A short introduction
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwwyhndrobwllllantysiligogogoch
(a town name in Wales)
Morphology:
Background and Basic Terms
How is it that we can use and
understand words in our
language that we have never
encountered before?
Morphology:
Background and Basic Terms (2)
Morphology :
the component of a grammar
that deals with the internal
structure of words.
Morphology:
Background and Basic Terms (3)
Adjectives are abstract; they are not real
forms. The real forms that represents them (in,-s, and –ful) are therefore usually called
morphs. (Hocket,1947)
Words
Morphs
Morphemes
watched
watch-ed
WATCH+PAST
pens
pen-s
PEN+PLURAL
unhelpful
un-help-ful
NEGATIVE+HELP+
ADJECTIVE
Definition
• Type of investigation which analyzes all those
basic “elements” which are used in language
elements= linguistic message (morphemes).
(Yule:1985)
• The study of forms of words (Matthews:1979)
• While syntax is concerned with how words
arrange themselves into constructions,
morphology is concerned with the forms of
words themselves. (Malmkjaer:1991)
The Minimal Meaningful Units of Language
(Words Versus Morphemes)
A word need not have any special
phonetic properties: some words bear
stress but others do not, some words
set off by intonational signals but
others are not.
a door - adore
Tone languages: a language is said to have tone
when differences in word meaning are signaled
by differences in pitch
H
[ma]
L
‘mother’
High tone
‘hemp’
Low rise
‘horse’
Fall rise
‘scold’
High fall
H
[ma]
ML H
[ma]
H L
[ma]
A word is a minimal free form
(a) The hunters pursued the bear.
(b) The bear was pursued by the hunters.
• Words, though they may be definable as minimal
free forms, are not minimal meaningful units of
language.
• The word hunters can stand alone (a free form),
nonetheless consists of three meaningful parts :
hunt, er, and s. (Morphemes).
• The minimal meaningful units of language ARE NOT
words, but arbitrary signs or MORPHEMES.
Morpheme
• A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function
(Yule:1985)
• The smallest linguistic unit that has meaning (Johnson
& Johnson:1999)
• The elementary particle of lexicogrammar, the thing
out of which words are built (Halliday:2004).
• The smallest meaningful unit in a language. A
morpheme cannot be divided without altering or
destroying its meaning. For example, the English word
kind is a morpheme. If the d is removed, it changes to
kin, which has a different meaning.
(Richard & Schmidt:2002)
One
Morpheme
Two
Three
More than
three
and
boy
boy-s
hunt
hunt-er
hunt-er-s
hospital
hospitalize
hospital-ization
gentle
gentleman
gentle-man- gentlely
man-li-ness
Hospital-ization-s
Morphological Description:
Elements of Morphology (Yule)
lexical
free
functional
Morphemes
derivational
bound
inflectional
Yule:1985
Free and Bound Morphemes
• Free: A form which can be used on its own
: Betty, horse, red, write, love, drive
• Bound: a linguistic form (a MORPHEME)
which is never used alone but must be
used with another morpheme, e.g. as an
AFFIX or COMBINING FORM. For
example, the English suffix -ing must be
used with a verb stem: writing, loving,
driving. (Richard & Schmidt:2002)
Bound Morphemes :
Derivational Morphemes
• used to make new words in the
language and different grammatical
category from the stem. The
derivational morphemes -ness
changes the adjective good to the
noun goodness.
[[good](Adj) ness] N
Bound Morphemes :
Inflectional Morphemes
• are not used to make new words in
the language , but rather to indicate
aspects of the grammatical function
of a word
• Plural/Singular, tense,
comparative/possessive form
• English : All inflectional morphemes
are suffixes.
Bound Morphemes
Bound
Derivational
Suffix and prefix
New words
Inflectional
Suffix
Plural/Singular, tense,
comparative/possessive form
Free Morphemes
Free
lexical
Ordinary nouns,
adjectives, verbs
functional
Conjunctions,
prepositions,
articles, pronouns.
The elements of morphology:
The boy’s wildness shocked the teachers.
The
(functional)
shock
(Lexical)
boy
-’s
(lexical) (inflectional)
-ed
(inflecti
onal)
the
(functional)
wild
(Lexical)
teach
(Lexical)
-ness
(derivational)
-er
-s
(derivational) (inflectio
nal)
Morphological Description:
Elements of Morphology (Bauer)
inflection
Morphology
derivation
wordformation
composition/
compounding
Bauer:1983
Word-formation:
Composition/ Compounding
• Two or more words combine into a morphological unit
(Marchand:1969)
• The combination of two free forms or words that have
an otherwise independent existence. (Adams:1979)
N+N
football
V+N
N+V
pickpocket, nosebleed,
killjoy
moonshine
Adjective
+
N
Particle
+
N
software,
slowcoach
in-crowd,
aftertaste
V
+
Particle
Phrase
compounds
clawback, gin-anddropout
tonic,
forget-menot
Word-formation:
Other word-formation types
• Backformation: occurs when suffix is removed from
a complex word (liaison – to liaise)
• Blend: where normally initial and terminal
segments of two words are joined together to create
a new word: brunch (breakfast +lunch), chunnel
(channel+tunnel), fantabulous (fantastic+fabulous).
• Acronyms : words formed from the initial letters of a
fixed phrase or title : SALT (strategic arms limitation
talks), misty (more ideologically sound than you).
Allomorph
• Any of the different forms of a MORPHEME
• For example, in English the plural morpheme is often
shown in writing by adding -s to the end of a word,
e.g. cat /kæt/ – cats /kæts/. Sometimes this plural
morpheme is pronounced /z/, e.g. dog /dig/ – dogs
/digz/, and sometimes it is pronounced /Iz/, e.g. class
/kleNs/ – classes /`kleNsız/. /s/, /z/, and /Iz/ all have the
same grammatical function in these examples, they all
show plural; they are all allomorphs of the plural
morpheme.
Word Structure
The structure of the entire word may be represented by means of
either a set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram.
[[[hospital] N ize] V ed]V
V
Af
V
N
hospital
Af
iz ed
Discussion
1. Draw the appropriate tree structure for each of these words:
a) unhappiness
b) denationalization
c) fearlessly
d) pre-viewer
2. What are the functional morphemes in the following sentences:
The old man sat on a chair and told them tales of the woe
3. What are the inflectional morphemes in the following phrases:
a) the teacher’s books
b) the newest model