PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE

FACULTAD DE LETRAS

Synchronic Grammar I:

Final Research Paper

Author:

Felipe Real Hurtado

Professor:

Hernán Pons

Santiago de Chile

July 2008

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Index

Cover ............................................................................................................................................... 1

Index ............................................................................................................................................... 2

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4

The Text .......................................................................................................................................... 5

Basics of the text ......................................................................................................................... 5

Particulars of the text .................................................................................................................. 5

The text itself .............................................................................................................................. 5

New D&D Rolls a 20 for Playability! ............................................................................................ 6

By guest blogger Michael Zenke ................................................................................................ 6

Methodology and Results ............................................................................................................. 11

Overview of the text .................................................................................................................. 11

Inflectional vs Derivational Morphology .................................................................................. 11

Analysis of the Inflectional Processes .......................................................................................... 12

Analysis of the Nominal Inflection ........................................................................................... 13

Analysis of the Adjectival Inflection ........................................................................................ 14

Analysis of the Verbal Inflection .............................................................................................. 14

Analysis of the Pronominal Inflection ...................................................................................... 15

Analysis of the Suppletive forms .............................................................................................. 16

Analysis of the Derivational Processes ......................................................................................... 17

Analysis of the Nominal Derivation ......................................................................................... 18

Analysis of the Adjectival Derivation ....................................................................................... 19

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Analysis of the Verbal Derivation ............................................................................................ 19

Analysis of the Adverbial Derivation ....................................................................................... 20

Analysis of the Acronyms ......................................................................................................... 21

Analysis of the Compounds ...................................................................................................... 21

Analysis of the Conversions ..................................................................................................... 22

Analysis of the Prefixation Processes ....................................................................................... 23

Analysis of the Shortening Process ........................................................................................... 24

Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 25

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Introduction

The following research is based upon a blog article written by Michael Zenke and published on

June 6th, 2008, as a review of a new, 4th edition of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons

(or D&D).

Zenke’s article is very interesting—from a morphological point of view—because of the

particularly technical language he uses to write about a game, and how those technical words are

seemingly easily understood by the gaming community. Furthermore, the author also uses a large

number of acronyms—most of them alphabetisms—that contribute to the technicality of the

blog.

Now, the morphological methodology to analyze this blog article is based upon a

synchronic appreciation of the English language, and therefore, it will not consider the analysis

of content words whose origin is part of etymology and other diachronic fields of study.

Nevertheless, bound bases will be analyzed if they present recurrent morphological processes; in

other words, if the prefix/suffix is synchronically recurrent and significant.

For these reasons, this study will not consider as object of its analysis the morphology of

numbers (ordinals such as 4th, largely repeated throughout the text) or the only graphical process

of contractions (wouldn’t, weren’t, et. al.) and, instead, will largely focus on the derivational and

inflectional morphology present in the article.

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The Text

Basics of the text

The blog entry used as corpus of analysis was published in June 6th

Particulars of the text

, 2008 by Michael Zenke,

official play tester in the last stages of development of the new edition of the role-playing game

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). That same day was the official world-wide release of this new

edition and the World Wide Web was swarmed by articles and reviews of the incoming books.

Although the format of blog is nowadays widely spread and employed by the average

user of informatics’ technology, it is very interesting to observe that Zenke’s language is far from

colloquial. Obviously it has “modern” features of the language—such as the use of

contractions—but it is largely a formal writing addressed to a gaming community that has its

own slang. This gaming slang seems to be characterized by the use of technical words—

therefore, we could expect an unusual amount of compound words—as well as sharing a

common background knowledge regarding certain terms and names used in the blog entry.

The text itself

The following text is the edited version of Zenke’s blog entry, adapted for this format. It keeps

the author’s original text in every possible way—the use of italics, capitalization and bold font,

for example—but it does not include the images that accompanied the original article, mostly

because of practical reasons of space and utility (the images were just edited versions of the

books cover arts, with no text or any other references on them).

