Hello everyone! Welcome! Thanks for joining us.
Today we'll be discussing the concept of morphology, or the study of forms in linguistics. More specifically, morphology is the study of the internal structure of words in a language. So this is part one of a multiple part series in morphology, and in this video we will be discussing the concept of a morpheme, as well as distinguishing between different types of morphemes.
Differences between free morphemes and... bound morphemes, lexical morphemes, and functional morphemes, as well as the difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes. So before we do any of that, let's talk about the fundamental concept in morphology, the morpheme.
So a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. A morpheme cannot be broken down into any smaller meaningful bits, just individual sounds or sound sequences, which in and of themselves are meaningless. Now you might think that the word is the smallest meaningful unit in a language, but any given word may be composed of more than one meaningful element. For example, consider the word cats.
Now cats is clearly one word in English, but it has two morphemes, cat plus s. So we all know what a cat means. It's furry, it has paws, whiskers, it meows, it vomits on the carpet.
But there is this S suffix, which is also meaningful because it denotes plural, or more than one. Therefore, cats has two morphemes. Let's take another word. How about category?
Now category has just one morpheme. Don't be fooled by the size of the word. Category cannot be broken down into any smaller meaningful bits. Now you might say, wait a minute, doesn't the word category have the word cat in it? And it does, that's a good observation.
However, the meaning of the word cat has nothing to do with the meaning of the word category in English. Therefore, we must conclude that category has just one morpheme. Similarly, you might notice that category has the word gory in it.
But again, the meaning of the word gory has nothing to do with the meaning of category. So, again, we must say that category has just one morpheme. Here's a tip.
Anytime you're looking at a word in a language and you're trying to determine how many morphemes are present in that word, ask yourself, does the sum of the parts equal the meaning of the whole? If the answer is yes, then there's likely more than one morpheme. If the answer is no, there's probably just one morpheme.
Let's take another word. How about categorize? Now, this word has two morphemes.
We've already determined that category is a word, but it's also just one morpheme. But in addition, we have this I-Z-E suffix, and that suffix is meaningful because it helps to determine or form a verb from a noun. So categorize has two morphemes. Let's take another word.
How about categorized? Now, categorized has one word. but it has three morphemes.
So we have category plus the I-Z-E suffix, but also that D suffix at the end is meaningful because it denotes past tense. Sometimes it's spelled D, sometimes it's spelled E-D, but as another tip, try to forget about how a word is spelled in a language. Instead, try to determine are the sounds present in that word meaningful?
If they are, we must look at them as morphemes. Alright, so let's do some more practice here. Take a look at the words on your screen and try to determine how many morphemes are present in each of these words. Now, while you're working, you'll want to pause the video and take as much time as you need to try to do it. But, again, try to figure out how many morphemes are present in these words.
Okay, let's go over each of these words and see how you did. Let's take this first word, overestimating. It's one word, but it has three morphemes. First of all, we have the stem estimate, and it has accepted a couple of affixes here. One is the prefix over, and the other is the suffix ing, or I-N-G.
So all of these elements are meaningful. Over, estimate, and ing. As a result, overestimating. It has three morphemes. Let's take the next word, keyboard. Keyboard uses a slightly different word formation process, but it has two morphemes, key and board.
Both of those are meaningful. We can pretty easily define them. We combine those separate words, separate morphemes together.
to form a new word, keyboard. Keyboard has two morphemes. What about cranberry? Cranberry is a bit of a weird word because it has just one morpheme. So first of all, you can isolate the.
berry, and that's pretty clear. We all know how to define that, but then we're left with this cran form, and that is very difficult to define. If you look this word up in the dictionary, you might notice that it actually refers to a quantity of fish, but that is not widely used. So cranberry has just one morpheme. Again, when you're looking at a word and you're trying to determine how many morphemes are present in that word, ask yourself, does the sum of the parts equal the meaning of the whole?
whole. And in the case of cranberry, well, a cran, as say a quantity of fish plus berry, does not equal the meaning of cranberry. So we want to conclude that cranberry has just one morpheme. And it happens to have this weird cranberry morph, as it is called in linguistics. A morpheme that doesn't really mean anything.
Let's take the last word, anti-disestablishmentarianism. Now, this is a very long and perhaps intimidating exotic as English gets in terms of the number of morphemes that it can pile into one word. But it has six morphemes.
First of all, there is the stem, establish, and there are a couple of prefixes before it, anti-and dis-. Now after establish we have ment, arian, and ism, and each of those suffixes is meaningful. If you combine all of them together we have six morphemes. Okay, now let's look at the suffix.
