think it's wrong to state that they never mean anything to English speakers. I also don't think there is any rule that all borrowed words are automatically mono-morphemic.

Regarding making new words from these morphemes (productivity): There are native English morphemes that are not productive, like the gain- prefix of gainsay. It's still considered a morpheme.

Taking companionship specifically

You agree with your professor that -ship is a distinct morpheme.

This gives us companion-ship.

Company vs. companion = a suffix -on or -ion?

The words company and companion seem to me to be related morphologically. If you agree, you can see that the "greatest common denominator" of these words is something like compan- or compani- (the latter works if we consider <i> and <y> to be purely graphical variants, and /i/ and /j/ to be allophonic or allomorphic variants that are conditioned by the presence or absence of a following vowel).

If companion and company are morphologically related, it seems to me that companion cannot be a single morpheme; it must have some other morpheme attached to the end. There are word pairs like relate/relat-ion-ship and un-ite/un-ion that show the putative -ion morpheme in a different context, so it seems reasonable to divide companion into compan-ion. (Note: "-tion" actually appears to be considered a morpheme by multiple linguists; “-tion in creation” is listed as a bound morpheme in these lecture notes for a Linguistics 101 course taught by Mark Liberman at the University of Pennsylvania. I suppose you could say that it carries meaning about the part of speech, since this suffix generally appears on nouns.) On the other hand, companion does behave a bit anomalously in some ways for a word with the suffix -(t)ion:

• normally this suffix takes the form -tion or -sion. The word union is actually anomalous in lacking a t/s.
• normally these words are abstract or represent the results of abstract processes; but companion refers to a concrete person.
• normally, the letters a, e, or o are given their "tense" or "long" pronunciations when followed by a single consonant (at the "underlying" level; that is, not counting single sounds represented by doubled letters like the "ss" in obsession) and the suffix -ion. For example, creation and abrasion. But companion is pronounced with a short/lax a.

If we look at the history, companion was not really formed with a suffix -ion. The hypothetical Latin ancestor compāniō is thought to have been composed of the prefix com-, the combining form pani- of panis "bread," and the augmentative suffix -ō(n-) (also seen in names such as Cicero). The Latin word passed into French, which is the immediate source of the English word.

Now, it doesn't make sense to me to analyze morphology on the basis of etymological knowledge that is not available to most native speakers. However, this information, plus the previously-mentioned anomalies if we interpret the suffix as -ion, does make me more inclined to analyse the word as compani-on.

Anyway, it doesn't affect the number of morphemes. This gives us compan-ion-ship or compani-on-ship.

Identifying the com- of companion as a prefix

As mkennedy and Adam say, com- exists as a prefix in many English words, usually meaning something like "together" or "with". Yes, most words with this prefix were taken from Latin whole rather than put together in English, but they are still English words now. So, we can separate this out as a distinct morpheme. Greg Lee points out another strong piece of evidence in his answer: the reduced quality of the first vowel. Apparently Chomsky and Halle's "The Sound Pattern of English" mentions the fact that morphologically simple words tend not to reduce the vowel of an initial closed syllable when the second syllable has stress: consider the pronunciations of "Montana," "spontaneous," "fondue," "bombard," "bombastic," "trombone," "conchoidal." Notice that there are reasons to identify "com-" is a separate morpheme even if we only look at other English words for comparison, not the original Latin words.

This gives us com-pan-ion-ship or com-pani-on-ship.

But is pan or pani really a morpheme in English?

I agree that it's questionable to identify pan(i) as a morpheme (especially one with the specific meaning "bread"), since I can't actually think of any other common English words that use this pan(i) "bread" morpheme (it's in pannier and panini, but neither of these seems fully naturalized to me, and it's in pantry, but not in a very recognizable form). A morpheme is supposed to be a meaningful unit, and it doesn't seem like native English speakers would associate any meaning with pan(i) on it's own.

This problem is not restricted to this one word, however. Two famous examples are the cran- and rasp- (or /ræz/ phonemically) in the words cranberry and raspberry. As far as I know, these are generally considered to be morphemes that don't have any meaning aside from their use in these particular words. But we can say that they are morphemes because berry is clearly a distinct morpheme.

