Morphology

God is my strength.

Morphology

Te study of words and word-making;

The relationships between words and the ways in which they are expressed

e.g., plurality, friend – friends

verb variation, like – likes

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit or grammatical unit participating in word formation operations

• e.g., like (one morpheme)

unlikely (three morphemes – un, like, ly)

Bound morpheme

Affixes like “s” in books and bound roots, receive, reduce

Prefix, suffix, derivationl, and inflectional

Free morpheme

Free, making sense all by itself like book

Characteristics

• Not transparent, many morphological markers not existing

• Chinese does not mark tense, nor part of speech

• No space between words, no distinction between free and bound morphemes in orthography

• Characters are a more natural concept, 字典 (zi4dian3), 词典 (ci2dian3)

Word

• Word is the smallest element that can stand on its own to express meaning or can be used as one grammatical constituent

• Morpheme: the smallest meaningful or grammatical unit participating in word formation operations

The structure of words

• Words in standard Chinese are composed of one or more morphemes

• Each morpheme is written in at least one character