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New D&D Rolls a 20 for Playability!

By guest blogger Michael Zenke

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is going to change just about everything for the dice-rolling

set.

With the new edition, released Friday, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast is launching one of

the most ambitious attempts the tabletop-games industry has seen at redefining what it means to

play an RPG. The rules are different, the mind-set is different, even the delivery system is

different. At essentially every level, Dungeons & Dragons is being streamlined and simplified

with one goal in mind: To get players together to roll some dice and have fun.

"From the beginning of the 4th Edition design process, we knew we wanted to make a rules set

that was accessible and easy to use," said Bill Slavicsek, R&D director for role-playing games at

Wizards. "We wanted to approach them in a friendlier manner, and not necessarily continue the

'dense textbook' style of past editions. I wouldn't say we were thinking 'mainstream gaming,'

whatever that really means. The D&D game will always be a specialized hobby. The trick is

making sure that we can remove as many hurdles as possible so that it becomes the largest

specialized hobby it can be."

I had the opportunity to play D&D 4th Edition in a series of play tests run by a friend of mine

last December. As gaming sessions go, they were quite grueling; we showed up at noon and

played until well after 10 or 11 p.m. We had to, though: We were on a deadline. Wizards needed

feedback on the adventure we were playing by the end of the month. Despite the long hours,

despite our fumbling with the rules, despite sometimes rough notes for the dungeon master, it

was a glorious experience.

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At every level, mechanically, players and dungeon masters (a game's storyteller and arbiter) are

freed to experience the game in ways they never could before. Characters now have special

powers that assist them in combat, giving them real moment-to-moment choices in the heat of

battle.

"I hit it with my warhammer" gets pretty old; instead, why don't you whack that monster upside

its head so hard that it's forced to stagger backward? Spellcasters have similarly colorful abilities

in D&D 4th Edition; where once they had hundreds of thematically similar spells to choose from,

they now only have to make a few important decisions as they gain in power. Warlocks, arcane

casters that truck with mysterious powers, have particularly evocative abilities. What better way

to deal with a troublesome orc than to teleport it away from you? If part of that trip involves

burning in the fires of Hell, so much the better!

In D&D 4th Edition, dungeon masters, or DMs, are freed from a good deal of the bookkeeping

associated with the hobby in previous editions of the game, as the designers have streamlined the

process for preparing adventures. Boxes of statistical information and extensive charts were once

the norm, but now DMs can almost throw together an adventure on the fly. This philosophy has

also lead to some radical changes in monster design. Just as players now have a fun trick or two

up their sleeves, monsters now wield fantastic abilities that are wholly unique.

The possibilities these mechanical changes unlock are exciting in and of themselves. Nerds love

to debate game mechanics, but what all this ultimately means for the player and the DM is more

time focusing on more important things.

Combat moves so fluidly now, and the DM has so much less prep time to worry about, that the

art of role-playing itself finally moves into the foreground of Dungeons & Dragons. Telling a

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compelling story, and having a ton of fun doing it, is ultimately the reason players sit down to

game in the first place. What D&D 4th Edition represents is the chance to have fun with your

friends without a ton of hassle, to immerse yourself in a fantasy world without working at it.

In fact, many of the mechanics are so easy to use that they remind players of what it feels like to

play a massively multiplayer game. Wizards' Slavicsek has absolutely no problem with those

comparisons, as all good games build on what has come before.

"Good games, whatever the format, are always a boon," he says. "Better games mean more

gamers, and more gamers mean a robust and vibrant hobby. At the end of the day, if the

entertainment is solid and fun, it attracts an audience. D&D is the game that paved the way for

the MMOs of today, but they are two very different experiences. Indeed, I believe that we need

more reasons to get together in the same room and socialize in person. D&D is a great way to do

that."

D&D is truly a great way to have fun. It's all about socializing with your friends over a handful

of dice. Laughing at old jokes and cracking new ones, running your friends through an adventure

you've created -- there's no experience quite like playing in a tabletop role-playing game.

