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Chapter 5

MORPHOLOGY

Overview : Morphology, in linguistics, study of the internal construction of

words. Languages vary widely in the degree to which words can be analyzed into
word elements, or morphemes

Objectives: At the end of this chapter, the students can be able to have :

1.determine the meaning and form of words and group of words in a profound
manner;
2. analyze changes in words and transformation;
3. differentiate the types of morphemes; and
4.detect the constituents structures of words.

Morphology

Morphology is the arrangement and relationships of the smallest meaningful

units in a language. So what does this really mean? Every human language depends
on sounds. When specific sounds are put together in a specific way, words, phrases,
and finally sentences can be created. This is how messages are sent and received.
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In order to understand morphology, you need to know the term morpheme,

which is the smallest unit of a word with meaning. That meaning is how language
conveys messages. Morphemes are more than just letters. When a number of letters
are put together into a word part that now has meaning, then you have a morpheme.
Morphology studies how these units of meaning, or word parts, can be arranged in
a language.

Examples

Let's illustrate the role of morphemes through some examples. Look at the
following list of words:

Firehouse

Doghouse

Bathroom

Chairlift

Each of these words has several phonemes, or distinct sounds. Firehouse begins
with an -f sound and ends with the -s sound. However, those sounds alone don't
have meaning. Breaking the first word into smaller parts shows the morphemes fire
and house. These are morphemes as they contain inherent meaning. Fire means
bright light, heat, and smoke, while house means a dwelling for human beings.
Putting these together creates a completely new word.

The other examples in that list work the same way. Two morphemes, or
meaningful elements, are put together in order to form a totally new word. Think of
morphemes as the pieces that come together to build a language, just like the pieces
of a house.

You may have a bunch of pieces of wood (letters), but you don't get a wall
(morphemes) until you start nailing them together. Then when all the walls are
together, you finally have a complete house, or in language, a meaningful sentence.

Bound vs. Free Morphemes

An important aspect of morphology is how morphemes connect. This is

where bound and free morphemes come in. A bound morpheme is one that must
be attached to another morpheme in order to form a word. On the other hand, a
free morpheme can stand as an independent word. Look at this list of words:
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Runs

Joyous

Unsightly

Rerun

Each of these words has more than one morpheme; however, some of the
morphemes are bound and some are free. Look at the first word. The base word is
run, which is a morpheme, meaning moving faster than a walk. What about the -s
then? It is more than a phoneme because it contains meaning. Attached to a verb,
the -s indicates the third-person singular present tense. Even though it's just one
letter, it has inherent meaning and so is a morpheme.

Now look at the second word. By now you should realize joy is a free
morpheme, since it can stand alone and has meaning. The -ous is a suffix that
changes the noun into an adjective. This means that -ous is also a bound
morpheme.

Remember, a suffix is a word part added to the end of a word. Prefixes, or

word parts added to the beginning of words, are also morphemes. The final two
words in this list contain the prefixes un- and re-, which are bound morphemes. All
prefixes and suffixes are bound morphemes. Here are some more examples:

ed

or

pre

re

un

ly

Universality of the concepts "word" and "morpheme"

Do the concepts of word and morpheme then apply in all languages?

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The answer is yes. Certainly the concept of morpheme -- the minimal unit
of form and meaning -- arises naturally in the analysis of every language.

The concept of word is trickier. There are at least two troublesome issues:
making the distinction between words and phrases, and the status of certain
grammatical formatives known as clitics.

What are clitics ?

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically

independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is
pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level.

Clitics may belong to any grammatical category, though they are commonly
pronouns, determiners, or prepositions. Clitics may be written as independent
words, bound affixes, or separated by special characters as in the use of
apostrophe.

Words vs. Phrases. Since words can be made up of several

morphemes, and may include several other words, it is easy to find cases where a
particular sequence of elements might arguably be considered either a word or a
phrase.Just like in the case of compounds in English.

