English Linguistics.

Unit 2 Mª del Rosario Caballero

UNIT 2: ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY

2.1. WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY?

Part of linguistic competence involves the ability to construct and interpret words. Scholars
claim that the average high school student knows about 60,000 words whose form and
meaning are not derived from those of other words (e.g., „read‟, „language‟, „cold‟, „on‟, etc.).
These words must be learned and stored as separate items in the lexicon (or mental
dictionary) of language users. However, many other words can be constructed and
comprehended by the application of quite general rules to more basic words. For example,
any speaker of English who knows the meaning of the noun „fax‟ –and the verb derived from
it– could form and interpret words such as „faxable‟ (for things that can be faxed) and „fax
machine‟. In other words, far from being a static repository of memorised information, a
human vocabulary is a dynamic system. We can add words at will. We can even expand their
meanings into new domains.

Read the following quote and discuss its implications:

For the student of language, words are a very rewarding object of study. An
understanding of the nature of words provides us with a key that opens the door
to an understanding of important aspects of the nature of language in general.
Words give us a panoramic view of the entire field of linguistics because they
impinge on every aspect of language structure. (Katamba 2005: 4)

What does knowing a word involve?

Morphology is concerned with the study of the formation and internal organisation of words
(i.e. word-formation and word-structure). It aims at characterising the kinds of things that
speakers need to know about the structure of words in order to be able to use them and
understand the production of others.

Look at the following sentence: The plogs glorped bliply

What do the words in this sentence mean?
 Now, look at the sentence again and answer the following questions: (1) How many
plogs were there? One or more than one? (2) What were they doing? (3) Were they
doing it now or in the past? (4) How, or in what way, were they doing it?

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In order to use language, speakers need to have two types of morphological knowledge. They
need to be able to:

 analyse existing words

 guess the meaning of novel words using the word-building elements and standard word-
construction rules of the language
The answers of these two questions are the topic of the following sections.

2.2. BASIC QUESTIONS IN MORPHOLOGY

Within the field of morphology, it is possible to pose many questions about the nature of
words. Among the most critical questions we find the following:

 What are words?

 What are the basic building blocks in the formation of complex words?
 How are more complex words built up from simpler parts?
 How is the meaning of a complex word related to the meaning of its parts?
 How are individual words of a language related to other words of the language?

Morphological units. Types and characteristics

(A) Words

Not all sound sequences are words, and not all sound sequences that native speakers would
identify as words have a meaning (consider, for instance, the meaning of „it‟ in a sentence like
“It was raining yesterday”). A standard definition of word was provided by Bloomfield in the
1920s: a word is “a minimum free form”, that is, the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that
can be used on its own. The underlined extracts are important because, as will be seen later,
there are also meaningful units smaller than the word, but they cannot function alone.
However, the term word has been used to cover various things in linguistics. Thus, we
have three main senses of word:
 Word or word-forms: the physical form which represents a word in speech or writing.
There are two types of „word‟ in this sense: (a) content words, which have referential or
cognitive meaning and comprise nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and (b) function
words, which have a grammatical role and comprise prepositions, pronouns,
conjunctions, articles, etc.

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 Words as vocabulary items or lexemes: these are the ones included in dictionaries.
For instance, the lexeme “write” can be realised in the following word-forms: write,
writes, wrote, written, and writing. Take into account that the same word-form may
represent two different lexemes with different meanings (e.g. cases of homonymy like
“club”)
 Words as grammatical words or lemmas: a lexical item with a certain meaning plus
certain syntactic and morphological properties. Example: You hit me (past or present?).

Which ones of the italicised word-forms in the following sentences belong to the same
lexeme? What difficulties, if any, have you had in determining whether word-forms belong to
the same lexeme?
1) She saw him saw through that plank of wood.
2) Bill will pay the bill.
3) I saw Farmer near your farm again this morning.
4) Jan looked pale when she walked towards the pail.
5) I am sick of your claiming to be sick all the time.
6) I was looking at the book when she booked the ticket.

In general, however, it is safe to say that words are the smallest freestanding items of
language or free forms that have meaning („plogs‟, „glorped‟ „blirpy‟ if these existed in
English). They are also known as free morphemes. But, as you also know, words can be
decomposed into smaller units (morphemes). When this is the case, we can make the
distinction between simple words (consist of a single morpheme, i.e., cannot be divided into
smaller parts) and complex words (which can consist of a base morpheme which carries the
major component of the word‟s meaning and belongs to a lexical category such as noun, verb,
adjective or preposition + one or more affixes, or may consist of two bases (compounds).

