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Morphology is the study of the structure of words; the component of grammar that includes
word formation, the study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words
are formed.
MORPHEMES
Morpheme: Smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function.
A single word may be composed of one or more morphemes:
One morpheme
boy
Two morphemes
boy + ish
Three morphemes
boy + ish + ness
Four morphemes
un + desire + able + ity
More than four
anti + dis + establish + ment + ari + an + ism
A morpheme may be represented by a single sound, such as the morpheme a meaning
without as in amoral.
A morphemethe minimal linguistic unitis thus an arbitrary union of a sound and a
meaning (or grammatical function) that cannot be further analyzed. It is often called a
linguistic sign.
Monomorphemic Word: A word that consists of one morpheme. A distinction is made
between monomorphemic words and complex words (A word made up of two or more
morphemes). As the name implies, monomorphemic words are composed of only a single
morpheme or meaningful unit. Examples include friar, sad, and deer: at least in modern
English, these words are unanalysable units, and if we understand them it must either be
because they are stored as meaningful units in our memory or because a given context in
which they appear makes their meaning obvious.
English has borrowed the Russian compound samovar, which consists of the Russian
morphemes sam [self] and varit [to cook]. This compound has entered English without any
morphological decomposition: samo and var are meaningless in English, and samovar is thus
a monomorphemic word. This shows that morphological rather than etymological criteria
should be used when defining complex words. The agentive morpheme er means one who
does in words like singer, worker, painter and lover and it also represents the comparative
morpheme, meaning more as in nicer, taller and prettier. The same sound may occur in
other words and not represent a morpheme at all, as in finger, water, father and monster.
Finger and monster are monomorphemic.
The decomposition of words into morphemes illustrates one of the fundamental
properties of human languagediscreteness. In all languages, sound units combine to
form morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, and words combine to form
larger unitsphrases and sentences. Discreteness is an important part of linguistic
creativity. We can combine morphemes in novel ways to create new words whose
meaning will be apparent to other speakers of the language.
Free Morphemes are morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words such as boy, open, man, tour, desire,
gentle.
Lexical Morphemes (Open class- Content words): Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are
the content words. These words denote concepts such as objects, actions, attributes,
and ideas. Content words are sometimes called the open class words because we can
add new words to these classes, such as Bollywood, blog, dis, and 24/7, pronounced
twenty-four seven.
Functional Morphemes (Closed Class- Grammatical Words): Other classes of words do not have
clear lexical meanings or obvious concepts associated with them, including
conjunctions such as and, or, and but; prepositions such as in and of; the articles the,
a/an, and pronouns such as it. These kinds of words are called function words
because they specify grammatical relations and have little or no semantic content.
Function words are sometimes called closed class words, because the closed classes
are unreceptive to new membership.
Brain treats content and function words differently. Some brain-damaged
patients and people with specific language impairments have greater difficulty in
using, understanding, or reading function words than they do with content words.
Some aphasics are unable to read function words like in or which, but can read
the lexical content words inn and witch. The two classes of words also seem to
function differently in slips of the tongue produced by normal individuals. For
example, a speaker may inadvertently switch words producing the journal of the
editor instead of the editor of the journal, but the switching or exchanging of
function words has not been observed. There is also evidence for this distinction
from language acquisition. In the early stages of development, children often
omit function words from their speech, as in for example, doggie barking. The
linguistic evidence suggests that content words and function words play different
roles in language. Content words bear the brunt of the meaning, whereas
function words connect the content words to the larger grammatical context.
Bound Morphemes are morphemes that cannot stand alone and are typically attached to
other morphemes. Prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circumfixes are bound morphemes.
Examples
She wait-s at home.
She wait-ed at home.
She is eat-ing the donut.
Mary has eat-en the donuts.
She ate the donut-s.
Disas hair is short.
Disa has short-er hair than Karin.
Disa has the short-est hair.
