Morphology

Morphology

1. It refers to the study of the internal form of words

2. Morphemes

   • It is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
   • Free morphemes
     • They can stand by themselves as single words, for example, new and tour.
     • Lexical morphemes
       • It is that set of ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
         • Some examples are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open, look, follow, break.
       • Thre are words that carry the “content” of the messages. They are treated as an “open” class of words.
     • Functional morphemes
       • They are functional words as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
         • Some examples are: and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them.
       • They are described as a “closed” class of words.
   • Bound morphemes
     • Their forms cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.
     • Derivational morphemes
       • There are to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.
         • For example derivational morphemes include suffixes, such as the -ish in foolish, the -ly in quickly, and the -ment in payment, and prefixes, such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un-.
       • Can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme -er
     • Inflectional morphemes
       • They are used to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.
         • Noun (+) -’s, -s Verb (+) -s, -ing, -ed, -en Adjective (+) -er, -est
           • For example: fish-fishes, walk-walking, old-older
       • Never change the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives.
       • Morphs
         • They are the actual forms used to realize morphemes.
           • For example, the form cats consists of two morphs, cat (+) -s, realizing a lexical morpheme (cat) and an inflectional morpheme (plural).
       • Allomorphs
         • It is a morpheme “plural,” which has the consistent function of indicating “there is more than one.”
           • For example the plural form of "sheep" is actually “sheep", the plural form of "man" is "men"