For each of the following words, determine whether it is simple or complex. Then identify
the individual morphemes in the word list: pigs, barked, unlikely, motherhood, salty, cherry,
taller, hammer, displease, hardship, superheroes.

(B) Morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. If they can occur alone, they
are free morphemes or words (e.g. „cat‟). If, on the contrary, they must occur with something
else because they cannot function alone otherwise, they are called bound morphemes („-s‟, „-

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ed‟, „-ly‟, „-er‟, „dis-‟). In other words, many words have an internal structure: they can be
decomposed into the smaller parts („atoms‟) known as morphemes. Moreover, since many
morphemes tend to have a fairly stable meaning which they bring to any word in which they
appear, knowing the morphemes may help us guess the meaning of unknown words without
using a dictionary.

SOME EXAMPLES OF MORPHEMES & THEIR MEANINGS

-ish: „having the qualities of‟ child-ish (having the qualities of a child)
-less: „without X‟ hope-less (without hope)
-er: „more X‟ soon-er (more soon)
-ed: „past‟ walk-ed (walk in the past)
-s: „plural‟ cat-s (more than one cat)
re-: „again‟ re-boil (boil again)
un-: „not X‟ un-safe (not safe)
ex-: „former‟ ex-wife (former wife)

Bound morphemes. These are always attached to a free morpheme or base morpheme.
Bound morphemes have two functions:
 To act as a grammatical marker, giving information about number, verb tense, aspect
and other grammatical functions. These are inflectional morphemes. Unlike other
languages, English is not a highly inflected language: it only has seven inflectional
affixes: (a) plural „-s‟, (b) 3rd person singular present „-s‟, (c) progressive „-ing‟, (d) past
tense „-ed‟, (e) past participle „-en/-ed‟, (f) comparative „-er‟, and (g) superlative „-est‟.
 To form new words. These are called derivational morphemes (or affixes). These are
very productive in English and often involve a change of the syntactic category of the
free morpheme to which they are attached (e.g., „hard‟ and „hardship‟).

ACTIVITIES
1) List the meanings associated with the morpheme –er in: faster, Icelander, cooker,
louder, grater, baker, astrologer, washer, buyer, sender, pensioner. Give a suitable
descriptive label to each meaning (if in doubt, consult a good dictionary).
2) Identify the morphemes in the following words: beds, bedding, bedrooms, bedfellows,
unenthusiastically, servility, servant, server, served, services, servicing, external,
externalise, externally, manly, mannish, manhood, manager, managers, management,
mismanaged, foothold, footpaths, footlights, footman, footsteps, paternal, paternalism,
paternity, pedestrian, pedal, pedestal, biped, tripod, expedition, ether, ethereal

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(C) Multi-word units

The term „word‟ implies a single unit. However, if we have a look at texts (oral or written),
we can notice a large number of recurring fixed forms which consist of more than one word
yet are not syntactically the same as compounds such as “living room” (see next section).
Two such types are common in English (and in other languages as well): idioms and
binomials.

Idioms

These are fixed, „fossilized‟ chunks of language, which, as a norm, cannot be (much) changed
by speakers. A well-known example is “to bite the dust” meaning „to die‟. Its idiomaticity is
partly determined by its fixedness: there is no way in which this fossilized block can be
decomposed into smaller pieces without losing its meaning and, therefore, must be treated as
a single lexical item although, in its internal structure, it is a clause with a verb and an object.
Other examples include: to kick the bucket, to bite one‟s tongue, to hit the sack. Some of
these are more transparent than others: e.g. to talk politics is clearer in meaning than the more
opaque to talk turkey (to talk seriously or clearly about something)
Certain verbs seem to be „idiom-prone‟ and regularly partake in the formation of
idioms. This is the case of „go‟ and „make‟:
To go mad To make the best of
To go west (go wrong/die) To make money
To go nuts (get crazy) To make something of
To go easy on someone (not to criticise sbody) To make do
To go easy on something (use it sparingly) To make something up

Binomials

These are pairs of words which display fixed membership and sequence and which, like
idioms, are usually treated as single vocabulary units. English has the following:

back to front, wine and dine, to and fro, fish and chips, ladies and gentlemen, in and
out, back and forth, clean and tidy, sick and tired

