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Chapter 6 Morphology

Morphology is the study of words, their structure and formation. It investigates the basic forms of a language. Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning or function that make up words. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes that can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes that must be attached to other morphemes. Morphemes can be classified as lexical, functional, derivational or inflectional depending on their meaning and function. Morphs are the actual forms that represent morphemes in words, and allomorphs are variant forms of the same morpheme.

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157 views11 pages

Chapter 6 Morphology

Morphology is the study of words, their structure and formation. It investigates the basic forms of a language. Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning or function that make up words. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes that can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes that must be attached to other morphemes. Morphemes can be classified as lexical, functional, derivational or inflectional depending on their meaning and function. Morphs are the actual forms that represent morphemes in words, and allomorphs are variant forms of the same morpheme.

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CHAPTER 6:

MORPHOLOGY
Lecture by: Ms. Sadaf Siddiq
WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?
• The term morphology means “the study of
forms,” was originally used in biology, but,
since the middle of the nineteenth century
it has become type of study in linguistics. Morphe=form
(Greek word)
• It investigates the basic forms (words) of a
language. Morphology
-ology= the study
• It is the study of words, their internal of
structure, formation, and their relationship (Greek suffix)
to other words.
MORPHEMES
Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. Look at the
following examples.
• Talks, talker, talked, talking
• Walks, walker, walked, walking
• Bakes, baker, baked, baking
You can see all these words have two elements (morphemes). One
is“talk”,”walk”,”bake” which have meaning, these are called stems.
( stem: the base form to which affixes are attached in the formation of words)
But the other elements such as “s”, “er”, “ed”, “ing” don’t have meaning but
they are performing some grammatical function (third person singular, past
tense or plural etc).
FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES
Free morphemes: those morphemes that can stand by themselves as single
words, for example, walk, talk, bake, open and tour.
Bound morpheme: a morpheme such as re- or -ed that cannot stand alone
and must be attached to another form (e.g. reopened)

Reopened

re open ed
free morpheme Bound morpheme (
Bound morpheme (prefix)
(Stem/root) suffix
CONT.
• There are a number of English words in which the element treated as the
stem is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words such as receive, reduce and
repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the
elements -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence
cannot be free morphemes.
• These types of forms are sometimes described as “bound stems” to keep
them distinct from “free stems” such as dress and care.
LEXICAL AND FUNCTIONAL
MORPHEMES
Lexical morpheme: a free morpheme that is a content word such as a noun or
verb or adjective etc. We can add new lexical morphemes to the
language rather easily, so they are treated as an “open” class of words.

Functional morpheme: a free morpheme that is used as a function word, such


as a conjunction (and) or a preposition (in). Because we almost never
add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described
as a “closed” class of words.
DERIVATIONAL AND INFLECTIONAL
MORPHEMES
Derivational morpheme: a bound morpheme such as -ish used to make new words or
words of a different grammatical category (e.g. boyish. For example, the
addition of the derivational morpheme -ness changes the adjective good to
the noun goodness. The noun care can become the adjectives careful or
careless by the addition of the derivational morphemes -ful or -less.
Inflectional morpheme: a bound morpheme used to indicate the grammatical
function of a word, also called an “inflection” (e.g. dogs, walked). English has
only eight inflectional morphemes (or “inflections”)
• Noun + -’s (possessive), -s (plural marker)
• Verb + -s (3rd person singular marker), -ing(present participle), -ed (past tense), -
en (past participle)
• Adjective + -er (comparative form marker), -est (superlative form)
MORPHEMES OVERVIEW
Lexical
(Book, read,
good etc.)
Free
Functional
(and, an, the
etc.)
Morphemes
Derivational
(re-, -ness etc.)
Bound
Inflectional
(-’s, -ed etc.)
MORPHS
Morph: an actual form used as part of a word, representing one version of a
morpheme (the actual forms used to realize morphemes.)
• cats consists of two morphs, cat +-s, realizing a lexical morpheme and an
inflectional morpheme (“plural”)
• buses also consists of two morphs (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme
and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”)
ALLOMORPHS
Allomorph: one of a closely related set of morphs

• “cat+plural,” “bus+plural,” “sheep+plural,” and “man + plural.” In each of


these examples, the actual forms of the morphs that result from the
morpheme “plural” are different. Yet they are all allomorphs of the one
morpheme. So, in addition to /s/ and /əz /, another allomorph of “plural” in
English seems to be a zero-morph because the plural form of sheep is
actually “sheep + ø.” When we look at “man + plural,” we have a vowel
change in the word (æ→ɛ) as the morph that produces the “irregular” plural
form men.

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