Morphemes, morpheme
classification, inflectional and
derivational morphology
June 5, 2014
What is a word??
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Morphology
morphology: subfield of linguistics that studies…
• words, their structure, and how they are put together out of their
composing parts
• rules that determine how words are put together using these component
parts
• how meaning of a complex word is related to the meaning of its parts
• how individual words of a language are related to other words of the
language in terms of their morphological structure
morphophonology: study of the interaction between morphology and
phonology. More on morphophonology is coming up next week!
Sound and meaning
In general, a word’s meaning or usage cannot be predicted from the speech
segments that make up the word, e.g.:
English
Polish
French
Japanese
[dag]
[pjɛs]
[ʃjɛ̃]
[inu]
But there are types of words in which sound and meaning are more closely
tied, e.g. onomatopoeia: word that (supposedly) imitates natural sounds
bam!
fizz
woof
a-choo!
Sound and meaning
Sound and meaning
Look at the two shapes. How
would you pair these shapes with
the following words?
Bouba
Kiki
sound symbolism: the idea that vocal sounds carry meaning in and of themselves:
slip slide, slurp, slither, slime, slug… but slave, slit, slow
little, teeny, cutey, Johnny, sweety… but bleed, grip, zombie
Sound and meaning
But once we know the meanings of certain words, we CAN predict the meanings
of other words, because word meaning is often compositional, e.g.:
rapid  rapidly
drink  drinkable
blue  blueish
bride, Godzilla  bridezilla
And yet, the meanings of many phrases and expressions are NOT compositional:
• idioms: to kick a bucket, to be a party pooper
• collocations: white wine/noise/man
• proverbs: It’s no use crying over spilled milk.
*It’s no use crying over a broken plate.
“Jennifer is a Party Pooper”
http://youtu.be/gjwofYhUJEM
Word vs. phoneme
morpheme: smallest meaningful unit of language and a building block of
words (cf. phoneme). Also, a morpheme is identifiable from one word to
another.
peg and beg are two morphemes with distinct meanings, differentiated by the
phonological feature [+/‐voice] and contrastive phonemes /p/ and /b/.
But /p/ and /b/ on their own do NOT carry any meaning!
Anybody want a peanut?
Anybody want some peanuts?
Anybody want some peanuts?
*Anybody want some –s?
Word vs. phoneme
In order for something to be a word, it must:
•
•
•
•
•
have meaning
have at least one morpheme
be able to move relatively freely in a sentence (a word is a free morpheme)
usually be inserted between two other words, but not inside of another word
have one primary stress
Morphemes that canNOT freely occur in a sentence (and that attach to another word) are
bound morphemes, ex. –s, – er, –im. Bound morphemes are also called affixes.
free morphemes
English: a, sweet, camel, library
Spanish: y, casa, cucaracha
bound morphemes
-dis, -ish, -ness, -zilla, prein- (inútil), -s (casas), o (puedo)
Morpheme classification
(a) read‐able
hear‐ing
en‐large
perform‐ance
white‐ness
dark‐en
seek‐er
(b) leg‐ible
audi‐ence
magn‐ify
rend‐ition
clar‐ity
obfusc‐ate
applic‐ant
What about words like…?
cranberry huckleberry
The meaning of the words in (b) and (a) are
similar, but roots in (a) are free morphemes,
while roots in (b) are bound morphemes!
loganberry raspberry
There are no words like cran, huckle, logan, and rasp, or at least not with
the relevant meaning. Words like cranberry are compounds: complex
words consisting of two roots, one of which is bound! Morphemes like
cran and logan are often called cranberry morphemes.