In our testing, Fargrim, hardened dwarven warrior, served as my personal window onto the

world the DM conjured at the table. Wielding a warhammer and a nasty attitude, he was the

party's front-line defender. Over the course of that month he held the line masterfully. Though he

nearly fell at the hands of a vicious tribe of goblins, was burned by the acidic membranes of a

gelatinous ooze, and nearly drowned in a deadly water trap, he ultimately survived to tell the

tale. The subjugation of an idyllic countryside was the cost of failure, and Fargrim's party

successfully won the day.

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Given the constraints of play-testing, there was almost no storytelling. We did very little role-

playing, almost no character development -- and still it was one of the most enjoyable D&D

experiences I've ever had. I've been playing this game for almost 20 years now, and the sheer

potential for entertainment the 4th Edition rules offer up is still something I'm coming to terms

with. In a more relaxed environment, with the opportunity for character, story and pacing, the

polished mechanics will allow DMs and players to fully appreciate the experience of Dungeons

& Dragons as they're playing.

For the first time, Dungeons & Dragons will offer an integrated online component. For a fee,

players will be able to get together on a "virtual tabletop" and play D&D with their friends from

anywhere in the world. The way Wizards is going about charging for this service is a bit hard to

understand, but the company is offering a level of service that has never been seen before in a

pen-and-paper title.

The last edition of D&D was released in the summer of 2000, and did a tremendous job of

revitalizing a hobby that had waned in popularity through the end of the '90s. While it also went

a long way toward addressing some seriously arcane rules (Thac0, anyone?), a number of legacy

issues found their way into D&D 3.0. Veteran third-edition players will talk your ear off about

the problems with a combat mechanic called grappling. Even more daunting was the magic-

user's burden of choosing from the hundreds of spells available at high level -- a Brobdingnagian

task.

D&D 4th Edition removes these hurdles. Wizards has clarified and enriched its legendary

tabletop property, and the new rules get to the core experience of D&D like no other edition has.

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If 3.0 was like listening to symphony with earmuffs on, 4th Edition turns those muffs into high-

quality headphones.

It's not without some amount of irony, of course, that D&D co-creator Gary Gygax passed away

the same year a new edition of his story-based game will be released. Some cynical wits have

made cracks to the effect of "he couldn't bear to see the new edition released"; it's an open secret

in the tabletop gaming world that Gygax had little interest in the more recent editions of the

game.

I see it quite the opposite, though. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is a fitting tribute to Gygax

and Dave Arneson's original vision of a game built around a story with few mechanical supports.

D&D, when it was first released, was little more than a few dozen pieces of paper stapled

together. They were the barest bones of a game system, requiring players and DMs to fill in the

blanks to create fun experiences. D&D 4th Edition returns to those early roots by freeing the

participants from boring mechanics and petty arguments about rules, by allowing them to focus

on what's truly important.

Good story, good friends, rolling dice, having fun. What else could be more important, in the real

world or the one of Dungeons & Dragons?

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Methodology and Results

Overview of the text

The text being analyzed is composed of 1,471 words. Of that number, 959 did not present any

relevant morphological processes and 512 did present morphological processes. For this analysis,

the morphology of numbers and contractions are not taken into account.

Inflectional vs Derivational Morphology

From the 512 words analyzed, 305 can be classified as part of the Inflectional paradigm of the

English language. This classification includes the 8 grammatical morphemes plus the so-called

Pronominal Inflection and the suppletive forms of the verbs to be. Derivational morphology, on

the other hand, is found in 207 words. This category includes the 4 major groups—nominal,

adjectival, verbal and adverbial derivation—and the lexicogenetic processes of Composition,

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Acronyms, Prefixation and Shortening of words. The following chart provides the percentages

and relations between the two.

