Introduction to linguistic (6)

Introduction to Linguistic (6)
Morphology

Morpheme (1)
• Morphology is a sub-discipline of linguistics
that studies word structure. While words are
generally accepted as being the smallest units
of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all)
languages, words can be related to other
words by rules.
• Morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or
grammatical function.

Morpheme (2)
• We would say that the word reopened in the
sentence The police reopened the investigation
consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of
meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is
re- (meaning again), and a minimal grammatical
function is -ed (indicating past tense).
• The word tourists also contains three morphemes.
There is one minimal unit of meaning, tour, another
minimal unit of meaning -ist (meaning ‘person who
does something’), and a minimal unit of
grammatical function -s (indicating plural).

Free and Bound Morphemes (1)
• From those two examples, we can make a
broad distinction between two types of
morphemes.
• These are free morphemes, that is,
morphemes which can stand by themselves as
single words, e.g. open and tour.
• There are also bound morphemes, that is,
those which cannot normally stand alone, but
which are typically attached to another form,
e.g. re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

• The free morphemes can be generally
considered as the set of separate English
word-forms. When they are used with bound
morphemes, the basic word-form involved is
technically known as the stem.
• For example: undressed; un- (bound, prefix),
dress (free, stem), -ed (bound, suffix),
carelessness; care (free, stem), -less (bound,
suffix), -ness (bound, suffix).

• It should be noted that there are a number of English
words in which the element which seems to be the
‘stem’ is not, in fact, a free morpheme.
• In words like receive, reduce, repeat we can recognize
the bound morpheme re-, but the elements -ceive,
-duce, and -peat are clearly not free morphemes.
• It may help to work with a simple distinction between
forms like -ceive and -duce as ‘bound stems’ and
forms like dress and care as ‘free stems’.

Free Morpheme (1)
• What we have described as free morphemes
fall into two categories.
• The first category is that set of ordinary
nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of
as the words which carry the content of
messages we convey.
• These free morphemes are called lexical
morphemes and some examples are: boy,
man, house, sad, long, yellow, sincere, open,
look, follow, break.

Free Morpheme (2)
• The other group of free morphemes are called
functional morphemes.
• Examples are: and, but, when, because, on,
near, above, in, the, that, it. This set consists
largely of the language such as conjunctions,
prepositions, articles and pronouns.

Bound Morphemes (1)
• The set of affixes which fall into the ‘bound’
category can also be divided into two types.
• The first is derivational morphemes. These are
used to make new words in the language and
are often used to make words of a different
grammatical category from the stem.
• The examples are: -ness changes the adjective
good to the noun goodness, -ish in foolish, -ly
in badly, and -ment in payment.

Bound Morphemes (2)
• The second set of bound morphemes contains what are
called inflectional morphemes. Note that, in English, all
inflectional morphemes are suffixes.
• These are not used to produce new words in the English
language, but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical
function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to
show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not,
and if it is a comparative or possessive form.
• Examples are: the use of -ed to make jump into the past
tense form jumped, and the use of –s to make the word boy
into the plural boys, the -ing, -s, -er, -est and -’s inflections in
the phrases Myrna is singing, she sings, she is smallest, and
Myrna’s horse.

Problems in Morphological Description (1)
• What is the inflectional morpheme which
makes sheep the plural of sheep, or men the
plural of man? Which makes went the past
tense of go? And yet another questions
concerns the derivation of an adjective like
legal. If –al is the derivational suffix, as it is in
forms like institutional, then what is the stem?

• These problematic issues, and many others
which arise in the analysis of different
language, have not been fully resolved by
linguists.
• The relationship between law and legal is a
reflection of the historical influence of other
languages on English word-forms. The modern
form law is a result of a borrowing into Old
English from Old Norse, over 1,000 years ago.

• The modern form legal is a borrowing from
the Latin form legalis (of the law).
Consequently, there is no derivational
relationship between the two forms in English,
nor between the noun mouth (an Old English
form) and the adjective oral (a Latin
borrowing).

• In morpheme-based morphology, a null
morpheme is a morpheme that is realized by
a phonologically null affix (an empty string of
phonological segments). In simpler terms, a
null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It's also
called zero morpheme; the process of adding
a null morpheme is called null affixation, null
derivation or zero derivation.

• There are some cases in English where a null morpheme
indicates plurality in nouns that take on irregular plurals.
• sheep = sheep + -Ø = ROOT ("sheep") + SINGULAR
• sheep = sheep + -Ø = ROOT ("sheep") + PLURAL
• Also, a null morpheme marks the present tense of verbs
in all forms but the third person singular:
• (I) run = run + -Ø = ROOT ("run") + PRESENT: Non-3rdSING
• (He) runs = run + -s = ROOT ("run") + PRESENT: 3rd-SING

Introduction to linguistic (6)

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