MORPHOLOGY

BASED ON VICTORIA FROMKIN BOOK

CHAPTER 2
 Erick F. Simanjuntak (20202244102)

GROUP 3B Hizkia Jordan R. (20202241032)

What is Morphology ?

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of

words, and of the rules by which words are formed.
Morphology studied about morphemes and how
morphemes formed words.
 What is Morpheme?

Morpheme is the linguistic term for the most

elemental unit of grammatical form.We also can
say that morpheme is the smallest meaningful
unit in the grammar of the language.
Example of Morpheme
Let’s see this charts bellow !
Bound and Free morphemes

The things we know about morphemes is

whether they can stand alone or whether they
can be attached to base morphemes.
 Free A) Open Class (content/lexical words)

Morphemes Content Words are words that have their

own meaning and can stand alone on its
own, these are nouns, adverb, verbs and
adjectives. Content Words also called open
class because we can regularly do add new
If a morpheme can stand alone words to these classes

and still have meaning they are

called Free Morphemes. B) Close class ( Functional morphemes)

Words that don’t have clear meaning but

has grammatical functions, these are
conjunctions, auxiliary, and pronoun. It’s
called closed class because it cannot be
added to another morphemes.
Examples

Open Class Close Class

Boy and

Red but

Online a, an
Bound morphemes
If a morpheme must be attached to a base morpheme
because they are always the parts of words, these
morpheme are called Bound morphemes and they may
attached at the beginning, middle or the ends of the
worlds
 A) If the affixes are attached in the beginning of

Affixes the morpheme they are called Prefixes.

Ex: Unclean, prejudge, premeditate, bilingual,

bisexual

Bound morphemes also can be B) Suffixes are the affixes if they are placed in the
end of a morpheme
called Affixes.
Ex: Running, singer, dancer, friendly
Affixes can be attached to the
C) Infixes are Affixes in the middle of the words,
beginning, middle or end of there are not many in English language the
the morpheme common example of the infixes are the words,
f*ckin and all the euphemisms for it like
friggin, freakin, flippin

Ex: that’s ri-freaking-diculous

Inflectional & Derivational Morphemes

Bound morphemes have also two categories and those

categories are Inflectional and Derivational
morphemes
 Derivational
Morpheme
Derivational morphemes are bound
morphemes that can change or make
new meaning when the morphemes
are added. Derivational also can
change the class of the words in part
of speech, derivational morphemes
can be prefix or suffix.
 Inflectional
Morpheme
In bond morphemes there are also
the morpheme that have a strictly
grammatical function and those
morphemes are called inflectional
morpheme. Unlike derivational
morpheme, they never change the
grammatical category (class of
words) of the stem they are
attached.
Root & Stem
Morphologically complex words consist of a morpheme root and
one more or more affixes.
Root are the basic part of a word that carries that meaning, a root
may or may not stand alone, if a root can’t stand alone then it’s
called Bound root.
When a root morpheme is combined with an affix then it forms a
Stem
Examples
Base
When a root or stem attached with affix, linguist usually called
the root or stem who is attached with affix by name Base
Example:
system
systematic
unsytematic
unsytematical
 The Hierarchical Structure of Words
Morphemes are added to a base in a fixed order which reflects the
structure of a word. For example the word unsystematic is composed of three
morphemes: un-, system, and -atic.

This tree represents the application of two morphological rules:

Noun + -atic => Adjective

un- + Adjective => Adjective

Rule 1 attaches the derivational suffix
-atic to the root noun, forming an The diagram shows that the entire
adjective. word -unsystematic- is an adjective
that is composed of an adjective
Rule 2 takes the adjective formed by rule -systematic- plus -un.
1 and attaches the derivational prefix
un-. The adjective is itself composed of a
noun -system- plus the suffix -atic.

- In the case of unsystematic, this is

the only possible hierarchy, as
unsystem is not a word
The hierarchical structure of words can help disambiguate ambiguous words.

unlockable could mean:

1) not able to be locked, or
2) able to be unlocked.
 Rule Productivity
Some morphological rules are productive, meaning that they apply freely to
form new words from the list of free and bound morphemes.

