Study Guidelines and Materials for MA
Applicants (Applied Linguistics)
Prepared by: Marwa Mustafa Alkawash
MA student – Zawia University
EFL teacher
Contact: Marwa.m.alkawash@gmail.com
Content is collected, paraphrased and designed through self-study’s experience
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
part 3 - Morphology
 What’s Morphology?
Morphology is the study of word formation, of the structure of words
 What’s Morpheme?
The meaningful parts into which words can be divided—e.g., boldest can be
divided into bold+est--are called the morphemes of the language. These are
considered the basic units of meaning in a particular language
Types of Morpheme:
we can make a broad distinction between two types of morphemes.
1- free morphemes: morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words,
for example, open and tour. Free morphemes can be divided into:
a) Lexical morphemes: Words that have meaning by themselves—boy, food,
door—are called lexical. Nouns, verbs, adjectives ({boy}, {buy}, {big}) are
typical lexical morphemes.
b) Functional ( Grammatical ) morphemes: Those words that function to
specify the relationship between one lexical morpheme and another—words
like at, in, on, -ed, -s. Prepositions, articles, conjunctions ({of}, {the}, {but})
are grammatical
morphemes.
2- Bound morphemes: they’re forms which cannot normally stand alone and
are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. they
were identified as affixes. So, we can say that all affixes (prefixes and
suffixes) in English are bound morphemes.
Bound grammatical morphemes can be further divided into two types:
a) Inflectional morphemes (e.g., -s, -est, -ing)
b) Derivational morphemes (e.g., -ful, -like, -ly, un-, dis-).
Inflectional Affixes: English has only eight inflectional affixes:
{PLU} = plural Noun
-s boys
{POSS} = possessive Noun
-’s boy’s
{COMP} = comparative Adj
-er older
{SUP} = superlative Adj
-est oldest
{PRES} = present Verb
-s walks
{PAST} past Verb
-ed walked
{PAST PART} = past participle Verb
-en driven
{PRES PART} = present participle Verb
-ing driving
Derivational affixes: There are an indefinite number of derivational morphemes.
Word formation processes
- The study of the origin and history of a word is known as its etymology
- Coinage: One of the least common processes of word formation in English is
coinage, that is, the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are
invented trade names for commercial products that become general terms (usually
without capital letters) for any version of that product. Older examples are aspirin,
nylon, vaseline and zipper; more recent examples are kleenex, Teflon
- Eponyms: New words based on the name of a person or a place. When we talked
about a hoover (or even a spangler), we were using an eponym.
- Borrowing: the taking over of words from other languages. croissant (French),
dope (Dutch), lilac (Persian), piano (Italian), sofa (Arabic).
- Compounding is a joining of two separate words to produce a single form.
- Blending: is typically accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and
joining it to the end of the other word. e.g. gasoline, which is made from alcohol,
the ‘blended’ word is gasohol.
- Clipping: This occurs when a word of more than one syllable (facsimile) is reduced
to a shorter form(fax), usually beginning in casual speech. The term gasoline is still
used, but most people talk about gas, using the clipped form. Other common
examples are ad (advertisement), cab (cabriolet), condo (condominium), fan
(fanatic), flu (influenza),
- Backformation: a word of one type (usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of
another type (usually a verb). A good example of backformation is the process
whereby the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was
created from it
- Conversion: A change in the function of a word, as for example when a noun comes
to be used as a verb (without any reduction), is generally known as conversion.
Other labels for this very common process are ‘category change’ and ‘functional
shift’. A number of nouns such as bottle, butter, chair and vacation have come to
be used, through conversion, as verbs
- Acronyms: are new words formed from the initial letters of a set of other words.
These can be forms such as CD (‘compact disk’) or VCR (‘video cassette recorder’)
where the pronunciation consists of saying each separate letter
- Derivation: it is accomplished by means of a large number of small ‘bits’ of the
English language which are not usually given separate listings in dictionaries. These
small ‘bits’ are generally described as affixes
- prefixes: affixes added to the beginning of the word (e.g. un-).
- suffixes: affixes have to be added to the end of the word (e.g. -ish)
All English words formed by this derivational process have either prefixes or
suffixes, or both.
- Infix: it is an affix that is incorporated inside another word.