ACTIVITY Look at this piece of natural conversational data and identify common
lexical phrases used by speakers that you consider could be treated as single items.
Provide reasons for your decision:
A: I don‟t know whether you have talked with Hilary about the diary situation.
B: well, she has been explaining to me in rather more general terms what you are sort of doing and …
A: what it was all about, yes

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B: I gather you‟ve been at it for nine years

A: by golly that‟s true, yes, yes, it‟s not a long time of course in this …. in in this sort of work you
know
B: well, but it‟s quite a long time by any standards
A: yeah, I suppose so
B: she told me what you did and we decided we were both a bit out of date compared with present-day
students and ….
A: well, I suppose that‟s true …

2.3. COMMON MORPHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA IN ENGLISH: WORD FORMATION

A root is a morpheme that forms the core of a word. It is the unit to which other morphemes
may be added to make new words. The majority of roots belong to the word classes that we
all know (noun, adjective, verb or adverb). A minority of cases concern what are known as
bound roots: sanct- (holy), vir- (man), tox- (poison), loc- (place). In both cases, when a form
(be it free or bound) may have affixes attached, we call it a base. Bases are, then, any word or
form to which affixes may be added in word-formation.
Word-building processes fall into two broad categories: (a) inflection, and (b)
derivation. Both are cases of affixation.

2.3.1. AFFIXATION

The addition of an affix, a process known as affixation, is an extremely common

morphological process in language. In English two types of affixes are distinguished

 those which are attached to the front of a base morpheme and are called prefixes

 those which are attached to the end of a base morpheme and are called suffixes

When affixation results in a change of meaning or syntactic category of the base word, we
talk about derivation. Derivation enables us to add new lexical items to the open word-
classes of noun, adjective, verb and adverb. The process of derivation is limitless: new words
are constantly invented by this process.
In contrast, English does not have much inflection. The little inflection that it has
consists of suffixes rather than prefixes (see list above).
In most cases, it is easy to tell the differences between inflection and derivation. Above
all, inflectional endings do not alter the syntactic behaviour of an item in any major way (a
noun is still a noun even if the plural morpheme „-s‟ is added to it). In contrast, derivational

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endings create entirely new words (e.g., „hard‟ and „hardship‟). In addition, inflectional
endings can be added on to derivational ones, but not vice versa (e.g., we find „hardship-s‟ but
not „hard-s-ship‟). Finally, when both derivational and inflectional morphemes are found in
the same word, the derivational ones are attached first and the inflectional ones are added
later. Examples: modern-ize-s, million-aire-s, de-regul-ate-d.

ACTIVITIES

1) The following words are made up of either one or more morphemes. Isolate the
morphemes and decide for each if it is free or bound, what kind of affix is involved (if
any), and it the affix is inflectional or derivational:

unspeakably unhappy rejoin milder hateful thickeners

bicycle greedy entrust signpost spacious nationalization
comfortable environmentally reconditioned unidirectional senseless unfukingbelievable

2.3.2. CONVERSION

This process is also known as zero derivation. It is a process where the word-form remains
the same, but it belongs to a different lexical category. The most productive cases of
conversion are (a) from verbs into nouns and (b) from nouns into verbs. Examples: „to butter‟
bread, „to ship‟ a package, „to button‟ a shirt, a „report‟, a „walk‟ jump, fish, smell, skin,
finger, kick.
Some adjectives and adverbs can also undergo conversion. Examples: green (green
party, the Greens), fast (fast runner, run fast), slow.

2.3.3. STRESS PLACEMENT

Sometimes, a base can undergo a change in the placement of stress or tone to reflect a change
in its category. This is the case of disyllabic words. In English there are pairs of words such as
those below in which the verb has stress on the final syllable while the corresponding noun is
stressed on the first syllable:
Verb Noun
implánt ímplant
impórt ímport
presént présent
subjéct súbject
contést cóntest

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2.3.4. COMPOUNDING

Compounding is a process that forms new words not by means of affixes but from two or
more independent words. The words that are the parts of the compound can be free
morphemes, words derived from affixation, or even words formed by compounding
themselves. Examples of these three types are shown below:
Compounding of free Compounding of affixed Compounding of compounded
morphemes words words
Girlfriend Air-conditioner Lifeguard chair
Blackbird Looking-glass Aircraft carrier
Textbook Watch-maker Life-insurance salesman

