Words and their parts
MORPHOLOGY
How many words begin with ‘b’? List the
different dictionary entries you would create
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1. The bear attacked him.
2. I can’t bear the sight of him.
3. People argue over the right to bear arms.
4. Bare feet are not allowed.
5. She bore up well under the strain.
6. He bears no malice towards those who did him this
injustice.
7. I was born at 5 a.m.
8. In the village, there was a woman who bore twins four
times.
9. He is such a bore.
10. With bared teeth, he uttered his horrifying threat.
Homonyms
 Words which sound the same but have different
meanings
 Bear, bear, bare
 Bore, bore
Polysemy
 Words with different, but related senses
 Bear, bear (3. and 6.)
Verb inflection
 Example 6:
 He bears him no malice
 I bear him no malice
 Is ‘bear’ and ‘bears’ the same word?
Look at the list and decide if it is considered a
word
 1. hello
 2. chair
 3. the
 4. friend
 5. friendship
 6. ly
 7. friends
 8. goodbye
 9. ceive
10. un
11. gotcha
12. gonna
13. coffee cup
14. cran
15. blackboard
16. faked
Content words and function words
 Content words – refer to concepts in the realm of
experience (tangible or abstract, real or imaginary)
 Function words – create connections or provide
specification of how we are to interpret the content
words
Content words
 Nouns
 Verbs
 Adjectives
 Adverbs
 - an open class of words, as new content words are
being created constantly
Function words
 Pronouns
 Determiners
 Prepositions
 Conjunctions
 - a closed class: fixed, relatively stable, and new ones
are not inclined to be added
Make a list of several words which are new to
your language
 For each word:
 1. List its word class: adjective, adverb, noun, verb?
 2. In what contexts have you heard the word
 3. How recent is it? How did it enter the language?
 4. Google the word. How many hits does it get? Look
through some of the hits. Does the way the word is
used match your understanding?
Neologisms: how are new words created?
 Acronyms: AIDS < acquired immunity deficiency
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syndrome
Alphabetic abbreviations: CD< compact disk
Clippings: prof < professor
Blends: camcorder < camera + recorder
Generified words: xerox (<the name of the
corporation that produces photocopying machines)
Proper nouns (guillotine – named after its
inventor, Dr. Joseph Guillotin)
Neologisms: how are new words created?
 Borrowings: Direct (avocado – Aztec word)
 Borrowings: Indirect (grattacielo<skyscraper)
 Changing the meaning of words
What is a word?
 The task of any language learner, including young
children acquiring their language, is to figure out
how to segment and analyze the talking noise around
them into meaningful units – namely, words and
their meaningful parts
 Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: “word is the
smallest independent unit of language, or one that
can be separated from other such units in an
utterance”
What is a word?
 Words are “usually separated by spaces in writing
and distinguished phonologically, as by accent”
 Chinese doesn’t insert spaces between words in
writing
 People who can’t read and speakers of languages
without writing systems know what words are in
their languages
What is a word?
 Phonology –an important role in identifying the
boundaries bewteen words
 A. They walked past a GREENhouse
 B. They walked past a green HOUSE
What is a word?
Examples
 Is phonology enough to disambiguate a word?
 A. Tea’s good for you.
 B. That shop sells teas from around the world.
 C. I asked him not to tease the cat.
What is a word?
 Webster: words are “typically thought of as
representing an indivisible concept, action, or
feeling, or as having a single referent”
 Tease – different referent than teas
 Teas: -s – not an independent word – must be
attached directly to an independent word whose
basic meaning it is modifying (plural)
 Teas is one word, the –s ending contributes some
additional information to its meaning
Morpheme
 Word – difficult to delineate
 Morpheme – the smallest unit of linguistic meaning
that has clear delineation
Morphology
 Studies morphemes and the ways in which
morphemes combine together into larger units of
meaning
Determine the number of morphemes in each of the words
below. How can you divide them into categories?
