Introduction to linguistics
LECTURE 3
Dorota Klimek-Jankowska
What is the difference between words in (1) and (2)?
(1)
(2)
cat,
replay,
lady,
comfortable,
walk,
unnatural,
nice,
put,
rose,
cry,
love
misinterpretations,
icecream,
bigheaded,
sisterhood,
Words in (2) can be broken down into still
smaller units.
How many units does the word unnatural
consist of?
Does the first unit have a meaning?
What does un- mean?
The smallest meaningful element of a
language is called....
Morphology focuses on these linguistic
regularities which are active in our mind and
which determine the way we structure of
words in natural language.
• Now consider the words look, looks,
and looked.
• Are -s and -ed morphemes?
• Do they have any meaning
• What role do they play?
Morphemes are the smallest units of
a language that can be associated
with meaning or grammatical function.
Exercise1: Look at the following list of words. Try
to divide each word into parts.
1. timetable
4. grammarian
7. recreate
2. emptiness
5. personified
8. unfriendly
3. meaningful
6. non-smoker
9. surfer
What is the difference between morphemes in (3) and (4)
(3)
cat,
happy,
girl,
flower
(4) un-,
re-,
-s,
-ation,
-able,
-ed
What is the difference between morphemes in (3) and (4)
(3)
cat,
happy,
girl,
flower
FREE MORPHEMES
CAN STAND ALONE
(4) un-,
re-,
-s,
-ation,
-able,
-ed
BOUND MORPHEMES
ARE ALWAYS
ATTACHED TO SOME
OTHER MORPHEME.
Exercise 2: The following words are made up of either one
or two morphemes: isolate them and decide for each if it is
free or bound
a. cats
d. broken
g. biggest
j. entrust
b. unhappy
e. milder
h.
childhood
k. signpost
c. rejoin
f. hateful
i. greedy
l. spacious
ROOT: the most essential form of a word
that
cannot be further analyzed without total
loss
of identity. It is also that part of the word
left
when all affixes are removed
We can attach AFFIXES to roots.
A PREFIX attaches to the beginning
(unhappy, impossible, misinterpret) and a
SUFFIX attaches to the end of a word
(excitement, sisterhood, information).
BASE: the form to which an affix is
attached.
UNHAPPINESS
HAPPY – functions as a root and a base
UNHAPPY – (prefix ‘un-’ + root ‘happy’) 
(base ‘unhappy’ + suffix ‘-ness’) 
UNHAPPINESS
Infix – a type of affix which occurs within a
base.
Morphemes can be devided into:
lexical (carry a certain
functional morphemes
meaning) e.g.
verbs, nouns, adjectives,
adverbs
(purely grammatical
function) e.g. articles,
conjunctions, numerals,
prepositions
(5) car, book, sun, doll,
dress…
(open class)
(6) the, on, one, and, or, a
(closed class)
Exercise 4: Identify a part of speech (lexical category)
ADJECTIVE, NOUN, PREPOSITION, ADVERB,
VERB
1) slowly, 2) funny, 3) freedom, 4) friendly,
5) pass by, 6) selection, 7) fast, 8) complain,
9) from, 10) single, 11) roses, 12) across,
13) satisfy, 14) satisfactory, 15) memorable,
16) memory, 17) always, 18) above,
19) round, 20) around, 21) kiss, 22) moving,
23) company, 24) hiss, 25) teddy bear
BOUND MORPHEMES:
INFLECTIONAL
DERIVATIONAL
Exercise: Identify the function of the
following inflectional suffixes
Stem
wait
wait
wait
eat
chair
chair
fast
fast
Suffix
-s
-ed
-ing
-en
-s
-'s
-er
-est
Function
DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES
• -ship, -hood, -able, -ment, -tion, re-, un-, in-, -al, -ly
Change the part of speech e.g., -ment added to a
verb forms a noun: judge-ment
Change the meaning of a word, re-activate means
'activate again'.
Are usually not very productive –hood cannot attach
to all members of a class of nouns brother, neighbo but
not *friendhood, *daughterhood, or *horsehood.
Derivational morphemes occur before inflectional
suffixes, e.g., govern-ment-s: -ment, a derivational
suffix, precedes -s, an inflectional suffix.
Derivational morphemes may be prefixes or suffixes
(in English), e.g., pre-arrange, arrange-ment.
INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES
-ed, -s, ‘s, -er, -ing, -en, est
Inflectional morphemes do not change meaning or
part of speech, e.g., dog - dogs are both nouns, jump –
jumps - jumped are all verbs.
Inflectional morphemes indicate grammatical
relations between words John love-s Mary -s marks the
3rd person singular present form of the verb, relating it
to the 3rd singular subject John.
Inflectional morphemes are very productive. They
typically occur with all members of a lexical category
the plural morpheme -s occurs with almost all nouns.
Inflectional morphemes occur after derivational
morphemes e.g., ration-al-iz-ation-s: -s is inflectional,
and appears at the very end of the word. (hence they
are suffixes only).
Exercises 5 -9 on the handout
The same morpheme may have more than
one
phonological manifestation. Different
phonological
realizations of a morpheme are called
allomorphs.
QUIZ
1. Which morpheme can stand alone as a word?
free or bound
2. Which morpheme has the principal meaning of the
word it's in?
stem or affix
3. Which morpheme creates a new word by changing
the meaning or part of speech, or both?
derivational or inflectional
• 4. Which morpheme has a meaning or causes a
change in meaning when added to a word?
content or function morpheme
Word formation process
DERIVATION/AFFIXATION – adding affixes
which changes meaning or category e.g. un-lucky,
excite-ment
COMPOUNDING – putting two words together in
order to create a new lexical item. Compounds
consist of more than one stem
street light, happy hour, bookcase, blackird, overload,
fireman, forget-me-not
CLIPPING – (abbreviations) - the word-formation
process in which a portion of a longer word is used to
produce a clipped word.
• telephone – phone
• refridgerator – fridge
• exam(ination)
• math(ematic),
• lab(oratory)
BLENDING – mixing words together, a blend is a
word formed from parts of two other words
• brunch = breakfast + lunch
• motel = motor + hotel
• smog = smoke + fog
BACKFORMATION – the reverse of affixation,
creation of a new word from an existing word falsely
assumed to be its derivative. For example, the verb
‘to edit’ has been formed from the noun ‘editor’,
donation from ‘to donate’.
CONVERSION: changing a category (a part of
speech) without changing a form
• a bottle – to bottle
• butter – to butter
• a drink – to drink
ACRONIMIZATION – letter abbreviations: NATO, ZUS,
PZU, BBC
SUPPLETION: a root morpheme is replaced by a
phonologically unrelated form go – went
1.REDUPLICATION: duplicates all or part of the base
Indonesian: anak – child, anak anak – children
Turkish: gyzel – beautiful, gyzel gyzel – very beautiful
CRANBERRY MORPEMES: determining its
internal structure is tricky since berry is
clearly a morpheme, we do not know what
to make of cran- which never occurs
elsewhere in language as an independent
bound morpheme.
THANK YOU