Chapter 4
Morphology
Morphology
• Morphology. This term, which
literally means ‘the study of
forms’ refers to the linguistic
study of the different forms of
a word, or word structure.
Classes of words
• Generally speaking, there are two types of
words: content words (open class words) .They
are the lexical items because we can add to them
. (Also called free lexical morphemes)
• Grammatical or functional words (closed class
words) are words that do only a grammatical
functions (conjunctions-prepositions-pronouns).
(Also called free functional morphemes)
morpheme
• We can recognize that English word forms such as
talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of
one morpheme.
• element talk, and a number of other elements
such as -s, -er, -ed and -ing. All these elements
are described as morphemes.
• The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit
of meaning or grammatical function”. Units of
grammatical function include forms used to
indicate past tense or plural.
Free and bound morphemes
• There are free morphemes, that is,
morphemes that can stand by themselves as
single words, for example, open and tour.
• There are also bound morphemes, which are
those forms that cannot normally stand
alone and are typically attached to another
form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.
• The free morphemes can generally be
identified as the set of separate English word
forms such as basic nouns, adjectives, verbs,
etc.
• When they are used with bound morphemes
attached, the basic word forms are technically
known as stems.
Examples
undressed
un-
dress
ed
prefix
stem
suffix
(bound)
(free)
(bound)
carelessness
care
-less
-ness
stem
suffix
suffix
free
bound
bound
Rules of Word Formation:
Derivational and inflectional bound morphemes:
Derivational morphemes.
• We use these bound morphemes to make new words or
to make words of a different grammatical category from
the stem.
• For example, the addition of the derivational morpheme
-ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.
The noun care can become the adjectives careful or
careless by the addition of the derivational morphemes ful or -less.
Rules of Word Formation:
• A list of derivational morphemes will
include suffixes such as the -ish in
foolish, -ly in quickly, and the -ment
in payment. The list will also include
prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-,
co-, un-, and many more. (See list P.
132).
Inflectional morphemes
• These are not used to produce new words in
the language, but rather to indicate aspects of
the grammatical function of a word.
Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a
word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or
not, and if it is a comparative or possessive
form
Inflectional morphemes
• English has only eight inflectional morphemes (or
‘inflections’), illustrated in the following sentences
• Jim’s two sisters are really different.
• One likes to have fun and is always laughing.
• The other liked to read as a child and has always
taken things seriously.
• One is the loudest person in the house and the
other is quieter than a mouse.
– Noun + -’s, -s
– Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en
– Adjective + -est, -er
Morphs and allomorphs
• we can propose morphs as the actual forms
used to realize morphemes. For example,
the form cars consists of two morphs, car +
-s, - (bus + -es), realizing a lexical morpheme
and an inflectional morpheme (‘plural’). So
there are at least two morphs (-s and -es)
used to realize the inflectional’.
Morphs and allomorphs
• However in some cases the change can be
internal and can involve a total vowel
change man-men; foot-feet
• We call this process Suppletion, forms
that are not predictable by regular
morphology.
The two processes above are studied under
morphophonemics.
Processes of word formation of free lexical
morphemes
Coinage
• Older examples are aspirin,-nylon, -vaseline
; more recent examples are kleenex, teflon,
tylenol and Xerox-a hoover- sandwichjeans- fahrenheit (from the German,
Gabriel Fahrenheit), volt (from the Italian,
Alessandro Volta) and watt (from the Scot,
James Watt).
Processes of word formation of free
lexical
Compounding
• It means joining of two separate words to
produce a single form.
• bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn,
textbook, wallpaper, wastebasket and
waterbed.
• compound adjectives (good-looking, lowpaid)
Processes of word formation of free
lexical
Blending
• Blending is typically accomplished by taking only
the beginning of one word and joining it to the
end of the
• bit (binary/digit), brunch (breakfast/lunch), motel
(motor/hotel), telecast (television/broadcast) and
the Chunnel (Channel/tunnel), connecting
England and France
Processes of word formation of free
lexical
Acronyms
• 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’)
• More typically, acronyms are pronounced as
new single words, as in NATO, NASA or UNESCO.
Processes of word formation of free
lexical
Backformation
• A very specialized type of reduction process is known
as backformation. Typically, a word of one type
(usually a noun) is reduced to form a word of another
type (usually a verb).
• television first came into use and then the verb
televise.
• donate (from ‘donation’), emote (from ‘emotion’),
enthuse (from ‘enthusiasm’), liaise (from ‘liaison’) and
babysit (from ‘babysitter’).
Processes of word formation of free
lexical
Abbreviation
• Abbreviations of longer words may
be lexicalized as new word; Nark--narcotics ;Telly –television; mathgas-phone bus-gym-lab.