Derivational
Lexical function
May cause word class change
Some meaning change
Never required by rules of grammar
Precede inflectional morphemes in a word
Some productive, many nonproductive
believe
believe + able
un + believe + able
Root
Stem
Stem
Stem
Word
system
system + atic
un + system + atic
un + system + atic + al
un + system + atic + al + ly
Linguists sometimes use the word base to mean any root or stem to which an affix is
attached. In the preceding example, system, systematic, unsystematic, and unsystematical
are bases.
Bound Roots do not occur in isolation. They acquire meaning only in combination with other
morphemes.
A morpheme was defined as the basic element of meaning that cant be analyzed simpler
elements. Although it holds for most of the morphemes in a language, this definition has
presented problems for linguistic analysis for many years. Consider words like cranberry,
huckleberry and boysenberry. The berry part is no problem, but huckle and boysen occur only
with berry, as did cran until cranapple juice came on the market and other morphologically
complex words using cran followed. Lukewarm is another example. Luke occurs only in this
word.
Bound forms like huckle-, boysen-, and luke- require a redefinition of the concept of
morpheme. Some morphemes have no meaning in isolation but acquire meaning only in
combination with other specific morphemes. Thus the morpheme huckle when joined with
berry has the meaning of a special kind of berry that is small, round purplish blue; luke- when
combined with warm has the meaning somewhat.
Words of Latin origin such as receive, conceive, perceive, and deceive share a common
root, ceive; and the words remit, permit, commit, submit, transmit, and admit share the root
mit. For the original Latin speakers, the morphemes corresponding to ceive and mit had clear
meanings, but for modern English speakers, Latinate morphemes such as ceive and mit have
no independent meaning. Their meaning depends on the entire word in which they occur. A
similar class of words is composed of a prefix affixed to a bound root morpheme. Examples
are ungainly, but no *gainly; discern, but no *cern; nonplussed, but no *plussed; downhearted
but no *hearted; upholster, but no* holster; outlandish but no *landish; inept, but no *ept.
un- is connected to the adjective systematic, and not directly to system.*unsystem is not a
word. *Unsystem is not a possible word because there is no rule of English that allows un- to
be added to nouns.
The following tree shows that the inflectional agreement morpheme -s follows the derivational
morphemes -ize and re- in refinalizes:
The tree also shows that re applies to finalize, which is correct as *refinal is not a word, and
that the inflectional morpheme follows the derivational morpheme.
Morphological Description
In the sentence The childs wildness shocked the teachers, we can identify eleven
morphemes.
The
(Functional)
(Inflectional)
child
(Lexical)
-s
wild
(Inflectional)
the
(Functional)
teach
(Lexical)
-er
(Derivational)
-ness
(Lexical)
shock
(Derivational)
-ed
(Lexical)
-s
(Inflectional)
Exceptions
Suppletive Forms: A term used to refer to inflected morphemes in which regular rules do
not apply.
Irregular, or suppletive, forms are treated separately in the grammar.
The morphological process that forms plural from singular nouns does not apply to words like
child, man, foot, and mouse. These words are exceptions to the English inflectional rule of
plural formation. Similarly, verbs like go, sing, bring, run, and know are exceptions to the
inflectional rule for producing past tense verbs in English.
Comparative and superlative forms (good- better- best, bad, worse, worst) are also
exceptions.
When a verb is derived from a noun, even if it is pronounced the same as an irregular verb,
the regular rules apply to it. Thus ring, when used in the sense of encircle, is derived from the
noun ring, and as a verb it is regular. We say the police ringed the bank with armed men, not
*rang the bank with armed men.
When a noun is used in a compound in which its meaning is lost, such as flatfoot, meaning
cop, its plural follows the regular rule, so one says two flatfoots to refer to a pair of cops
slangily, not *two flatfeet.
Making compounds plural, however, is not always simply adding -s as in girlfriends. Thus for
many speakers the plural of mother-in-law is mothers-in-law, whereas the possessive form is
mother-in-laws; the plural of court-martial is courts-martial and the plural of attorney general
is attorneys general in a legal setting, but for most of the rest of us it is attorney generals.