In some languages, this boundary is even harder to draw. In the case of

Chinese, the eminent linguist Y.R. Chao (1968: 136) says, 'Not every language has
a kind of unit which behaves in most respects as does the unit called "word" . . . It
is therefore a matter of fate and not a question of fact whether to apply the word
"word" to a type of subunit in the Chinese sentence.'

Status of clitics

In most languages, there is a set of elements whose status as separate words

seems ambiguous. Examples in English include the 'd (reduced form of "would"),
the infinitival to, and the article a, in I'd like to buy a dog. These forms certainly
can't "stand alone as a complete utterance", as some definitions of word would
have it. The sound pattern of these "little words" is also usually extremely reduced,
in a way that makes them act like part of the words adjacent to them. There isn't
any difference in pronunciation between the noun phrase a tack and the verb
attack. However, these forms are like separate words in some other ways,
especially in terms of how they combine with other words.
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Members of this class of "little words" are known as clitics. Their peculiar
properties can be explained by assuming that they are independent elements at
the syntactic level of analysis, but not at the phonological level. In other words,
they both are and are not words.

Some languages write clitics as separate words, while others write them
together with their adjacent "host" words. English writes most clitics separate, but
uses the special "apostrophe" separator for some clitics, such as the reduced
forms of is, have and would ('s 've 'd), and possessive 's.

Pronunciation
Noun Noun + s (plural) Noun + s (possessive)
(both)

thrush thrushes thrush's iz

toy toys toy's z

block blocks block's s

Plural (irregular in Possessive (always

these cases) regular)

Oxen ox's

Spectra spectrum's

Mice mouse's

English does have few irregular possessives: his, her, my, your, their. But
these exceptions prove the rule: these pronominal possessives act like inflections,
so that the possessor is always the referent of the pronoun itself, not of some
larger phrase that it happens to be at the end of.

So the possessive 's in English is like a word in some ways, and like an
inflectional morpheme in some others. This kind of mixed status is commonly
found with words that express grammatical functions. It is one of the ways that
morphology develops historically.

In Tagalog language, morphology include infixes. As cited below :

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bili 'buy' Binili 'bought'

basa 'read' Binasa 'read' (past)
sulat 'write' Sinulat 'wrote'

Categories and subcategories of words and morphemes

The different types of words are variously called parts of speech, word
classes, or lexical categories. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language gives this
list of 8 for English:

noun pronoun verb adjective

adverb conjunction preposition interjection

END OF MO DU L E
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: Types of morphemes

Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own, e.g. de- in detoxify, -tion in creation, -s in
dogs, cran- in cranberry.

Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car, yes.

In a morphologically complex word -- a word composed of more than one

morpheme -- one constituent may be considered as the basic one, the core of the form,
with the others treated as being added on. The basic or core morpheme in such cases is
referred to as the stem, root, or base, while the add-ons are affixes. Affixes that precede
the stem are of course prefixes, while those that follow the stem are suffixes. Thus in
rearranged, re- is a prefix, arrange is a stem, and -d is a suffix. Morphemes can also be
infixes, which are inserted within another form. English doesn't really have any infixes,
except perhaps for certain expletives in expressions like un-effing-believable or Kalama-
effing-zoo.

Prefixes and suffixes are almost always bound, but what about the stems? Are
they always free? In English, some stems that occur with negative prefixes are not free,
such as -kempt and -sheveled. Bad jokes about some of these missing bound morphemes
have become so frequent that they may re-enter common usage.

Morphemes can also be divided into the two categories of content and function
morphemes, a distinction that is conceptually distinct from the free-bound distinction
but that partially overlaps with it in practice.

The idea behind this distinction is that some morphemes express some general sort
of referential or informational content, in a way that is as independent as possible of the
grammatical system of a particular language -- while other morphemes are heavily tied to
a grammatical function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a sentence,
or obligatorily-marked categories such as number or tense.

Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs, adjectives are typically content morphemes:
"throw," "green," "Kim," and "sand" are all English content morphemes. Content
morphemes are also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong to
categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items. People are always
making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories.: "smurf," "nuke," "byte,"
"grok."
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By contrast, prepositions ("to", "by"), articles ("the", "a"), pronouns ("she", "his"),
and conjunctions are typically function morphemes, since they either serve to tie
elements together grammatically ("hit by a truck," "Kim and Leslie," "Lee saw his dog"), or
express obligatory (in a given language!) morphological features like definiteness ("she
found a table" or "she found the table" but not "*she found table"). Function morphemes
are also called "closed-class" morphemes, because they belong to categories that are
essentially closed to invention or borrowing -- it is very difficult to add a new
preposition, article or pronoun.

For years, some people have tried to introduce non-gendered pronouns into
English, for instance "sie" (meaning either "he" or "she", but not "it"). This is much harder
to do than to get people to adopt a new noun or verb.

The concept of the morpheme does not directly map onto the units of sound that
represent morphemes in speech. To do this, linguists developed the concept of the
allomorph. Here is the definition of allomorphs:

Allomorphs:

- Nondistinctive realizations of a particular morpheme that

have the same function and are phonetically similar. For
.Inflectional vs.plural
example, the English Derivational Morphology
morpheme can appear as [s] as in
cats, [z] as in dogs, or ['z] as in churches. Each of these three
pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same
morpheme

Another common distinction is the one between derivational and inflectional affixes.

Derivational morphemes makes new words from old ones. Thus creation is
formed from create by adding a morpheme that makes nouns out of (some) verbs.

Derivational morphemes generally

change the part of speech or the basic meaning of a word. Thus -ment added to a verb
forms a noun (judg-ment). re-activate means "activate again."

are not required by syntactic relations outside the word. Thus un-kind combines un- and
kind into a single new word, but has no particular syntactic connections outside the
word -- we can say he is unkind or he is kind or they are unkind or they are kind,
depending on the desired meaning.They are often not productive or regular in form or
meaning -- derivational morphemes can be selective about what they'll combine with, and
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may also have erratic effects on meaning. Thus the suffix -hood occurs with just a few
nouns such as brother, neighbor, and knight, but not with most others. e.g., *friendhood,
*daughterhood, or *candlehood. Furthermore "brotherhood" can mean "the state or
relationship of being brothers," but "neighborhood" cannot mean "the state or
relationship of being neighbors." Note however that some derivational affixes are quite
regular in form and meaning, e.g. -ism.

typically occur "inside" any inflectional affixes. Thus in governments, -ment, a derivational
suffix, precedes -s, an inflectional suffix.

in English, may appear either as prefixes or suffixes: pre-arrange, arrange-ment.

Inflectional morphemes vary (or "inflect") the form of words in order to express
the grammatical features that a given language chooses, such as singular/plural or
past/present tense. Thus Boy and boys, for example, are two different forms of the
"same" word. In English, we must choose the singular form or the plural form; if we
choose the basic form with no affix, we have chosen the singular.

Inflectional Morphemes generally:

do not change basic syntactic category: thus big, bigg-er, bigg-est are all adjectives.

express grammatically-required features or indicate relations between different words in

the sentence. Thus in Lee love-s Kim, -s marks the 3rd person singular present form of
the verb, and also relates it to the 3rd singular subject Lee.

occur outside any derivational morphemes. Thus in ration-al-iz-ation-s the final -s is

inflectional, and appears at the very end of the word, outside the derivational morphemes
-al, -iz, -ation.

Some examples of English derivational and inflectional morphemes:

derivational inflectional

-ation -s Plural

-ize -ed Past

-ic -ing Progressive

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-y -er Comparative

-ous -est Superlative

Properties of Some Derivational Affixes in English:

-ation is added to a verb to give a noun

finalize finalization
confirm confirmation

un- is added to a verb to give a verb

tie untie
wind unwind

un- is added to an adjective to give an adjective

happy unhappy
wise unwise

-al is added to a noun to give an adjective

institution institutional
universe universal

-ize is added to an adjective to give a verb

concrete concretize
solar solarize

Most linguists feel that the inflectional/derivational distinction is not a fundamental or

foundational question at all, but just a sometimes-useful piece of terminology whose
definitions involve a somewhat complex combination of more basic properties. Therefore
we will not be surprised to find cases for which the application of the distinction is
unclear.
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For example, the English suffix -ing has several uses that are arguably on the borderline
between inflection and derivation (along with other uses that are not).