Morpheme classification
Words that consist of a single
morpheme are classified as
simple words.
berry
drama
with
swim
restaurant
cry
cute
of
wombat
Words that consist of more than
one morpheme are classified as
complex words.
berry-s
over-drama-tic
house-keep-er
swim-er
restaurant
cry-ing
cute-ish
anti-dis-establish-ment
wombat-s
Morpheme classification
root: morpheme (usually free) that plays a central role, to which all other
morphemes attach. Roots usually contribute the greatest meaning component
to the resulting word, e.g.:
jump + able = jumpable (can be jumped)
liquid + ify = liquify (to turn into liquid)
dog + s = dogs (more than one dog)
affix: bound morpheme that attaches itself to a root. Affixes are further
subdivided into:
overdramatic
prefix
root
suffix
base: that to which the affix is
attaching; can be a bare root
or an already affixed form
stem: the bare root that never
changes
Practice!
With a partner, complete exercise 1 on the exercise sheet.
Morpheme classification
infix: morpheme that gets inserted INSIDE the root instead of going to its left
or right edge!
Kharia (India)
bhore ‘be full’
t͡ʃuwe ‘leak’
bhobre ‘fill’
t͡ʃubwe ‘cause to leak’
Bontoc (Austronesian, Philippines)
fikas ‘strong’
fumikas ‘he is becoming strong’
bato ‘stone’
bumato ‘it is becoming a stone’
English
un-freaking-believable
Morpheme classification
circumfixes: two‐part morphemes that go AROUND the root simultaneously!
Chickasow (Oklahoma)
lakna ‘it is yellow’
iklakno ‘it isn’t yellow’
palli ‘it is hot’
ikpallo ‘it isn’t hot’
German
Lieb ‘love’
glaub ‘believe’
geliebt ‘loved’
geglaubt ‘believed’
Morpheme classification
There are other types of morphological processes that are not limited to
prefixation and suffixation, e.g. reduplication (root or part of root is repeated).
Agta (Austronesian, The Philippines)
ma‐wakay ‘lost’
ma‐wakwakay ‘many things lost’
takki
‘leg’
taktakki
‘legs’
mag‐saddu ‘leak’
mag‐sadsaddu ‘leak in many places’
Reduplication is often used
iconically: repetition of the
phonological material stands for
repetition of the events of
things (to mean repetitive action
or plurality).
Ilokano (Austronesian, The Philippines)
pusa ‘cat’
puspusa ‘cats’
jojo ‘yoyo’
joj‐jojo ‘yoyos’
English?
chit‐chat
lovie dovie
see‐saw
criss cross
knock knock bow wow
‘I don’t like him. I like like him!”
teeny weeny
cray cray
Morpheme classification
Another non-suffixal processes is zero affixation/conversion: morphological
change (usually of lexical class) without any explicit phonological material, e.g.
in English:
NV
a telephone  to telephone
a friend  to friend
a Xerox to Xerox
VN
to look  a look
to run  a run
to like  a like
English words can also change lexical class through:
Stress change:
per’mit (V.)  ‘permit (N.)
Final consonant change: prove (V.)  proof (N.)
defend (V.)  defense (N.)
Vowel change:
sing (V.)  song (N.)
sit (V.)  seat (N.)
In English these are exceptional,
but some languages use them
extensively, e.g.: Hebrew, Arabic
use vowel change to signal
derivational morphological
relationships:
Hebrew:
sapar ‘barber’
saper verbal root ‘to get a
haircut’
Word classes / lexical categories
lexical (content) morphemes
functional (grammatical) morphemes
express general informational content, a
meaning that is essentially independent of
the grammatical system of a particular
language; open class
tied to a grammatical function, expressing
syntactic relationships between words in a
sentence or obligatorily marked categories,
such as number or tense; closed class
Nouns: London, app, love
Verbs: swim, devour, sleep
Adjectives: squishy, tiny, meh
Adverbs: often, nicely, very
Tie elements together grammatically:
hit by a truck apples and bananas
Express grammatical features, e.g.
definiteness, gender, number, tense:
She found a/the table vs. *She found table.
She found many tables vs. *She found many
table.
She fixed it yesterday vs. *She fix it yesterday.
Prepositions: to, by, from, with
Articles: the, a, an
Pronouns:
Personal: I, he, they
Reflexive: yourself, themselves
Possessive: my, hers, its
Demonstrative: this, these, those
Indefinite: each, somebody, both
Relative: that, which, what, who
Interrogative: where, when, whether
Auxiliaries: has, did, will, might
Conjunctions: and, but, however
Interjections: well, hi, gah!
