Overview
This lecture reviews core concepts in English morphology, focusing on how affixes (prefixes and suffixes) attach to base words and change their syntactic category and meaning.
Course Recap and Key Questions
- Knowing a language involves knowing a set of descriptive rules and morphemes.
- Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language.
- Recent focus: What does it mean to know a morpheme?
Affixes: Role and Behavior
- Affixes are bound morphemes that attach to base words (free morphemes) to form complex words.
- Affixes cannot stand alone and must attach to specific syntactic categories.
- Syntactic category distribution tests help determine which categories affixes attach to.
Example: The Suffix "-ful"
- "-ful" attaches to nouns (event, joy, beauty) and creates adjectives (eventful, joyful, beautiful).
- After attaching, the resulting word shifts categories (noun → adjective).
- Syntactic information can be shown using a morpheme template, e.g., X<sub>N</sub> + ful = adjective.
- "-ful" means "full of X," where X is the noun it attaches to.
- This dependency highlights that "-ful" only conveys meaning when attached to a noun.
Example: The Prefix "re-"
- "re-" attaches to verbs (do, teach, grow, write) and creates verbs (redo, reteach, regrow, rewrite).
- Meaning of "re-" is "again," or "to do X again," with X being the verb base.
- The syntactic category of the word stays the same after "re-" attaches (verb → verb).
Morpheme Templates
- A morpheme template includes:
- Syntactic info: what category it attaches to and what it creates.
- Semantic info: the meaning, often dependent on the base.
- (Phonological info is not emphasized in this course.)
Key Terms & Definitions
- Morpheme — the smallest unit of meaning in a language.
- Affix — a bound morpheme that attaches to a base word (prefixes and suffixes).
- Free Morpheme — a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
- Bound Morpheme — a morpheme that cannot stand alone.
- Syntactic Category — the grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) of a word.
- Morpheme Template — a structured representation of an affix’s syntactic and semantic properties.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Practice creating morpheme templates for other affixes using syntactic and semantic information.
- Review syntactic category distribution tests for use with future examples.
- Prepare to analyze the word "uneventfulness" in the next lesson.