Another, closely related use is to make present participles of verbs, which are used like
adjectives: Falling water; stinking mess; glowing embers. According to the rule that
inflection doesn't change the lexical category, this should be a form of morphological
derivation, since it changes verbs to adjectives. But in fact it is probably the same
process, at least historically as is involved in marking progressive aspect on verbs, since
"being in the process of doing X" is one of the natural meanings of the adjectival form X-
ing.

There is another, regular use of -ing to make verbal nouns: Flying can be dangerous;
losing is painful. The -ing forms in these cases are often called gerunds. By the "changes
lexical categories" rule, this should also be a derivational affix, since it turns a verb into a
noun. However, many people feel that such cases are determined by grammatical
context, so that a phrase like Kim peeking around the corner surprised me actually is
related to, or derived from, a tenseless form of the sentence Kim peeked around the
corner. On this view, the affix -ing is a kind of inflection, since it creates a form of the
verb appropriate for a particular grammatical situation, rather than making a new,
independent word. Thus the decision about whether -ing is an inflection in this case
depends on your analysis of the syntactic relationships involved.

What is the meaning of an affix?

The meanings of derivational affixes are sometimes clear, but often are obscured by
changes that occur over time. The following two sets of examples show that the prefix un-
is easily interpreted as "not" when applied to adjectives, and as a reversing action when
applied to verbs, but the prefix con- is more opaque.

untie

unshackle

unharness

unhappy

untimely
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unthinkable

unmentionable

The suffix -ize, which some prescriptivists object to in words like hospitalize, has a long
and venerable history.

The first -ize words to be found in English are loans with both a French and Latin pattern
such as baptize (1297), catechize, and organize (both 15th c.) Towards the end of the
16th century, however,there comes many new formations in English, such as bastardize,
equalize, popularize, and womanize..

The -ize words collected by students in in this class nine years ago show that -ize is
almost entirely restricted to Romance vocabulary, the only exceptions we found being
womanize and winterize. Even though most contemporary English speakers are not
consciously aware of which words in their vocabulary are from which source, they have
respected this distinction in coining new words.

Constituent Structure of Words

The constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching or

hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure. Consider the word unusable. It
contains three morphemes:

prefix "un-" + verb “ use” + suffix “ able”= UNUSABLE

This analysis is supported by the general behavior of these affixes. There is a prefix
"un-" that attaches to adjectives to make adjectives with a negative meaning ("unhurt",
"untrue", "unhandy", etc.). And there is a suffix "-able" that attaches to verbs and forms
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adjectives ("believable", "fixable", "readable"). This gives us the analysis pictured above.
There is no way to combine a prefix "un-" directly with the verb "use", so the other
logically-possible structure won't work.

Example : The the word "unlockable" below . This also consists of three
morphemes:

prefix "un-"

verb stem "lock"

suffix "-able"

A little thought shows us that there are two different meanings for this word: one
corresponding to the left-hand figure, meaning "not lockable," and a second one
corresponding to the right-hand figure, meaning "able to be unlocked."

In fact, un- can indeed attach to (some) verbs: untie, unbutton, uncover, uncage, unwrap...
Larry Horn (1988) points out that the verbs that permit prefixation with un- are those
that effect a change in state in some object, the form with un- denoting the undoing (!)of
that change.

This lets us account for the two senses of "unlockable".. You can combine the suffix -
able with the verb lock to form an adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix un-
with lockable to make a new adjective unlockable, meaning "not able to be locked". Or you
can combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a new verb unlock, and the combine
the suffix -able with unlock to form an adjective unlockable, meaning "able to be
unlocked".

By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a single word, you can better
understand why its meaning might be ambiguous.
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