[Z]
[s]
Allomorph
[z]
Environment
After [b], [d], [g], [v], [], [m], [n], [], [l], [r], [a], []
[z]
[z]
[s]
[z]
After
After
1. Insert a [] before the plural morpheme /z/ when a regular noun ends in a sibilant, giving
[z].
2. Change the plural morpheme /z/ to a voiceless [s] when preceded by a voiceless sound.
These rules will derive the phonetic formsthat is, the pronunciationsof plurals for all
regular nouns. Because the basic form of the plural is /z/, if no rule applies, then the
plural morpheme will be realized as [z].
Another allomorph of plural in English seems to be zero- morph. For example, the plural
form of sheep is sheep. Sheep+. When we look at man+ plural we have a vowel
change in the word [mnmn] as the morph that produces the irregular plural form
men.
Past tense morpheme also has allomorphs that result in different pronunciations.
[d]
[d] /ladd/
[d]
or /d/
[t]
Called [d]
[d]
/kld/
Talked [t]
/tkt/
Glided
as /d/ when the stem ends with the alveolar stops /t/
WORD FORMATION
A neologism (new word) is a newly coined term, word, or phrase that may be in the process
of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language.
Etymology: The study of the origin and history of a word is known as its etymology.
COINAGE
Coinage is the invention of totally new terms that then become part of the lexicon.
The most typical sources are invented trade names for commercial products that
become general terms (usually without capital letters) for any version of that product.
(Aspirin, nylon, vaseline, zipper, granola, kleenex, teflon, orlon, Dacron, band-aid, brillo, jell-o,
kodak and xerox).
Science has also added many words to English over the ages such as neutron, asteroid,
vaccine, genome and krypton. Also new to this millennium, dot- com, google (meaning to
search on the internet), e- mail, e- trade, e-commerce and bollywood.
Even new bound morphemes may enter the language. The prefix e-, as in e-commerce,
e-mail, and e-trade, meaning electronic, is barely two decades old, and most interestingly
has given rise to the prefix s- as in s-mail to contrast with e-mail. The suffix -gate, meaning
scandal, which was derived from the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, may now be suffixed
to a word to convey that meaning. (Irangate, Dianagate) A change currently under way is the
use of -peat to mean win a championship so many years in succession, as in threepeat and
fourpeat. Also so new that it hasnt made the dictionaries are words that take -zilla as a bound
suffix with the meaning huge or extreme, as in shopzilla, bridezilla, and the British band
Dogzilla, with its source being the world-famous Japanese movie monster Godzilla. The bound
prefix uber- of German origin meaning the best or the most allows new words to be
formed as in uber-cool.
EPONYMS
Eponyms are words that are coined from the name of a person or place.
Sandwich ( Named for the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who put his food between two slices
of bread so that he could eat while he gambled)
Robot (After the mechanical creatures in the Czech writer Karel Capeks play R.U.R., the initials standing for
Some eponyms are technical terms, based on the names of those who first discovered or
invented things, such as Fahrenheit (from the German, Gabriel Fahrenheit), volt (from the
Italian, Alessandro Volta) and watt (from the Scottish inventor, James Watt).
COMPOUNDING
Two or more words may be joined to form a new word. This combining process is technically
known as compounding. For example: bittersweet, headstrong, bookcase, textbook,
wallpaper, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn, wastebasket, waterbed, good-looking, fast-food,
full-time.
When the two words are in the same grammatical category, the compound will
also be in this category: noun + noun = noun, as in girlfriend, fighter- bomber,
paper clip, elevator-operator, landlord, mailman; adjective +
adjective=adjective, as in icy-cold, red-hot, worldly wise. . In English, the
rightmost word in a compound is the head of the compound. The head is the part
of a word or phrase that determines its broad meaning and grammatical
category. Thus, when the two words fall into different categories, the class of the
second or final word determines the grammatical category of the compound:
noun + adjective = adjective, as in headstrong; verb + noun = noun, as in
pickpocket. On the other hand, compounds formed with a preposition are in the
category of the nonprepositional part of the compound, such as (to) overtake or
(the) sundown.
