Chapter 6 : Morphology

Morphology

The type of exercise we have just performed is an example of investigating basic forms in language.

Morphemes

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or/and grammatical funtion
The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.”
Units of grammatical function include forms used to indicate past tense or plural.

Free Morphemes

Can stand by themselves as single words like "cat" "run" or "happy","walk" "book".

Bound Morphemes;

Cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

e.g: " s" (for plurals) " ed" (for tense) " ing" (for actions) " ness" (, for creating nouns).

All fixes in English are bound morphemes.

stem the base form to which allfixes are attached

Lexical morphemes:

A free morpheme that is a content word such as a noun(girls, house), verb , adjectives, adverbs

=Open class

Functional Morphemes

closed class

funtion word

article, conjunction, preposition, and pronouns

articles( a, an , the)

conjunctions( and , because, FANBOYS)

prepositions (THIS,THAT,ON NEAR,TO)

pronouns( ( I, ME, IT, SHE)

Derivational Morphemes

Make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.

Can be suffixes like -ment and -ify and also prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, co-, un-

ex: boyish

adj->N

tall ness

specific ity

Inflectional Morphemes:

not used to produce new words in the language, but rather to indicate the grammatical function of a word.

marking possessive (-'s) and plural (-s)
four inflections to verb:

-s (3rd person singular, present tense)

-ing (present participle)

-ed( past tense)

-en( past participle)

two inflections to adjectives:

-er( comparative)

-est( superlative)

Mors, Allomorphs and special cases

Mors : as the actual forms used to realize morphemes.

Ex: the forms of cats consists of 2 parts, /kæt/ +/-s/, with a lexical morpheme("cat) and inflectional morpheme ("plural")

Allomorphs of a morpheme, using the prefix "allo-" ( = one of a closely related set).
There are 3 allomorphs (/-s/, /-z/, /-əz/)
Special cases: a " zero-morph" : produces irregular words
Add plural -> the morph that produces the "irregular" plural form.

E.g: man-> men, woman-> women, mouse-> mice,...

past tense -> the inflectional suffix -ed -> produces irregular verbs

E.g: go -> went, bring-> brought,...

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