Linguistics: Morphology and Lexical Categories

Morphology

• Morphology is a component of mental grammar focusing on word types and formation from smaller meaningful units.
• It's a subfield of linguistics that examines the internal structure of words.
• It analyzes how meaningful language pieces combine to create words, affecting their meaning or grammatical function.
• Examples include: "wind," "unwind," "rewind," "winding," "windy," and word combinations like "re-unite."

What Are Words?

• Words differ in form (spoken sound) and meaning.
• Words must share the same form and meaning to be considered the same word.
• Examples to illustrate the difference: "cat" vs. "dog," "cat" vs. "catalog," "kid" vs. "kidney".

Lexical Categories

• Words belong to lexical categories (classes).
• Categories differ in how new words are built from existing words.
• Examples of open categories: nouns, verbs, and adjectives; they can accept additional words.
• Examples of closed categories: pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions; generally less open to new words.

Derivation

• Derivation creates new words from existing ones, often changing their meaning or category.
• Example, converting "cat" (noun) to "catty" (adjective).

Derivational Affixes

• It's a process of creating new words by modifying or adding to existing words.
• Adding prefixes or suffixes often changes the base word's meaning.
• Ex: "play" (verb) to "playable" (adjective)

Inflectional Affixes

• Inflection alters the grammatical form of words without changing their basic lexical category.
• Examples: adding "-s" to make a word plural with no change in lexical category (like "cat" and "cats").
• It affects grammatical function but doesn't change part of speech

Morphemes

• Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language with phonological form and grammatical function.
• Words can be divided into root and affixes.
• Root is the pure form of a word, and stem is the root plus affixes.
• Prefixes precede the root, whereas suffixes follow it.
• Affixes can be categorized into inflectional or derivational .

Classification of Elements

• Simple words consist of one morpheme.
• Affixes are bound morphemes (meaningful parts that connect or modify other word parts) which cannot stand independently.
• Morphemes can be free (stand alone) or bound (must attach to other morphemes).

Content & Function Morphemes

• Content morphemes carry concrete meaning and refer to real-world concepts.
• Function morphemes express grammatical relations and are not associated with specific real-world ideas, like tense or aspect.

Types of Languages

• Analytic languages typically lack affixes and use free morphemes.
• Synthetic languages frequently comprise bound morphemes, which can alter meaning and grammatical function, modifying the base word.
• In agglutinative languages, morphemes are attached to words relatively loosely, with clear boundaries.
• Fusional languages have merged morphemes creating a less obvious boundary.
• Polysynthetic languages tend to combine multiple components to build complex words.

Hierarchical Structure of Words

• The internal structure of words can be represented as a tree diagram showcasing the hierarchical relationships of word parts and steps in their formation.

Exercises

• Exercises are provided to practice identifying and classifying morphemes in given words and phrases.