Morphology

Morphology

=the analysis of the structure of words

What is a word?

• We can’t define it properly (greenhouse, put off, kick the bucket, happy-happier?)

• If we want to be precise, don’t use a word “word”, use morpheme

Morpheme

• The morpheme is the smallest mental representation that convey meaning

• It is connection of sounds and the thing that it represents (apple)

• Speakers must memorize each morpheme

• Morpheme is made of phonemes, not phones of allophones

• Words like "unhappy" which consist of more than one piece (morpheme) are called

morphologically complex

we know three things about every morpheme:

1. its meaning

2. its form (the sounds that make it up)

3. a rule of combination (put it before/after/inside the stem)

Two types of morphemes:

1. Free morphemes =morphemes can stand by themselves as single words, for example, open and tour

2. bound morphemes= cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s.

• In words such as receive, reduce and repeat, we can identify the bound morpheme re- at the beginning, but the elements -ceive, -duce and -peat are not separate word forms and hence cannot be free morphemes. These types of forms are sometimes described as “bound stems” to keep them distinct from “free stems” such as dress and care

Two types of bound morphemes:

derivational morpheme= a bound morpheme such as -ish often, not every time used to make new words or words of a different grammatical category (e.g. boyish) - mislead

inflectional morphemes= are not used to produce new words in the 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. They never change a grammatical category of a word

English has only eight of them:

Noun + -’s, -s

Verb + -s, -ing, -ed, -en

Adjective + -er, -est

Circumfix (the new+est)

Infix (abso-freaking-lute, ob-telefon-vá-ovat)

Homonyms = same form for different meaning (light-not heavy/light – not dark, match, train)

Two types of free morphenes:

Content(lexical) words Functional words

Nouns Pronouns

Verbs Conjunctions

Adjectives Auxiliaries

Problems in morphological description

Relationship between law and legal is reflection of the historical influence of different languages on English word forms – law is from old English (lagu), legal is from Latin (legalis) -> the same with mouth and oral

Morphs

• Morphs = actual forms used to realize morphemes

• Cats – consist of two morphs (cat + -s)

Allomorphs

= one of a closely related set of morphs

• Plural has different forms, it can be -s or -es => these two are allomorphs of “plural” in English

• The same “meaning”, but has different realisation, complementary distribution

• Plural can be irregural (“man + plural,” we have a vowel change in the word (æ→ɛ))