Morphology
Gerber Luca
Put the words into groups:

Write

Eats

Taken

Takes

Writing

Eat

Ate

Took

Writes

Taking

Wrote

Take

Written

Eaten

Eating
LEXEME
A unit of the lexicon, which is an uninflected abstract form that underlies all its inflected
variants
SYNTACTIC WORD
It’s an inflected variant of a lexeme
• A whole set of inflected variants of a lexeme is called a PARADIGM
•Take, takes, taking, took, taken  TAKE
Lewis Caroll: Jabberwocky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Put the words into two groups:

Happy

When

At

Of

Without

Although

And

The

Horse

Black

Very

Between

House

John

Or

Buy

Answer

They

Search

Happy

John

Black

Answer

House

Search

Buy

Horse

Very

Of

The

And

At

They

Although

When

Between

Without

Or
CONTENT WORDS
Nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs
FUNCTION WORDS
Conjunctions, pronouns,
auxiliaries, determiners
Stem

The part of the word which remains if we remove the suffix or
prefix that has entered the word last


Unfriendliness
 unfriendly
Unfriendly
 friendly
Friendly
 friend

If we remove all affixes, we arrive at the absolute stem  root




Let’s play with morphemes!
Morphemes
Affix
Root
Always bound morphemes
Free morphemes
Bound morphemes
They can occur by themselves as whole
words
Must be attached to other morphemes
within words
(house, table, boy, etc.)
(cred-, grad-, -mit, , etc.)
Prefixes
Suffixes
Derivational
Inflectional or derivational
Class-maintaining
Class-changing
(legal  illegal)
(joy  enjoy)
Class-maintaining
Class-changing
(boy  boyhood)
(print  printer)