REDUPLICATION
Reduplication is a morphological process that repeats or copies all or part of a word to
produce a new word. English uses some kinds of reduplication, mostly for informal expressive
vocabulary. For example; wishy- washy, teensy- weensy, hurly- burly, hokey-pokey, razzledazzle, super-duper, boogie-woogie, teenie-weenie, walkie-talkie, wingding, bye-bye, zigzag,
criss-cross, ding-dong, chit-chat, Bing bang
Reduplication is also used in some languages as an inflectional process, e.g. , Samoan
manao/ mananao, he wishes/ they wish
BORROWING
Borrowing occurs when one language adds a word or morpheme from another language to
its own lexion. Throughout its history, the English language has adopted a vast number of
words from other languages, including croissant (French), dope (Dutch), lilac (Persian), piano
(Italian), pretzel (German), sofa (Arabic), tattoo (Tahitian), tycoon (Japanese), yogurt (Turkish),
ensemble (French), feast (French) and zebra (Bantu).
Larger units than words may be borrowed. For example mnage trois meaning a three-way
romance, is borrowed from French.
When an expression is borrowed and then translated into the borrowing language it is called a
loan translation or calque such as worldview from German Weltanschauung. It goes without
saying from French il va sans dire is a loan translation from French. The English word
superman is thought to be a loan-translation of the German Ubermensch, and the term loanword itself is believed to have come from the German Lehnwort. The English expression
moment of truth is believed to be a calque from the Spanish phrase el momento de la verdad.
A language may borrow a word directly or indirectly. A direct borrowing means that the
borrowed item is a native word in the language from which it is borrowed. For example, feast
was borrowed directly from French, along with a host of terms as a result of the Norman
Conquest. By contrast, the word algebra was borrowed from Spanish, which in turn had
borrowed it from Arabic. Thus algebra was indirectly borrowed from Arabic, with Spanish as an
intermediary.
The frequently used function words and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, you, on, that, and is
are all native to English.
Language may borrow not only words and phrases but other linguistic units as well. English
borrowed the phonemes /v/ and // from French. The bound morpheme suffixes ible / able
were also borrowed from French arriving in English by hitchhiking on French words such as
incredible but soon attaching themselves to native words such as drinkable.
Government, crown, prince, estate, parliament, nation, jury, judge, crime, sue, attorney, saint,
miracle, charity, court, lechery, virgin, value, pray, mercy, religion, chapel, royal, money,
society, beef, pork, mutton, boil, fry, stew, roast, coupe, and caviar are all borrowed from
French.
Drama, comedy, tragedy, scene, botany, physics, zoology and atomic are borrowed from
Greek.
Bonus, scientific, exit, alumnus, quorum, describe and numerous other words are borrowed
from Latin.
The pronouns they, their, and them are loan words from Old Norse, the predecessor of
modern Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Bin, flannel, clan, slogan, and whisky are all words
of Celtic origin.
Buoy, freight, leak, pump, and yacht are borrowed from Dutch. Quartz, cobalt, and sauerkraut
are borrowed from German. Opera, piano, virtuoso, balcony, influenza and mezzanine are
borrowed from Italian. Many scientific words were borrowed indirectly from Arabic such as
alcohol, algebra, cipher, and zero. Barbecue, cockroach, and ranch are borrowed from
Spanish. Hickory, chipmunk, opossum, and squash are borrowed from Native American
languages.
Blending
Blending: A process that creates a word from non- morphemic parts of two existing words.