Affixes: re-, -ness, -ly, -ed, -s
Word classes / lexical categories
Give me a second, I
I need to get my story straight
My friends are in the bathroom
Getting higher than the Empire State
My lover, she is waiting for me
Just across the bar
My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses
Asking 'bout a scar
fun. “We are young”
Practice!
With a partner, complete exercise 2 on the exercise sheet.
Inflectional vs. derivational morphology
Inflectional morphology creates new grammatical forms of the same word, but the core
meaning remains the same. Also, inflectional morphology NEVER changes the word’s
syntactic/lexical category, e.g.:
key (N.)  keys (N.)
cute (Adj.)  cuter (Adj.)
Derivational morphology creates new words from old ones. The core meaning might change
significantly, and the syntactic category of the word may change too. Also, the new word will
require additional inflectional morphology required by the grammar, e.g.:
happy (Adj.)  unhappy (Adj).
blend (V.)  blender (N.)  blenders
derivation
inflection
Inflectional morphology
Inflectional morphology marks grammatical features of words, like plurality or tense. This
morphological marking is required by syntax of the language. For example, in English, there
are contexts where a verb must carry a 3rd-person singular marker:
He goes to school vs. *He go to school
Inflections do NOT create new words but rather mark the existing ones for grammar. The
meaning of the inflected word is always compositional, or predictable from the meaning of
its parts, e.g.:
piano (musical instrument) + s (plural) = pianos (more than 1 musical instrument)
sweet (sugary flavor) + est (superlative) = sweetest (the most sweet)
paint
paints
painted
painting
different inflectional variants of the
same abstract word (lexeme): PAINT
English inflectional morphology
tense on verbs
aspect on verbs
number and person on verbs
play vs. played
cough vs. coughing
she knits
number on nouns
number on pronouns
case on pronouns
book vs. books
I vs. we, this vs. these
they vs. them
comparative degree on adjectives
superlative degree on adjectives
white vs. whiter
loud vs. loudest
All English inflections are suffixes!
English inflectional morphology
Some English inflections are irregular, e.g.:
tooth  teeth
go  went
dive  dove or dived
child  children
man  men
drink  drank
ox  oxen
cactus  cacti
Are these all different allomorphs of the plural morpheme –s and past tense morpheme -ed?
• If we use meaning as the basis of our analysis, then YES.
• But because of their phonological divergence from –s and –ed, these are usually NOT
considered allomorphs. Also, many of the changes involve the word root, not the affix.
The phenomenon in which a single lexeme has more than one root is suppletion.
English inflectional morphology
But what are the plural forms of nouns like…?
a pair of
a pair of
a piece/stick of
a piece of
some/a lot of
a piece of
a flock of
scissors
pants
butter
furniture
knowledge
information
sheep
periphrasis (periphrastic form): use of one or more free morphemes (instead
of inflections or derivations) to denote grammatical meaning. Also:
more/most intelligent
English: of a dog
vs. Japanese: いぬの Latin: stēllae
Inflectional morphology
Some languages have richer inflectional systems than English.
Italian: gender
Il sole ‘sun’ (masc.)
la luna ‘moon’ (fem.)
Russian: gender
[stul] ‘chair’ (masc.)
[taburetka] ‘stool’ (fem.)
[sidenje] ‘seat’ (neut.)
Inuktitut: number
Iglu ‘a house’
Igluk ‘two houses’ (DUAL)
Iglut ‘more than two houses’
Polish: case
jeż
‘hedgehog’
jeża ‘of a hedgehog’
jeżowi ‘to a hedgehog’
jeża
‘hedgehog (dir. ob.)’
jeżem ‘with a hedgehog’
jeżu ‘about a hedgehog’
jeżu ‘you hedgehog’
NOMINATIVE
GENITIVE
DATIVE
ACCUSATIVE
INSTRUMENTAL
LOCATIVE
VOCATIVE