Lecture Three
Morphology
I.
Open class and closed class, morphology

Open class: nouns, verbs, adjectives and
adverbs to which new words can be added. For
example: beatnik (a person who rejects or
avoids conventional behavior)
Closed class: conjunctions, prepositions, articles
and pronouns to which new word are not usually
added
Morphology: Morphology refers to the study of
the internal structure of words, and the rules by
which words are formed.


II.
Morpheme: the minimal units of
meaning

A single word may consist of one or more
morphemes.
Example: a word over 5 morphemes
Anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism (国教废除论)
(Hu, Liu & Li, 1988, p. 87)
 Affixes: prefixes and suffixes, disorder, wonderful
 Bound morphemes and free morphemes: disorder,
girl
 Derivational morphemes: blacken, physician (may
change class or words, a new word is derived or
formed)
 Inflectional morphemes: grammatical markers,
signifying such concepts as tense, number, case
and so on, they do not change the syntactic
category of the original words, such as “–ed”, and
“–ing”
 Some morphemes don’t have any lexical meanings
in sentences, such as “to” and “it”.
III.
Morphological rules of word formation

The ways words are formed are called
morphological rules.
Examples:
un + inhabit + able (un + adjective = not – adjective)
un + decided (un + adjectival form derived from a verb)

Some morphological rules can be
productive but some are less.
IV.
Compounds
Compounds: stringing words together
1.
2.
3.
4.

Same category: landlady, blue-black, icy-cold
Category changed keeping the grammatical category of
the final word: head-strong, pickpocket
compounds have different stress patterns from the
noncompounded word sequence, `redcoat, `greenhouse;
red `coat, green `house
The meaning of a compound is not always the sum of
the meanings of its parts. For example, redcoat (在美国独
立战争中服役的英国士兵), bigwig (有重大影响的人), highbrow,
jack-in-a-box (a tropical tree), turncoat (a tractor)
Compounding is then a very common and frequent
process for enlarging the vocabulary of the English
language.
References
Dai, W. D & He, Z. X. (2002). A new concise course
on linguistics for students of English. Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Hu, Z. L., Liu, R. Q. & Li, Y. F. (1988). Linguistics: a
course book. Beijing: Beijing University Press.
Task
Do the following in groups:
1. Divide the following words into their
separate morphemes by placing a “+”
between each morpheme and the next:
a. microfile
e. telecommunication
b. bedraggled
f. forefather
c. announcement
g. psychophysics
d. predigestion
h. mechanist
2. The italicized part in each of the following
sentences is an inflectional morpheme.
Study each inflectional morpheme carefully
and point out its grammatical meaning.
Sue moves in high-society circles in London.
A traffic warden asked John to move his car.
The club has moved to Friday, February 22nd.
The branches of the trees are moving back and forth.