Morphology

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Morphology

• Study of the internal structure of words

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• Morpheme smallest linguistic unit with a meaning
  or grammatical function
• Words are composed of morphemes
• (1) Those sing-er-s answer-ed un-kind-ly.

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• (1) The governor is anti-Blotsky.
• (2) The dry cleaner told me theyre going to have
  to re-mercolize my coat.
• (3) The lawn became unfluffled because of the
  rain.
• (4) There are three lorks sitting on my porch.

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• (1) The governor is Blotsky-anti.
• (2) The dry cleaner told me theyre going to have
  to merco-re-lize my coat.
• (3) The lawn became unedfluffle because of the
  rain.
• (4) There are three slork sitting on my porch.

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Classification of morphemes

• Monomorphemic containing only one morpheme
• Polymorphemic containing two or more morphemes
• Free morpheme morpheme that can be used by
  itself as a word. Every word has at least one
  free morpheme.
• Laptop, teaspoon, unhappy, window
• Bound morpheme morpheme that cannot stand alone
• Unhappy, cranberry, cups

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Derivational and inflectional morphemes

• derivational morphemes derive a new word by
  changing meaning or lexical category
• option al ? optional, un happy ? unhappy
• inflectional morphemes function morphemes which
  serve a purely grammatical function
• cup s ? cups, small est ? smallest

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Stems and Affixes

• Stem (root, base)
• a free morpheme in a morphologically complex
  word
• usually bear the major meaning of the word
• Affixes
• attach to free morphemes or to other affixes
• usually add extra information to meaning of the
  word
• three types prefixes, suffixes, infixes
• attach to specific lexical categories

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Inflectional affixes of English

• English has 8 inflectional affixes, all suffixes

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Inflectional Affixes of English

• Affix Function
• -s 3rd pers. Sing. Pres.
• -ed past tense
• -ing progressive aspect
• -en, -ed past participle
• -s plural (nouns)
• -s possessive
• -er comparative
• -est superlative

• Attaches to Example
• verbs He talks.
• verbs He talked.
• verbs He is talking.
• verbs He had talked.
• nouns The cats are sleeping.
• nouns The cats food is ready.
• adj., adv. Joe is older than Sue.
• adj., adv. John is the oldest son.

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