Morphology

Morphology

1. The study of forms

2. Morphemes. “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.”

   • Free morphemes
     • Lexical morphemes
       • nouns, verbs, adjectives that carry the content of the message
         • are: girl, man, house, tiger, sad,
       • Open class
     • Functional morphemes
       • Closed class
       • conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.
         • and, but, when, because, on, near
     • They can stand by themselves as single words. They are also known as "stems" when attached to a bound morpheme.
       • open, close, tour, clock
   • Bound morphemes
     • Derivational morphemes
       • These create new morphemes by getting attached to another morpheme, and they also have a different syntactical function compared to the stem
         • (Noun) good + -ness = goodness (Adjective)
     • Inflectional morphemes
       • These indicate the syntactical function of a morpheme
       • Plural or singular, past tense or not, comparative and superlative or possessive.
       • There are only 8 inflectional morphemes in English
         • Noun
           • -'s, -s
         • Verb
           • -s, -ing, -ed, -en
         • Adjective
           • -er, -est
     • They can't stand on their own and need to be attached to another morpheme
       • affixes: un-, -ed, -less, -ness
   • Stems
     • A morpheme to which other morphemes are added
       • Free morphemes
         • time, cat
       • Bound stems
         • The stem of the morpheme can't stand alone
           • re-ceive, re-duce, re-peat

3. Morphological description

   • The difference between a derivational morpheme and an inflectional morpheme is that the derivational one will change the syntactical function or category of a morpheme but the inflectional won't.
     • Derivational morpheme -er
       • teach (Verb), teacher (Noun)
     • Inflectional morpheme -er
       • old, and older (Adjectives)

4. Problems in morphological description

   • Some morphemes such as legal, can't be analyzed through a derivational process becuase they're borrowed from other languages. In these type of morphemes, we need to study their etimology.

5. Morphs and Allomorphes

   • An allophorm is a variation of a morph.
   • girl + plural = girls
   • sheep + plural = sheep
     • Zero morph
   • walk + past tense = walked
   • go + past tense = went
     • Suppletion