Some other examples of compounds are the following:

 noun-noun compound: tooth + paste → toothpaste (single word)

 noun-noun compound: part + time → part-time (with a hyphen)
 noun-noun compound: car + park → car park (two separate words)
 adjective-noun compound: heavy + metal → heavymetal
 verb-noun compound: work + room → workroom
 noun-verb compound: sun + rise → sunrise
 verb-verb compound: stir + fry → stir-fry
 adjective-verb compound: white + wash → whitewash
 verb-preposition compound: break + up → breakup
 preposition-verb compound: out + run → outlook
 preposition-noun: over + weight → overweight
 adjective-adjective compound: bitter + sweet → bittersweet
 preposition-preposition compound: in + to → into

An interesting property of compounds is that they are headed, that is, one of the words in the
compound is syntactically dominant and, therefore, determines the category of the entire
word. This is called the head. It is also this component that receives the „-s‟ suffix to form the
plural of the compound. In most compounds, the head is placed on the right of the compound.
In most compounds, the head determines the general meaning of the word –although the
other part of the compound, the modifier, is also usually understandable and adds to the
meaning of the word. These are called endocentric compounds (e.g., steamboat, airplane,
fire truck, bath tub). The term endocentric means that the compound is a sub-class or an

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extension of the head. A textbook for example is a kind of book. The word text describes
what type of book it is, but it is the word book that is most important.
Another type of compound is the exocentric compound. Exocentric compounds do not
have a head. For instance, hardback and paperback are two examples of exocentric
compounds. They are not examples of backs; instead, they describe different types of books.
A hardback is a book with a hard back and a paperback is a book with a back made of paper.
In a smaller number of cases, however, the meaning of the compound does not follow from
the meanings of its parts. Other examples are greenbottle, which is not a type of bottle but a
type of fly, and a redneck, which is an ultra-conservative, white working-class person.

2.3.5. INTERNAL CHANGE

This is a process that substitutes one non-morphemic segment for another. The term ablaut is
often used for vowel alternations that mark grammatical contrasts such as the English
irregular past tense forms and irregular plurals. Examples: „sing‟-„sang‟, „drive‟-„drove‟,
„foot‟-„feet‟, „goose‟-„geese‟.

2.3.6. CLIPPING

It is a process that shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or more syllables. Clipping
has yielded forms such as „Liz‟, „Rob‟, „prof‟ (professor), „burger‟, „doc‟, „ad‟, „lab‟, „demo‟,
or „porn‟. There are 4 types of clippings:
 Back clipping: it is the most common type in which the beginning persists. For
example: “doc” (document), “exam” (examination).
 Fore clipping: the final part is retained in this case. For instance: “phone” (telephone)
and “chute” (parachute).
 Middle clipping: The middle of the word is the part that persists. For example: “flu”
(influenza), “tec” (detective).
 Complex clipping: both parts of compound words are clipped in one word. For
example in “navicert” (navigation certificate).

2.3.7. BLENDS

These are words that are created from non-morphemic parts of two already existing items.
Well-known examples of blends include „brunch‟ (breakfast + lunch), „smog‟ (smoke + fog),
„motel‟ (motor + hotel) or „bit‟ (binary + digit). Blends can be formed in several ways:

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1. With the beginning of one word and the end of other word: advertisement +
entertainment = advertainment
2. With the combination of the beginning of two words: biographical + picture = biopic
3. With word combined around a common sequence of sounds: California + fornication =
californication
4. With the combination of multiple sounds: lithe + slimy = slithy

2.3.8. BACKFORMATION

This is a process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from another
word in the language. „Resurrect‟ was originally formed in this way from „resurrection‟.
Other backformations in English include „housekeep‟ from „housekeeper‟, „donate‟ from
„donation‟, or „orient‟ or „orientate‟ from „orientation‟.
A major source of backformations in English has been words that end with „-or‟ or „-er‟
and have meanings that involve the notion of an agent, such as „editor‟, „peddler‟, „swindler‟
and „stoker‟. Because hundreds of words ending in these suffixes are the result of affixation, it
was assumed that these words too had been formed by adding „-or‟ or „-er‟ to a verb. By the
process of backformation, the verbs „edit‟, „peddle‟, „swindle‟ and „stoke‟ were formed, as
happened with the modern verb „word-process‟.

