Introduction to Linguistics

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Introduction to Linguistics

• Ms. Suha Jawabreh
• Lecture 14

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The Components of Language

• 1. Sounds Phonetics and Phonology
• 2. Words Morphology
• 3. Phrases and sentences- Syntax
• 4. Meaning- Semantics and Pragmatics

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What is Morphology?

• Morphology, in linguistics, is the study of the
  forms and the structure of words.
• - Word-forms may consist of elements.
• -Example
• tour-ist-s tourists
• re-open-ed reopened
• - We call these elements morphemes .

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What is a morpheme?

• A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning or
  grammatical function.

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• Decide how many morphemes the following words
  have.
• 1. walking
• 2. Faithfulness
• 3. Disrespectful
• 4. Incomplete
• 5. Taken
• 6. Teachers
• 7. Helplessly
• 8.Beautiful
• 9. Faster
• 10 unhappiest

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Types of morphemes

• There are two types of morphemes
• 1. Free morphemes morphemes which can stand by
  themselves as single words.
• E.g. Open , tour
• 2. Bound morphemes morphemes what can NOT stand
  alone. (all affixes are bound morphemes in
  English)
• E.g. ist , -ful, un-

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What is the stem?

• -The stem is the basic word-form.
• -Identify the stems in the question in the
  previous slide.
• - Are all stems free morphemes?

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Types of free morphemes

• 1. Lexical morphemes.
• They are words which carry content of messages
  we convey.
• E.g. Look, follow, yellow, break, house boy.
• - We can add new lexical morphemes to the
  language easily, so they are treated as open
  class of words.

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• 2. Functional morphemes.
• They consist of conjunctions, prepositions,
  articles and pronouns.
• E.g. But, when, because, on, a, near, she, they.
• - We almost never add new functional morphemes to
  the language they are describes as a closed
  class of words.

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Types of bound morphemes

• 1. Derivational morphemes.
• -They are used to make new words in the language
  and often change the grammatical category of the
  stem.
• Example
• care (n.) less careless (adj.)
• good (adj.)ness goodness (n.)
• -less and ness are derivational morphemes.

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• 2. Inflectional morphemes.
• -They are NOT used to produce new words in
  English, but rather to indicate aspects of
  grammatical function of a word.
• - Inflectional morphemes are used to show if the
  word is
• 1. plural or singular
• 2. past tense or not
• 3. a comparative or possessive form

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• - All inflectional morphemes in English are
  suffixes.
• - English has eight inflectional morphemes
• Noun s , -s
• Verb -s, -ing, -ed,-en
• Adjective -est , -er

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• Study questions on page 82 in the textbook.