 1. dogs
 2. unpack
 3. carrot
 4. behead
 5. repackage
 6. redness
 7. deactivate
 8. classroom
 9. paper
 10. writer’s
Morphemes
 Free
 Bound
Free and bound morphemes
 Free m. can stand alone as words (e.g. dog, carrot,
head, red, class, room, paper, write)
 Bound m. must be attached to another morpheme
(e.g. s, er, un, be, de, ate, ness, re, ‘s)
Root morphemes
 The smallest units cannot be analyzed into smaller
units (e.g. pack, write, act)
 Bound roots – cannot stand alone (ceive >receive,
conceive, deceive; rupt > interrupt, disrupt; cran >
cranberry)
Stem
 Root morpheme + affixes
 E.g. write + er = writer + s = writers
Affixes
 Bound morphemes that attach to roots or stems in
different ways
Affixes
 Prefixes: attach at the beginning of a root or stem
morphemes: un-, re-, dis-, etc.
 Suffixes: attach at the end of root or stem
morphemes: -s, , -ness, -ly, etc.
 Infixes: insert in the middle of root or stem
morphemes (Croatian pokušati ‘try’ > pokuša-va-ti)
 Circumfixes: attach simultaneously at the
beginning and at the end of a bound or stem
morpheme (German: past participle ge-hab-t)
Bound morphemes
 Inflectional
 Derivational
Inflectional morphemes
 Inflectional morphemes do not change the meaning
of a word; they change the word because of
constraints provided by the syntax of their
surrounding phrase or sentence (e.g. I come, he
comes)
Inflectional morphemes
 Provide information on:
 Case,
 gender,
 person,
 mood,
 tense,
 voice,
 aspect
Person
 Distinguishes entities referred to in an utterance
 1st person: speaker
 2nd person: addressee
 3rd person: a default category that refers to
everything else
 Person – often combined with number
Number
 A grammatical property of nouns
 Singular – plural (some languages also dual)
 Uncountable nouns cannot be pluralized (abstract
nouns: carelessness, peace; non-individual material:
milk, rice); a mass noun in one language may be
countable in another: furniture – meuble/meubles
Gender
 Genus ‘kind, sort’
 Masculine, feminine, neuter
 Sometimes: gender indicated on the noun itself: Sp.
amigo – amiga; forms of the indefinite article
un/una and the adjective americano/a agree with
the gender of the noun
Case
 One of the most important functions of morphology
is to distinguish the roles played by the various
participants in an event
 Case indicates a noun’s relation to some other
element in a clause or phrase
 Case marking – the relation of the noun to the verb
(as its subject, direct or indirect object) or to another
noun (possessive or locational relation)
Tense
 All human languages have ways for locating
situations in time
 Tense used to locate an event or state in relation to a
point in time
 In simple tenses (past, present, future), the reference
point is “now”, at the moment of speaking
 English – 2 tenses: past and non-past
Aspect
 Encodes whether an action is (or was) completed
(perfective), ongoing, repeated (iterative) or habitual
(progressive):
 John is painting the kitchen.
 John was painting the kitchen.
 John painted the kitchen.
Mood
 A grammatical category that expresses the speaker’s
belief, opinion, or attitude about the content of an
utterance
 Although often morphologically marked on verbs,
mood really applies to entire clauses, to indicate
whether the speaker thinks a proposition is true, or
likely, or doubtful, or is something he wonders
about, or hopes or wishes for
Mood
 Indicative - used for making declarative assertions
 Interrogative – asking questions
 Imperative – giving commands
 Subjunctive – wishes, thoughts, hopes, doubts etc.
 Conditional – expresses what one would or should
do
English inflectional morphemes
Word class
i. morpheme
function
examples
Nouns
s
plural
dogs
‘s
possessive
John’s
er
comparative
faster
est
superlative
fastest
s
3rd person sg.
walks
ed
Past tense
walked
ed
Past participle
cooked
ing
Present participle
walking
Adjectives
Verbs
Grammatical roles
 English: SVO
 The boys call the girls.
