Morphology: Understanding Word Structure

Morphology

• Morphology is the study of word structure, including how words are built from smaller parts and how languages indicate grammatical relationships.
• A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit with meaning or grammatical function.
• Morphemes can be free, meaning they can stand alone as words (e.g., "boy", "in"), or bound, meaning they must be attached to other morphemes (e.g., "-ish", "-ness").
• Bound morphemes are also called affixes, which can be prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, or roots.
• Prefixes are attached to the beginning of a word (e.g., "un-", "bi-").
• Suffixes are attached to the end of a word (e.g., "-er", "-ing").
• Infixes are inserted within a word (e.g., Tagalog).
• Circumfixes are attached to both the beginning and end of a word (e.g., German, Chickasaw).
• Root morphemes are the base of a word and provide its core meaning (e.g., "deceive", "lukewarm").
• Derivational morphemes change the meaning or grammatical class of a word (e.g., “un-” in “unhappy” changes the meaning of “happy”).
• Inflectional morphemes mark grammatical distinctions like tense, number, and case (e.g., "-ing" in "walking" indicates present participle).
• Back-formation is the creation of a new word by removing an affix (e.g., "donate" from "donation") or a mistakenly perceived affix (e.g., "edit" from "editor").
• Compounds are words formed from two or more independent words (e.g., "blackboard", "firefighter").
• The head of a compound is the rightmost word, which determines its meaning and grammatical category.
• Content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are called open class words because new words can be added to these categories.
• Function words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles) are called closed class words because new words are rarely added.

Etymology

• Etymology is the study of the history of words.
• The average English speaker knows about 20,000-40,000 words.
• More English words begin with the letter "s" than any other letter.

Mental Lexicon

• Words are stored in our mental lexicon, where we associate sounds with their meaning.
• Some brain-damaged patients and individuals with specific language impairments may have difficulty with function words compared to content words.