Unit I: Morphology
Meaning and definition
Morphology is commonly defined as the scientific study of the internal structure of words. Words have phonological properties. Their forms often reflect their syntactic function and their parts are often composed of meaningful smaller pieces. This word is of Greek origin. The term ‘morph’ means form and morphology means the study of forms. In linguistics, morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation. Morphology looks at how individual words are formed from smaller chunks of meaningful units called morphemes. For example, the English word 'untied' is really made up of three parts, one referring to the process of reversing an action (un-), one indicating the action of twisting string like things together so they stay (tie), and the last indicating that the action happened in the past (-d).
Morphology interacts in important ways with both phonology (bringing sounds together can cause them to change) and syntax, which needs to pay attention to the form of a word when it combines it with other words. Traditional linguistics treated words as the basic unit of grammatical theory. American Structuralists came up with the concept of morpheme and claimed that words are analyzable in terms of morphemes.
Morpheme
Morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit of semantic content and grammatical function they are not identical to a word. A single word can have one or more morpheme. Morphemes may or may not stand alone where as words stand alone. A morpheme can be defined as a minimal unit having more or less constant meaning and more or less constant form. For example, the word ‘buyers’ is made up of three morphemes {buy} +{er}+{s}. In the formation of multi morphemic words (Words that have more than one morpheme) it is not the case that the morphemes combine in arbitrary ways, but they follow a definite pattern. Linguists study the meaning of morphemes as well as the distribution and combinatory possibilities. A single morpheme can be found in a number of combinations. The more combinations a morpheme is found in, the more productive it is said to be. Morphemes are generally identified based on the following three criteria. Morphemes are words or parts of words that have meaning, they cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts without violation of its meaning or without meaningless remainders and they recur in differing word environments with a relatively stable meaning.
Morpheme can have varying size one cannot judge whether something is a morpheme or not by relying only on the number of syllables or the length of the word for example ‘constituent’ a long word and a plural marker ‘-s’ qualify as a morpheme.
Types of Morphemes
Morphemes and immediately be divided into two: Free and bound morphemes.
Free morphemes are those that can stand alone as words. E.g.: cat, boat, on, in, about and so on.
Bound Morphemes are those that can occur only in combination that is they are parts of the word. E.g. -s, -er, -ing, -ment.
Bound morphemes are classified into affixes, critics, portmanteau morphemes and empty morphemes.
(i) Affixes: Affixes are bound morphemes attached to a word. They suggest where exactly they are attached to in the word. Affixes participate in the word formation of a language. They are always bound morphemes and do not belong to a lexical category. Based on the place of occurrence, affixes are classified into four types
Prefix: attached at the onset always. (re-start, un-happy,pre-view).
Suffix: attached after the root. ( quick-ly, dance-er, exam-ine).
Derivation and Inflectional affixes:
Derivational affixes are those bound morphemes that are added to one word to create another word with the meaning and a category distinction which may be distinct from that of its base. E.g.
Verb to adjective: read- readable, verb to noun: write -writer, noun to adjective: girl- girlish, noun to verb: glory -glorify.
Inflectional affixes: are those bound morphemes whose presence in the structure is mandated by the structure of a sentence. Inflection creates new forms of the same word with the addition of grammatical properties. The basic meaning of the newly formed word would be the same. English inflectional morphology includes the following
Nominal suffixes plurals: (dog+s), possessives (dog’s)
Adjectival suffix: Comparative: (dark+er), superlative (dark+est)
Verbal suffix: present third person singular (buy+s), past (walk+ed), progressive (read+ing).
(ii) Portmanteau morphemes are those morphemes that carries more than one piece of meaning, but which cannot be broken down into separate morphemes.
E.g. -s means singular, present and 3rd person, but these meanings cannot be separated.
(iii) Empty morphemes are those which have structure phone but no meaning example in the word Cran-berry, though Berry has meaning, cran does not have a meaning of its own.
(iv) Zero morpheme are morphemes that are physically not present in the word yet fulfill the requirement of the language. For example the word ‘cut’ has the same form in both past and present tense and past and is the null morphemes is added to the root, thus it has a function but no form.
(v) Clitics have grammatical rather than lexical meaning. They belong to closed classes like pronouns, preposition and conjunctions. Clitics are usually attached to the edges of the words, outside the derivational and inflectional affixes.
E.g. contraction of the morpheme is, as in What’s going on?
Allomorphs are the group of morphs that are the realization of the same morpheme i.e. just as allomorphs phones are the variants of a phoneme, so allomorphs are the variants of a morpheme.