 Latin: inflections
 Pueri puellas vocant.
 Puellas pueri vocant.
Inflection and derivatin in English
 Inflectional morphemes are few in English, but
derivational morphemes are many
 Inflectional morpheme does not change the
grammatical class or the underlying meaning of a
word, a derivational morpheme changes one or the
other
English derivational morphemes
 -ness, -ly: change the grammatical class of a word:
friend (noun) > friend-ly (adverb);
 Friendly (adverb) > friendliness (noun)
English derivational morphemes
 Adjective
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Adverb
sad
sadly
happy
happily
quick
quickly
momentary momentarily
English derivational morphemes
 Some derivational morphemes change or add to the
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meaning of the root or stem, but do not change the
grammatical class
unhappily
impossible
intolerant
mistreat
friendship
blueish
Morphonematics
 Impossible – inflexible: allomorphs of the same
morpheme
Allomorphy
A
B
C
D
Clicks /kliks/
Pigs /pigz/
Flaws /floz/
Kisses /kisiz/
clips
beds
days
judges
plates
caves
knees
sashes
myths
pans
plows
churches
Allomorphy
 Different pronunciations of the plural morpheme
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depend on the surrounding phonetic context
A: unvoiced consonant
B: voliced consonant
C: words ending in vowels
D: vowel epenthesis
Morphology
 Morphology applies within words (cat > cats) but it
also applies across words, as when we alter the form
of one word so that some part of it matches, or
agrees with, some feature of another word:
 A. That cat sleeps all day.
 B. Those cats sleep all day.
Can you identify the morphemes?
 The musicians reconsidered their director’s unusual
proposal.
The meaning of complex words
 readable - well written, good style
 A bill is payable – doesn’t mean that it can be paid
but it must be payed
 If a theory is questionable, it doesn’t mean that it can
be questioned but that it is dubious and suspect
 Meanings of many complex words – not merely
composites of the meanings of their parts (semantic
drift)
Compounding
 Concatenation of two or more lexemes to form a new
lexeme
 English: greenhouse, moonlight, download
Compounding: writing conventions
 Often, the hyphen is used when a compound has
been recently created (black-board)
 When it has gained a certain currency or
permanence, spelled without a hyphen (black board)
 Spelled as one word (blackboard)
Inflectional vs. Derivational morphology
 Inflectional affixes never change the category of the base
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morpheme
Inflectional suffixes follow derivational suffixes (modernize –
modernizes)
Derivational suffixes create new base forms (stems) that other
derivational or inflectional affixes can attach to
Semantic relations: inflectional affixes – the meaning of the
morpheme and the meaning of the base + affix is regular (tree
– trees); derivational affixes: the relation between the
meaning of the base morpheme and the meaning of the base +
affix – unpredictable (read – readable)
Inflectional suffixes – paradigms (Lat. amo, amas, amat,
amamus, amatis, amant)
Summary
 Morphology – concerned with the relation between
form and meaning
 The basic unit that combines form and meaning –
morpheme
 Lexical/content morphemes (N, V, A)– serve as the
root for additional morphological operations
 Grammatical/function morphemes signal a
grammatical function
Summary
 Morphological operations: derivation (affixation),
compounding
 Two major functions: derivation and inflection
 Derivational morphology creates new lexemes from
existing ones, with a change in a word’s lexical
category or meaning
 Inflectional morphology adds grammatical
information to a lexeme: person, number, gender,
case, tense, aspect, mood
Key terms
 Affix
 Agreement
 Allomorph
 Aspect
 Base
 Case
 Compound
 derivation
Key terms
 Gender
 Inflection
 Lexeme
 Lexicon
 Mood
 Morpheme
 morphology
Key terms
 Number
 Paradigm
 Person
 Prefix
 Root
 Stem
 Suffix
 Tense
 Word