Morphology

Morphology

The study of morphemes, the processes they undergo,

and the ways in which they combine to form words.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful units of language. Morphemes cannot

be broken down into any further meaningful units.

Free and bound morphems

Free Morphemes:

• Can stand by themselves.

• Examples: cat, open, about, round, the, every, Sue

e.g. I have a cat; or The jar is open

• Bound Morphemes:

• Can only appear attached to other morphemes.

• Examples: -s, -ed, un-, re-, -ness, -an

e.g. *I have s; or *I can re it for you

Root and affixes

Multi-morphemic words (e.g. ‘dancing’) consist of:

• a root (‘dance’),

•one or more affixes (‘-ing’).

•A combination of a root and one or more affixes,

(e.g. ‘unreal’) is called a stem.

Affixes

a- a-moral, a-symptomatic

•de- de-forestation, de-grease

•con- con-gregation, con-join

•uni- uni-form, uni-versal

•un- un-happy, un-do

•pre- pre-meditate, pre-view

•anti- anti-matter, anti-freeze

Infixes

Expletive infixation:

• abso-blooming-lutely

•fan-fricking-tastic

•Some other infixes:

• h-iz-ouse, dr-iz-eam, G-iz-oogle

• edu-ma-cation, Saxa-ma-phone

Inflectional morphonology

Morphology that expones a grammatical function.

•Examples:

•-s ‘You bake’ vs. ‘He bakes’

•-ed ‘They bake every day’ vs. ‘They baked every day’

•-s ‘the book’ vs. ‘the books’

Inflectional morphology never changes the grammatical category of a word!

Derivational morphology

Morphology that adds/modifies semantic content.

• Examples:

•-able

• un-

• un-

= ‘able to be X-ed’ (lockable, usable)

= Negation (unhappy, uncertain)

= Reversive (unzip, unbind)

• Derivational morphology may change the grammatical category of a word:

• system (N) → systematic (Adj) → unsystematic (Adj) → unsystematically (Adv)

Homorganic nasal rule:

Change the place of articulation of a nasal to

agree with place of articulation of the following consonant.

Affixation

Affixes are selective (“choosy”).

•Examples:

• -able only attaches to verbs: doable, *blueable

• -ly only to adjectives: happily, *doly

• un- only to verbs and adjectives: undo, unhappy, *undesk

• anti- only to nouns: antimissile, *antido, *antihappy

Compounding

Compounding combines two roots with each other.

These can be nouns, verbs, or adjectives.

•Examples:

• Noun-Noun: wristwatch, bookshelf

• Adj-Noun: blackboard, greenhouse

• Adj-Adj: bittersweet

• Noun-Verb: spoonfed

Truncation

Stems can undergo partial deletion to signal semantic modification

or grammatical function. K

Linearility

Morphemes are usually combined in a linear sequence.

This process is called (linear) concatenation.

•In concatenated words, morphemes are pronounced

one after another (i.e., not at the same time).

Hierarchy

Complex words have hierarchical structure:

•Words consist of smaller groupings of morphemes,

which themselves consist of smaller groupings

of morphemes, etc., eg Ambiguous

Head and grammatical category

When two items are combined, one is the head of the new item.

•Words have a grammatical category, determined by their head.

•Examples - English obeys the “right-hand head rule”:

• un-lock-able → adjective

• un-tie → verb

• black-board → noun

• bitter-sweet → adjective

• spoon-feed → verb

Non-concatenative morphology

Non-concatenative morphology is exponed by changes to the stem

other than adding to the linear sequence.

•Examples:

•mouse (sg.) - mice (pl.); tooth (sg.) - teeth (pl.);

• swim (pres.) - swam (past); spin (pres.)- spun (past).

•English ablaut is limited to inflectional morphology, and only

arguably productive nowadays.

Mutation

some languages, the initial consonant or a stressed vowel of a word

change to expone a morphological feature. This is calledmutation.eg welsh.

Templates

Semitic languages like Arabic use templatic morphology,

where a root is combined with a template to form a word.

Summary

Morphemes can be in complementary or contrastive distribution.

•Morphemes may have multiple realisations.

The choice of allomorph depends on its context.

•Multi-morphemic words consist of more than one morpheme.

Complex words often have hierarchical and linear structure.

•Non-concatenative morphology involves non-linear modification.