By desmond bett; B. A- criminology m. A – public administration & policy

3.6
VERBAL BLUEPRINTS
Linguistic theory incorporates the hypothesis that there are universal principles of grammar that regulate the amount of variation in linguistic structure. In the last section we saw the marginal role played by sound symbolism in word-formation. This does not obscure the fact that normally languages from
On the Night Nang Nong
On the Night Nang Nong
Where the cows go Bong
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jabber Joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang!
And you just can’t catch `em when they do!
So it’s Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
The mice go Clang!
What a noisy place to belong,
Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!
SPIKE MILLIGAN
..Words by using a non-imitative way. There is an overriding tendency for the relationship between sounds and meanings to be arbitrary. Normally there is no reason why a particular morpheme is realized by any particular sounds. The choice of the allomorphs that represent a particular morpheme is arbitrary.
Obviously, as everyone knows, all languages do not have the same words. Since virtually any arbitrary match of sound and meaning can produce a word, it is not surprising that words vary greatly in their structure across languages. But this does not means chaos reigns. The ways in which morphs are used to form words is regulated by general principles. So, the amount of crosslinguistic variation in word-formation falls within certain broad parameters. It is as if there is a menu of blueprints for word-formation from all languages make their selections:
[3.14]
(i) ISOLATING (or analytic) languages
(ii) AGGLUTINATING languages
(iii) INFLECTING (or synthetic languages
(iv) POLYSYNTHETIC languages
No language makes all its choices from just one part of menu. To varying degrees all languages make mixed choice. The idea of this menu is to indicate the predominant word-formation tendencies, if they exist. In subsections below we shall consider in turn examples of the different morphological types.

3.6.1
Tiny words is virtually indistinguishable from the morpheme, for every word contains just one morpheme. Every morpheme is a free morpheme. There are no bound morpheme. Vietnamese comes close to this ideal:

[3.15]
vietnamese

1. 
   T’oi a’ ‘a qua’ bo’ng v’a hn ‘a d’a t’oi
   

I kick past class ball and he punch past me
‘ I kicked the ball and he punched me.’
B chu’ng t’oi mua ‘a go
Pl. I buy past rice
‘we bought the rice’
Typically, the words are short and contains just one morpheme each. Almost every concept is expressed by a separate word. Look again, for example, at the treatment of past tense in verbs (e.g. punched, bought and the plurality of we (plural plus first person).