Linguistics
The ninth week
Chapter 3 Morphology
 3.1 Introduction
 3.2 Morphemes
Key points
 1. the definition of morphology
 2. the definition of morpheme
 3. the classification of morphemes
Difficult points
 1. Free morphemes
 2. Bound morphemes
Morphology
 Morphology is the study of the internal
structure, forms and classes of words.
Morphemes
 A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or
grammatical function.
 Ex. Tourists: -tour (one minimal unit)

-ist (meaning “person who
does something”)

-s (a third unit of grammatical
function indicating plurality)
Free morphemes
 The morphemes that can stand alone as
words are called free morphemes.
Root and stem
 A word must contain an element that can
stand by itself, that is, a free morpheme,
such as talk. Such an element is called a
root. When they are used with bound
morphemes, the basic word-form involved is
technically known as the stem.
Lexical and functional morphemes
 Lexical morphemes refer to ordinary nouns,
verbs and adjectives.
 Functional morphemes refer to conjunctions,
articles, prepositions and pronouns.
Open and closed class of words
 lexical morphemes are called an open
class of words because we can create
new lexical morphemes.
 functional morphemes are called a
closed class of words because no new
fellow members can be added.
Bound morphemes
 Bound morphemes are those that can not
be used independently but have to be
combined with other morphemes, either
free or bound, to form a word.
Occurrence position:
 Prefixes
 Suffixes
 infixes
Function:
 Derivational morphemes
 Inflectional morphemes
Eight English inflectional morphemes:
 (i) –‘s (possessive)
 (ii) –s (plural)
 (iii) –s (3rd person present singular)
 (iv) –ing (present participle)
 (v) –ed (past tense)
 (vi) –ed (past participle)
 (vii) –en (past participle)
 (viii) –est and –er (superlative and comparative
degree)
The chart of the different categories
of morphemes

Lexical morphemes (work, house, kind)

Free morphemes
Morphemes
Functional morphemes (and, if, or, but)

Derivational morphemes (-er, -ness, -

ly)


Bound morphemes
Inflectioanal morphemes (-ed, -er, -est)








Lexical morphemes
Free morphemes
Functional morphemes
Morphemes
Derivational morphemes
Bound morphemes
Inflectional morphemes
Assignments
1. Define the following terms:
(1)morphology (2) free morpheme
(3) morpheme (4) stem
2. Identify the structure of the following words:
wording person existentialism
international statesman spokesman
walkman bicyclist assignment