📚

Understanding Morphology and Its Components

May 12, 2025

Lecture on Morphology

Introduction

  • Morphology: Study of forms used in language.
  • New words like “ambimoustrous” show word formation processes.
  • Importance of understanding internal elements of words.

Morphemes

  • Definition: Minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
  • Examples in English:
    • Words like “talks,” “talker,” “talked,” “talking” all have the morpheme “talk.”

Types of Morphemes

Free and Bound Morphemes

  • Free Morphemes: Can stand alone (e.g., “new,” “tour”).
  • Bound Morphemes: Cannot stand alone (e.g., “re-,” “-ist,” “-ed,” “-s”).
  • Stems: Basic word forms with bound morphemes attached.

Lexical and Functional Morphemes

  • Lexical Morphemes: Carry content of messages (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs).
  • Functional Morphemes: Serve grammatical purposes (articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns).

Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes

  • Derivational Morphemes: Create new words or change grammatical category (e.g., “encourage” to “encouragement”).
  • Inflectional Morphemes: Indicate grammatical functions (e.g., plurality, tense).
  • Inflectional morphemes do not change grammatical category.

Morphological Description

  • Difference between Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes:
    • Derivational can change word category; inflectional cannot.
  • Example: “teacher’s” involves both derivational and inflectional suffixes.

Morphs and Allomorphs

  • Morphs: Actual forms used to realize morphemes.
  • Allomorphs: Variants of a morpheme (e.g., different plural forms in English).
  • Examples include “cats,” “dogs,” and “horses” showing different plural allomorphs.