Among derivational affixes are productive to different extents:

1. -able can be affixed to any verb to

2. un- is most productive for
create an adjective such as:
adjectives derived from verbs and
accept + able, laugh + able, pass + words with polysyllabic bases.
able, adapt + able, and so on.
unsimplified, unenlightened, and
unhappy, but not *unsad, *unbrave, or
*untall.
 Exceptions and Suppletions

1.Not all words undergo regular morphological 3. Borrowed words may retain borrowed
processes morphology.

(Example: feet, went, sing, children) *Latin datum and data (rather than *datums).

*These words must be learned separately since

rules don’t apply to them.
4. Some words have no change when made
plural or past tense.
2. When new words enter the language, regular
* sheep (singular) and sheep (plural)
morphological rules generally apply to them.
* hit (present tense) and hit (past tense)
*The plural of fax became faxes rather than
faxen.
 Lexical Gaps (Accidental Gaps)

It means that words could be in a language but aren’t.

- Some permissible sound

sequences have no meaning

(e.g. blick) - Some combinations of

morphemes are never used

(e.g. curiouser)
 Other Morphological Processes
Back-formations:
New words can be created through misanalysis of
morpheme boundaries

- pease => pea

- bikini => monokini

- editor => edit

- television => televise

 Compounds: joining two or more words together to make
a new word (e.g. landlord)
1. The rightmost word in a compound is the head, 3. Two-word compounds are the most common, but

which determines its meaning and part of speech there may not be an upper limit

*Noun + adjective = adjective (headstrong) * Dr. Seuss’s “Tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle”

2. The stress on English compounds falls on the 4. The meaning of a compound is not always the sum of

first word the meaning of its parts:

*Blackboard, Cathouse, Turncoat

* greenhouse vs. green house
 Molaporism
A malapropism is the confusion of a word through misinterpretation of its
morphemes, usually with a humorous effect. Such "mistakes" reveal much
of the lexical knowledge of the speaker. Here are a few examples:
 Sign Language Morphology

- Like spoken languages, signs have parts of speech, roots and affixes, and morphemes that
can be free, bound, derivational or inflectional

- Like spoken languages, sign languages have rules for combining morphemes to make
complex signs

- Affixation can occur by adding another sign before or after the root sign.

*The negation suffix is a rapid turning over of the hand(s) after the root sign

- Sign languages can also allow the stem and the affixes to be signed simultaneously, an
option not available in spoken languages.
 Morphological Analysis: Identifying Morphemes

Morphological analysis is the process of identifying form-meaning units in a

language, taking into account small differences in pronunciation.

Example prefixes in- and im- are seen to be variants of the "same" prefix in
English ( intolerable, impeccable) just as democrat and democrac are stem
variants of the same morpheme, which shows up in democratic with its "t" and in
democracy with its "c."
How would you determine whether a word in that language had one or two or more
morphemes ?
To determine what the morphemes are in such a
list, the first thing a field linguist would do is to see
The first thing to do would be to ask native
if there are many forms that mean the same thing
speakers how they would say various words.
in different words, that is, to look for recurring
Then, you collected the following sets or
forms. We find them: ugly occurs in ugly, uglier,
paradigms of forms:
ugliest, all three of which words include the
meaning ‘very unattractive’.

We also find that –er occurs in prettier and taller,

adding the meaning ‘most’. Furthermore, by asking
additional questions of our English speakers we find
that –er and -est do not occur in isolation with the
meanings of ‘more’ and ‘most’. We can therefore
concluded that the following morphemes occur in
English
 As we processed further we find there are other
words that end with –er, singer, lover, bomber,
We can therefore concluded that the writer, teacher, and many more word in which in
following morphemes occur in words in which the –er ending does not mean
English ‘comparative’ but, when attached to a verb,
changes it to a noun who ‘verbs’ that (e.g. sings,
loves, bombs writers, teaches). So we conclude
that is a different morpheme even though it is
pronounced the same as the comparative. We go
on and find words such as anger, butter, member,
and many others in which the –er has no separate
meaning at all—an anger is not one who “sombes”
and a member does not memb—and therefore these
words must be monomorphemic.
Once you have fully described the morphology of
English, you might want to go on to describe another
language. A language called Paku was written by one
of the authors of this book (Fromkin) for a 1970s
television series called Land of the Lost.
By examining these words you find that
all the plural forms and –ni and the
singular forms do not. You therefore
conclude that –ni is a separate
morpheme meaning ‘plural’ which is
attached as a suffix to a noun.
THANK YOU

ANY QUESTION?