Analysis of the Inflectional Processes

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As it can be seen, inflectional morphology is mostly found in the Nominal Inflection paradigm,

followed closely behind by the Verbal paradigm and behind this are the Pronominal paradigm

and Suppletive forms. The few Adjectival forms that appeared throughout the text—only 8 out of

the 304 that presented inflectional morphology—account for the few comparisons and

superlatives. This tells us that the author intended to present an balanced and rather neutral vision

on his review of the game’s new edition.

Analysis of Nominal Inflection

The results of the data analysis regarding nominal inflection in this text, is a perfect reflection of

the actual state of the English language: native speakers seem to be abandoning the use of the

“possessive” inflective suffix and, at the same time, the stream of regularization seems to be

unavoidable in the plural paradigm. This, because of the great extension of the s1 suffix, which

has now clearly outnumbered other forms of pluralization in English.

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Analysis of the Adjectival Inflection

The scarce number of adjectives of the blog entry are equally divided between the superlative

and comparative form, another factor that demonstrates the egalitarian approach of Zenke

regarding his experience while play-testing the new game.

Analysis of the Verbal Inflection

Verbal Inflection in the text is largely composed of verbs conjugated in the past tense,

represented by the abundant presence of the inflective form “ed1”. This is the result of the

narrative exposed on the text, related to Zenke’s experience. In this sense, if there is any

argumentative exposition of the topic, it stems from the life-experience of the author.

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Analysis of the Pronominal Inflection

The Pronominal Inflection was used in this analysis as an all-encompassing category. It is very

interesting to observe how numerous the so-called “Th- Paradigm” is. Moreover, the possessive

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pronouns are almost equally important in number and in recurrence, due to the quotes attributed

to various speakers in the text.

Analysis of the Suppletive forms

The suppletive forms category includes the verb to be and the verb to have, and serves the

purpose of looking at the recurrence of what are perhaps the most important verbs in the English

language in their irregular forms.

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Analysis of the Derivational Processes

As it is shown above, Derivational Morphology is composed of various processes, which in the

overall scenario are the most productive and ever present in the synchronic English language,

although they can be quantitatively outnumbered by the inflection paradigm. As it can be seen,

Verbal derivation in this text is almost non-existent (with only 3 cases out of a derivational

universe of 253), a fact that demonstrates that the most common way of forming verbs in English

is not through suffixation, but through the conversion process.

On the other hand, Prefixation and the Shortening of words were two processes of

lexicogenesis that scarcely appeared in the text. This reveals how uncommon these two

morphological processes are.

Finally, the conversion category includes only a few special cases but it is not used in the

most general sense of the concept, because of the risk of duplication; in other words, because of

the risk of repeating too many words in two different categories, therefore ruining the analysis.

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Analysis of the Nominal Derivation

The analysis of the different morphemes that formed the nominal derivational paradigm of this

text provides us with information both about how the text was written and about the recurrence

of the morphemes. It must be said that for this analysis, the morpheme “s4” and “ics” were used

as valid morphological categories. These morphemes correspond, respectively, to the –s that

appears in ‘90s and to the use of –ics to form the noun “mechanics”, referred in the text as a

concept derived from the different mechanisms of the game.

Likewise, it is very noticeable the importance given to the use of the “ing3” morpheme.

They are very recurrent in this text and its importance can be attributed to the fact that the blog

entry is talking about doing things; i.e. to play a game and to do things in life. Another recurrent

morpheme in the text is the agentive derivational suffix –er, which can be also attributed to the

reference to doing the activities abovementioned.

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Analysis of the Adjectival Derivation

The few derived forms (4) that form the paradigm of Adjectival Derivation are characterized by

the predominance of the “–al” suffix present in forms such as personal and potential.

Analysis of the Verbal Derivation

The Verbal Derivation that appears in the text is also very limited. The morphemes that appeared

are the “–ize” and the “–ify” forms and, as I mentioned before, its scant presence are the result of

the outnumbering process of conversion, that is nowadays the most recurrent process in verb

formation in the English language.