With companionship, once we remove the clearly identifiable English morphemes com- and -ship, and the less clear but apparently present morpheme -ion or -on, we're left with what appears to be a morpheme pan, even if this type of analysis doesn't tell us what this morpheme means.

Edwin Ashworth's answer cites Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics, by Marina Yaguello, translated by herself and Trevor A. Le V. Harris, which provides a different way of describing pan/pani that might be more useful or more appropriate. Yaguello speaks of "so-called paleo-morphemes, whose status and meaning are impenetrable for many speakers" (39). So maybe pan or pani is best classified as one of these "paleo-morphemes." It's unclear to me if Yaguello considers these a sub-class of morphemes: the next sentence suggests she does ("Such morphemes are all the more numerous in English, insofar as it is a hybrid language which has borrowed a great deal, in particular from the Classical and Romance languages") but the "turpitude" example cited in Edwin Ashworth's answer suggests to me that she doesn't. I'm not all that interested in terminological debates, but it is interesting to consider the limitations of the concept of the "morpheme."

Answer 2

The following extract is from Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics_Marina Yaguello, Trevor A. Le V. Harris; the conclusions summarised (from an acceptance of the views of the authors) are mine.

… An analysis which is valid from a historical or etymological point of view may be worthless from the synchronic point of view: that is, within the language system as it exists and is perceived by speakers at a given moment in its history….

Sometimes, the complete form of Latin words has come down to us, but not their constituent morphemes. [(1) morphemes are not common across all languages, even when one language has evolved largely from a previous one.]

If we compare amplitude and turpitude, for example, we can easily isolate the suffix -itude, which we also find in numerous abstract nouns and which is still productive….

But in the first case, ampl- is identified as a morpheme of English [(2) morphemes are defined for an individual language, and need that language specifying where it is not obvious], found in ample, amply, amplify, and so on, while turp- is not: an accident of history has meant that in one case the adjective and words derived from it have all passed into English, while in the other case they have not. So the independence of the [Latin] morpheme turp- can only rest on a knowledge of the Latin turpis. [(3) There may or may not be transfer of a morpheme from language A to language B. (If there is, language B is best regarded as containing an isomorphic morpheme rather than the same one.)]

The bottom line is that the correct identification of morphemes in individual words may be counter-intuitive.

Answer 3

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a word. That is, a morpheme is irreducible in meaning, which is not restricted to a particular language. In Japanese, "origami" has two morphemes oru (meaning "fold") plus kami (meaning paper). That English has adopted the word without also adopting its constituents doesn't matter.

Answer 4

The questioner is right. Com- is a common prefix in English words borrowed from Latin or from French or other Romance languages, but it is not a morpheme in English. (And I see no way that pan and ion as used in the word campanionship can be considered English morphemes.) Even in Latin, the status of the prefix com- as a morpheme is iffy. Some linguists might call it a bound morpheme in Latin, just as we would call the -ship in companionship a bound morpheme.

Answer 5

In the Sound Pattern of English analysis of English word stress, when the second syllable of a morphologically simple word has primary stress, the first syllable will have no stress only when it is open (does not end in a consonant) and has a lax vowel. (SPE does not refer to syllable structure, but that's essentially what C&H mean.) Otherwise, the first syllable will have a secondary stress.

For instance, the first syllable of "Nantucket", nan-, has some stress (which prevents its vowel from reducing to schwa), because that syllable is closed by the -n. However, the first syllable of "Connecticut" is open with a lax vowel, and consequently has no stress and its vowel reduces to schwa.

"Companion" is an apparent exception to this rule if it is indeed morphologically simple, since its first syllable is closed by -m yet remains without stress, and its vowel reduces to schwa. So we can conclude that, perhaps despite initial appearances, this word is not actually morphologically simple, and the com- is a separate morpheme.

In the SPE analysis, the Latinate prefixes of English, like com- from con-, are separate morphemes, and this affects their phonological realizations.

Answer 6

It looks like you have to just take it case by case.

Companionship can be broken down into companion and ship, but companion uses the prefix com- (as mkennedy stated). This leaves you with three morphemes that are identifiable and useable in English: com, panion, and ship.

Panion obviously isn't a word, so in this case it is considered an affix because it can't stand alone, and it can't be broken down further because of this.