E.g. -I’d, -t, and -d are the allomorphs of past tense morpheme.
Allomorphs are in complimentary distribution. That is they have the same meaning and function but they do not occur in the same environment.
Words, lexeme and word forms- root, stem and base: Bloomfield defined words as minimal free units. The term word is often used in two different senses, as a physical unit and as a semantic entity. These physical entities, the written or spoken form of words are called word forms. In other words, word forms are the physical realization of lexemes. The include all the inflected forms of a lexeme. For example, ‘sit’, ‘sat’ and ‘sitting’ are different forms of the word ‘sit’.
Lexeme is the term used to denote the usage of word to refer the semantic entity. It is normally defined as the vocabulary items listed in a dictionary. A lexeme includes all inflected forms of a word. Example SIT- ‘sit’, ‘sat’ and ‘sitting’, ‘sit’; WALK- ‘walking’, ‘walks’, ‘walked’, ‘walk’.
Root, stem and base.
Roots are primary lexical units, which carry the most significant aspect of semantic content. They cannot be reduces into smaller units. They are lexical morpheme, the base to which grammatical derivational morphemes are added to form a complex word. Words have multiple rrots. Some lexemes have more than one root. A root also qualifies as a stem.
All roots can be base, but not all bases are roots.
Eg. ‘walk is the root of the form - ‘walks’, ‘walked’, ‘walking’, ‘walker’ and so on.
Stem is the part of word that is in existence before any inflectional affix. Eg, in the word books, the stem is book (which is also the root”, it immediately precedes the inflectional morpheme –s. the word friendship is the base word for friendships, but is not the root. Bases can be called stems in inflectional morphology.
Base is any form, which enters into a word formation process that yields a more complex form. The affixes attached to the base may be inflectional or derivational. A root like girl can be a base to ‘girls’. The base of the word playfulness is playful as it is the immediate form that enters into the process of word formation.
Explain the process of word formation giving suitable examples.
Compounding: When two or more words are joined to make a new word the process is known as compound as formation.
Example- Manpower (Compound Noun)
Myself (Compound Pronoun)
Clipping: The process by which a word is curtailed by retaining only its initial and recognizable part without effecting any change in meaning and grammatical class is called clipping.
Ex. - Perambulator – Pram
Telephone – Phone
Blending: When a new word is formed by combining the meaning and also partly the sound of two words.
Ex. - Brunch (blend of breakfast and lunch meaning a late meal between breakfast and lunch).
Backformation: Back formation is the formula of words by the deletion of actual or supposed affixes in longer words:
Housekeeping Housekeep
Service Serve
Coining: A new word is created either deliberately or accidentally without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.
Ex.- Xerox, Google etc.
Acronym: Pronounceable word coined from initial letters of the words in a name (mostly of an organization), title or phrase.
Ex- TOEFL – Teaching of English as Foreign Language
WHO- World Health Organization
Conversion: When a word of one grammatical class is used as a word of another class without change in its form the process is known as conversion.
Ex- Service - That garage services my car. (Noun used as verb)
Eponym
Reduplication: Sometimes new words are formed in English by repeating an item with a little change which can take place initially, medially or finally.
Example- Tip-top, Brain- drain
Derivation: Example: Defrost etc.
Explain the Process of Word Formation.
Process of Word Formation: There are processes by which new words are formed.
Derivation- Example: Defrost etc.
Compound Formation: When two or more words are joined to make a new word the process is known as compound as formation.
Example- Manpower (Compound Noun)
Myself (Compound Pronoun)
Duplication- Sometimes new words are formed in English by repeating an item with a little change which can take place initially, medially or finally.
Example- Tip-top, Brain- drain
Back formation: Back formation is the formula of words by the deletion of actual or supposed affixes in longer words:
Housekeeping Housekeep
Service Serve
Conversion: When a word of one grammatical class is used as a word of another class without change in its form the process is known as conversion.
Ex- Service - That garage services my car. (Noun used as verb)
Clipping: The process by which a word is curtailed by retaining only its initial and recognizable part without effecting any change in meaning and grammatical class is called clipping.
Ex. - Perambulator – Pram
Telephone – Phone
Acronym: Pronounceable word coined from initial letters of the words in a name (mostly of an organization), title or phrase.
Ex- TOEFL – Teaching of English as Foreign Language
WHO- World Health Organization
Blending: When a new word is formed by combining the meaning and also partly the sound of two words.
Ex. - Brunch (blend of breakfast and lunch meaning a late meal between breakfast and lunch).
Coinage- A new word is created either deliberately or accidentally without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing.
Ex.- Xerox, Google etc.