Smog (smoke+ fog)
Electrocute (electricity + execute)
Bit (binary+ digit)
Emoticon (emote + icon)
Brunch (breakfast+ lunch)
Faction (fact + fiction)
Motel (motor+ hotel)
Fanzine (fan + magazine)
Telecast (television+ broadcast)
Flare (flame + glare)
Telex (teleprinter+ exchange)
Glimmer (gleam + shimmer)
Modem (modulator+ demodulator)
Globish (global + English)
Telethon (television+ marathon)
Guitarthritis (guitar + arthritis)
Infotainment (information+ entertainment)
Moped (motor + pedal)
Simulcast (simultaneous+ broadcast)
Palimony (pal + alimony)
Agitprop (agitation + propaganda)
Pulsar (pulse + quasar)
Alcopop (alcohol + pop)
Sitcom (situation + comedy)
Bash (bat + mash)
Slanguage (slang + language)
Biopic (biography + picture)
Smash (smack + mash)
Backformation is the creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word, or by
removing what is mistakenly considered an affix.
peddle ( from peddler), donate (from donation), pea (from Pease), act (from action),
exempt( from exemption), revise (from revision), resurrect (from resurrection), preempt (from
preemption), televise (from television), enthuse (from enthusiasm), liaise (from liaison),
babysit (from babysitter), edit (from editor), hawk (from hawker), stoke (from stoker), swindle
(from swindler), script (from sculptor), burgle ( from burglar), work (from worker),emote ( from
emotion), opt (from option) etc.
CONVERSION
A change in the function of a word, as for example when a noun comes to be used as a
verb (without any reduction), is generally known as conversion. Other labels for this very
common process are category change and functional shift. A number of nouns such as
bottle, butter, chair, total and vacation have come to be used, through conversion, as verbs:
We bottled the home-brew last night. Have you buttered the toast? Someone has to chair the
meeting. Theyre vacationing in Florida.
The conversion can involve verbs becoming nouns, with guess, must and spy as the
sources of a guess, a must and a spy. Phrasal verbs (to print out, to take over) also become
nouns (a printout, a takeover). One complex verb combination (want to be) has become a new
noun, as in He isnt in the group, and hes just a wannabe.Verbs (see through, stand up) also
become adjectives, as in see-through material or a stand-up comedian. Or adjectives, as in a
dirty floor, an empty room, some crazy ideas and those nasty people, can become the verbs
to dirty and to empty or the nouns a crazy and the nasty.
Some compound nouns have assumed adjectival or verbal functions, exemplified by the
ball park appearing in a ball-park figure or asking someone to ball-park an estimate of the
cost. Other nouns of this type are carpool, mastermind, microwave and quarterback, which
are all regularly used as verbs. Other forms, such as up and down, can also become verbs, as
in theyre going to up the price of oil or we downed a few beers at the Chimes.
DERIVATION
Derivation is the process of forming a new word by adding affixes (suffixes, prefixes,
circumfixes and infixes).
Examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes:
Derivation stands in contrast to the process of inflection, which uses another kind of affix in
order to form grammatical variants of the same word, as with determine/determines/determine-ing/determin-ed. Generally speaking, inflection applies to all members of a part
of speech (e.g., every English verb has a past-tense form) thus inflection is productive, while
derivation applies only to some members of a part of speech (e.g., suffix -ity can be used with
the adjectives modern and dense, but not with open or strong).
MULTIPLE PROCESSES
It is possible to trace the operation of more than one process at work in the creation of
a particular word. For example, the term deli seems to have become a common American
English expression via a process of first borrowing delicatessen (from German) and then
clipping that borrowed form.
If someone says that problems with the project have snowballed, the final word can be
analyzed as an example of compounding in which snow and ball were combined to form the
noun snowball, which was then turned into a verb through conversion. Forms that begin as
acronyms can also go through other processes, as in the use of lase as a verb, the result of
backformation from laser. In the expression waspish attitudes, the acronym WASP (white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant) has lost its capital letters and gained a suffix (-ish) in the derivation
process.
An acronym that never seems to have had capital letters comes from young urban
professional, plus the ie suffix, to produce the word yuppie. The formation of this new word,
however, was helped by a quite different process, known simply as analogy, whereby new
words are formed to be similar in some way to existing words. Yuppie was made possible as a
new word by analogy with the earlier word hippie and another short-lived analogy yippie. The
word yippie also had an acronym basis (youth international party) and was used for some
students in the USA who were protesting against the war in Vietnam.