2.3.9. ACRONYMS

An acronym is created by combining the initial letters in a title or a phrase. However, all
abbreviations are not acronyms. To be an acronym the abbreviation must be pronounced not
as a series of letters but as a word. This type of word formation is especially common in
names of organizations and scientific terminology. Examples: UNICEF (United Nations
International Children‟s Emergency Fund), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), or
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Acronyms can also be made of phrases:
NIMBY (not in my backyard) is one example.

2.3.10. ONOMATOPOEIA

All languages have words whose sound represents an aspect of the thing that they name.
examples of such onomatopoeic words in English include „buzz‟, „hiss‟, „sizzle‟, and
„cuckoo‟.

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Finally, we should bear in mind that the principles of word-formation can be looked at
in two different ways. One is simply to consider them as part of the rule-systems of the
language (just like grammatical rules). But we can also look at word-formation as a resource
in the language, something learners should be allowed to experiment with and use
strategically. In this sense, creative word-formation can also be seen as a communicative
strategy (i.e., a strategy for supplying formations when the right word cannot be found).

2.4. PRACTICAL CASES & ACTIVITIES

1) Determine whether the words in each of the following groups are related to one
another by processes of inflection or derivation:

go, goes, going, gone

discover, discovery, discoverer, discoverable, discoverability
lovely, lovelier, loveliest
democracy, democrat, democratic, democratize

2) Here are five instances where a new word is needed. Create a word for each of these
definitions using the word formation process suggested. Fill in the blanks with your new
words:

Use an acronym for your uncle‟s second oldest brother. “We visited my ________ at
Christmas”
Use onomatopoeia for the sound of a coffee percolator at work. “I can‟t concentrate
because my perc is _______________ ing”
Use conversion for wrapping something breakable in bubbles. “You‟d better ______ that
ornament or else it might break”
Use a compound for the annoying string of cheese stretching from a slice of hot pizza to
one‟s mouth. “As the __________ hung precariously from my lips, our eyes met”
Use backformation for the action of backformation. “We had to __________ words in
Linguistics today”

3) In each group of words that follow, two words have the same morphological
structure, one has a different suffix from those two, and one has no suffix at all. Your
task is to tell which two words have the same suffix, which one has a different suffix, and
which has no suffix at all. Having done this, tell the meaning of each suffix:

Nicer, Painter, Runner, Feather Clocks, Nick‟s, Friendly, Sadly, Sons, Lens, Vans,
Hearts, Glass Softly, Silly Runs

Youngster, Faster, Monster, Wrestling, Handling, Nifty, Ducky, Given, Maven,

Gangster Fling, Duckling Thrifty, Lucky Wooden, taken

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4) Consider the columns of words below. What do the words in each column have in
common? Come up with more words that could go in each column. Do the words in both
columns have the same suffix or not? Justify your answer:

Teacher, Baker, Singer, Fighter, Writer, Stapler, Juicer, Copier, Toaster, Hole-puncher,
Painter Lighter

5) The following words can be either nouns or verbs. For each word determine whether
stress placement can be used to make the distinction between noun and verb. Think of
two more English examples illustrating the process of stress shift to mark a category
distinction.

journey, exchange, remark, surprise, outline, convict, imprint, record, retreat, report,
outrage, answer, import, cripple

2.5. ORAL PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION

Readings

1. Chapters 4 and 5 from Robert Clairborne (1994). English: It’s Life and Times. New
York: Bloomsbury.

Questions for discussion

 How and why has the English inflectional system changed throughout time?
 Spot words influenced by the different peoples inhabiting the British Isles
 Which are the origins of compounding and derivation/suffixation?
 Find Old English affixes and determine their contemporary forms.
 How can „borrowing‟ help enlarge the vocabulary of a language? Find
examples of borrowed terms in English, and discuss their impact in this
language.

2. “Understanding basic medical terminology” (J. A. Romich). From: V. Clark, P.

Escholz, A. Rosa & B. Lee Simon (Eds.) 2008. Language. Introductory Readings.
Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin‟s.

3. “Mc-: Meaning in the marketplace” (G. Lentine & R. W. Shuy). From: V. Clark, P.
Escholz, A. Rosa & B. Lee Simon (Eds.) 2008. Language. Introductory Readings.
Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin‟s.

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