Now that you've hopefully got some confidence in your ability to identify the number of morphemes present in a given word, let's talk about different types of morphemes. First, let's talk about freemorphemes. Freemorphemes are those that can stand alone as individual words in a language. So words like cat, vital, and laugh, they are all one morpheme, and of course, they are all individual words.
They could stand alone as individual words in English. So there's two types of free morphemes. There are lexical morphemes and functional morphemes. Lexical morphemes are free morphemes. themes that carry the content and the meaning of the messages that we say.
So, there are things like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. They're pretty easy to define and they are an open class, which means that you can add new members to these categories. You can invent a new noun. You can invent a new verb, adjective, or adverb if you want. And if it gets popular, it might just get added to the lexicon of English.
This is what happens with slang terms all the time. In fact, we can look back in recent history at the word Google, which was coined a long time ago by a mathematician's son, so the story goes, to refer to a very large number. These days, of course, it's undergone a change in meaning, and now it just refers to the search engine.
But it provides evidence that it was a recent invented word, and it's a lexical morpheme. It can stand alone as a lexical morpheme. an individual free morpheme. Now the other type of free morpheme is a functional morpheme. So functional morphemes, they don't really provide the content or the meaning of our utterances.
Instead, these functional morphemes serve a more grammatical role by kind of being the glue that link together words in a sentence. So these include categories such as prepositions, adjunctions, articulations, and subjunctions. articles, pronouns even. These functional morphemes are a closed class, which means that they cannot accept new members, and they're harder to define.
But again, a closed class means that you can't really invent, say, a new preposition or a new conjunction. You can try, but it will probably never catch on, in part because these functional morphemes that we use, they're so common that they're difficult to unseat. So good luck trying to coin a new pronoun. It's just never going to gain any traction, unfortunately.
Okay, now that we've discussed free morphemes, let's talk about the other major type of morpheme, which is called a bound morpheme. Bound morphemes cannot stand alone as individual words. Therefore, bound morphemes are affixes. Affixes include things like prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes. Note that in English, we pretty much only use prefixes and suffixes.
really the examples that I'm using in this video because I'm referencing English, but other languages use infixes and circumfixes more regularly. So there are two types of bound morphemes. There are derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes. Let's talk about each of these in turn. Derivational morphemes serve to create new words in a language and and they also have the capacity to change the part of speech or lexical category from one to another.
If we consider these affixes, pre-and un-which are prefixes, and this agentive er-and full-which are suffixes, they do some interesting things that tell us that they are derivational morphemes in English. If we take pre-for example, and we add it to the word determine, we get predetermine, which is a new word. that would have its own dictionary entry separate from that of determine.
Now also, if we take, for example, this ER suffix, the agentive ER suffix, then that means something that we could make a noun from a verb. Like if we take the word teach, or the morpheme teach, and we add ER to the end of it, now we've got teacher, which is noun, a different lexical category, a different part of speech. So that's what derivational morphemes can do.
They can create new words in a language or they can possibly change the part of speech or lexical category from one to another. Note that all prefixes in English are derivational morphemes, but not all derivational morphemes are prefixes. Alright, let's talk about the other type of bound morpheme, and that is inflectional morphemes. Inflectional morphemes are sort of like functional morphemes in that they serve a more grammatical function in a language. So, these bound morphemes that are inflectional, they don't really create new words, they don't have the possibility of changing the lexical category of a word from one to another.
Instead, they have to do with the grammar, what's going on inside the word, kind of. In fact, there are really only just eight. Just eight. Inflectional morphemes in English and they are displayed on your screen. So we have the plural S, which denotes more than one.
We have the possessive S, often written with an apostrophe and then an S. We have the third person singular S, such as in the phrase, he walks. We have the past tense ED.
We have the suffix ING, which indicates an ongoing action. We have the EN suffix. which indicates a past participle, sort of like turning broke into broken. We have the ER comparative, which you use from cold to colder.
That's not the same as the agentive ER, like turning teach into teacher, because that changes the lexical category from one to another. But that ER in colder, that's doing something more, it's doing something more grammar-like. And then the last of these is the superlative, the EST, such as in the word coldest.
So there's just eight inflectional morphemes in English. But other languages may use a lot more inflectional morphology. Well, that's it for this video. Hopefully you've gained some confidence in your ability to identify the number of morphemes present in a given word, as well as how to distinguish between different types of morphemes. In part two on morphology in this series, we will discuss the difference between morphemes and allomorphs.
And in part three, we'll talk about how to do morphological analysis. Until then, thanks so much for tuning in, and have a great day!