Hello everyone, welcome--thanks for joining us. Today we'll be discussing the concept of morphology, or the study or forms in linguistics. More specifically, morphology is the study of the internal structure of words in a language. So this is part 1 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--difference 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 2 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 2 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 conclude that "category" has just 1 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 1 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 is likely more than 1 morpheme. If the answer is no, there's probably just 1 morpheme. Let's take another word. How about "categorize". Now this word has 2 morphemes. We've already determined that "category" is a word, but it's also just 1 morpheme, but in addition we have this "-ize" suffix, and that suffix is meaningful because it helps to form a verb from a noun, so "categorize" has 2 morphemes. Let's take another word. How about "categorized". Now "categorized" is 1 word but it has 3 morphemes. So we have "category", plus the "-ize" 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 "-ed", 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, you 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. Take as much time as you need to try to do it, but, again, try to figure out how morphemes are present in these words. Ok, let's go over each of these words and see how you did. Let's take this first word: "overestimating". It's 1 word, but it has 3 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". So all of these elements are meaningful: "over-", "estimate", and "-ing". As a result, "overestimating" has 3 morphemes. Let's take the next word: "keyboard". "Keyboard" uses a slightly different word formation process, but it has 2 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 2 morphemes. What about "cranberry"? "Cranberry" is a bit of a weird word because it has just 1 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 1 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?" 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 1 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: "antidisestablishmentarianism". Now, this is a very long and perhaps intimidating word; it's about as exotic as English gets in terms of the number of morphemes that it can pile into one word, but it has 6 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 6 morphemes. Okay, 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 "free morphemes". "Free morphemes" are those that can stand alone as individual words in a language, so words like "cat", "vital" and "laugh"--they are all 1 morpheme, and, of course, they are all individual words. They can stand alone as individual words in English. So there's 2 types of free morphemes. There are "lexical morphemes" and "functional morphemes". Lexical morphemes are free morphemes that carry the content, the meaning of the messages we say. So they're things like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs--they're pretty easy to define, and they are 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 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, conjunctions, 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 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 they're difficult to unseat, so, you know, 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 prefixes and suffixes--those are 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 2 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 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 "-ful", which are suffixes, they do some interesting things that tell us 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 it 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 can make a noun from a verb, like if we take word "teach"--or the morpheme "teach--and we add "-er" to the end of it, now we've got "teacher", which is a 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 or what's going on inside the word (kind of). In fact, there are really only just 8--just 8!--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 3rd 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 we 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 grammar-like. And then the last of these is the superlative--the "-est", such as in the word "coldest". So there's just 8 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 3 we'll talk about how to do morphological analysis. Until then, thanks so much for tuning in, and have a great day!