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Analysis of the Adverbial Derivation

Adverbial Derivation, on the other hand, is entirely dominated by the –ly1 morpheme. This could

be regarded as demonstrative of the author’s simplicity in writing, because of his closeness to his

audience.

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Analysis of the Acronyms

As anticipated in the Introduction, acronyms were of particular importance in Zenke’s blog

entry, as a result of the technical jargon shared by gamers. Inside acronyms, a large amount of

them were alphabetisms resulted from the everyday use of words such as RPG—which stands for

Role-Playing Game. Furthermore, the use of acronyms exhibits the principle of “economy of

language” at its highest, together with creating a sense of shared background between the writer

and his audience.

Analysis of the Compounds

Another aspect in this jargon is the use of compounds. Of particular interest here is the creation

of concepts and notions through the composition process, in order to specify certain

characteristics or groups through language. For this analysis, two syntactic but very productive

constructions were considered as compounds, because of its importance in the text. These were

the construction Dungeons and Dragons (or Dungeons & Dragons) and the trademark Wizards of

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the Coast. In first case, its importance is derived from the notion of what Dungeons and Dragons

is as a game and an experience. Similarly, in the trademark case, the word Wizards is used

throughout the text as a shortened version of the brand name and represents both the company

and a corporative entity. That is why both cases were considered as compounds for this analysis.

Analysis of the Conversions

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The only processes of conversion analyzed in the text were those related to words that occurred

in forms that are historically recent in comparison to previous functions. A good example of this

is the word “experience”, which according to the OED was first used as a noun, with corpus

supporting this statement from 1388 in the voice of Wiclyf: “Now y schal take experience” The

sense of the word experience here is to put to test or trial. That same meaning, but in the verb

form, only appears in 1533. These are the type of cases considered for this study.

Analysis of the Prefixation Processes

The scant number of prefixed words in the text does not permit to make any real generalization

of the actual trends in Prefixation. If anything can be said, is that this processes is far from

recurrent in Zenke’s writing and its use is always marked by repetition or emphasis, and does not

seem to be casual.

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Analysis of the Shortening Process

Finally, the shortening process involves the expressions which are used in a more colloquial way.

In this sense, we encountered words such as prep, which is actually quite accepted, as a reduced

form of the noun preparation or the example of muffs for earmuffs, in order to avoid repetition.

But perhaps the most interesting case to analyze is the word blogger—which indeed does

not appear in the Second Edition of the OED. The word blogger, first and foremost, is a derived

form of the original blog, through the agentive morpheme –er. Now the word blog is indeed a

shortened, reduced version of the compound boat log, which the native speakers “broadened”

semantically and then “backformed” into blogger, due to its resemblance to other nouns.

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Conclusions

I chose the text used for this analysis for very special reasons. When I was 14 years old, I read

for the first time the title “Calabozos y Dragones” over a book with a charging knight on its

cover art. Even at that time, I could not but wonder “Why did the translators use those words in

order to translate the Dungeons & Dragons concept?”

This analysis intends to demonstrate that morphology is of great importance in our

perspective of a language. Although English is acknowledged to have borrowed structures and

lexicon from many sources, it is still important to discover what its grammatical foundations are.

I cannot but be amazed at the incredible knowledge that can be derived from morphology and

how useful it can prove to be in areas such as translation, following the abovementioned

example.

Moreover, this quantitative analysis is also useful to analyze a text from a different

perspective; indeed, how can we know if a text is neutral in its treatment of a subject? Well, let’s

see how many superlatives and adjectives it uses. How can we know if the text was written by a

speaker with a great knowledge of his/her language? Let’s analyze how many prefixes or

Latinate words uses. How can we know if the text is technical in its use of language is rather

colloquial? Let’s see how acronyms, compounds and other technicalities are used in comparison

to the amount of contractions and words without morphological processes.

Finally, I can say now that definitely Calabozos y Dragones is not a good translation—

and will never be—for the concept behind Dungeons & Dragons. How different these concepts

are, that even non-English speakers refer to the game as D&D (in Spanish, saying De y De).