Words appear to be single forms but they contain a large number of word-like elements.
MORPHOLOGY investigates word forms in language, and the elements that they consist of. The
Study of the internal structure of words.
English word forms such as (talks, talked, talking consist of one element talk and the others –s –er –Ed
–ing are described as morphemes)
MORPHEME
Morphological unit that cannot be further decomposed or divided. A minimal unit of meaning or
grammatical function.
Bound morpheme: affixes
Forms/morphemes that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another
form/morpheme to receive meaning. (Un- -ness re- -ist –ed –s.)
They are described as affixes (prefixes front of base & suffixes end of base)
Free morphemes:
Morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, (new & tour) they can be identified as
English word forms such as nouns, verbs, adjectives.
When free morphemes are used with bound morphemes attached, they get called stems.
In words like (reduce, repeat, receive) bound morphemes are at the beginning (re) but (ceive, duce, peat) are
not separate word forms in English hence cannot be free morphemes, they are described as bound stems. (anti is
free)
Free morphemes fall into 2 categories:
Lexical morphemes:
That set of ordinary nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (house, break, long, never) that we think of as
words carrying the “content” of the message.
Lexical morphemes are treated as an “open” class of words since new ones can easily be added to a
language.
Functional morphemes
They are articles, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns (a, the, and, because, on, it, me) we can almost
never add new functional morphemes to a language so they are described as a “closed” class of words.
Affixes that make up bound morphemes are divided into 2 types:
Derivational morphemes:
Used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. They change the part of
speech of a word.
EX: the addition of the derivational morpheme –ment change encourage from a verb to a noun, encouragement.
The noun class becomes verb when we add the derivational morpheme –ify.
Inflectional morphemes: inflections
Used to indicate the grammatical function of a word, to show if a word is plural or singular, past tense
or not, comparative or possessive form. An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical
category of a word (Old & older are both adjectives, and –er inflection create a different version of the
adjective)
English only has 8 inflectional morphemes, all suffixes:
Attached to nouns:
Possessive (-‘s)
Plural (-s)
Attached to verbs:
3rd person singular present tense (-s)
Past tense (-ed)
Past participle (-en)
Present participle (-ing)
Attached to adjectives:
Comparative (-er)
Superlative (-est)
Wherever the derivational suffix and inflectional suffix are used together (both at the end), they are used
in this order, first the derivational –er is attached to teach, then the inflectional –s is added to produce
plural teachers.
The teacher’s wildness shocked the girls’ parents:
ALLOMORPHS
A realization of the same morpheme, the plural morpheme is realized differently in each word, we
have it /s/ in flats, /z/ in blogs, as /Iz/ in houses, and as zero morphemes in fish.
Morphs are the forms used to realize morphemes. Here in the case of plural, we have at least 3
forms /s/ /z/ /Iz/ used to realize the inflectional morpheme “plural”.
