Morphology: Word Structure and Morphemes

Morphology

• Morphology refers to the area of grammar focused on the structure and formation of words.
• It originates from the Greek word "morphē," meaning "form," combined with "-logy," signifying "a subject of study."

Morphemes

• Words are made up of one or more morphemes.
• Morphemes represent the smallest meaningful linguistic unit.
• They are strings of sounds carrying meaning or functional information.
• The "-s" in English indicates a plural marker and is considered a morpheme.

Plural Formation

• English forms plural nouns by adding "-s" to a singular noun.
• Plural nouns contain two morphemes, the singular noun and the plural marker.
• Combining morphemes follows word-formation rules.

Morpheme Types

• Free morphemes can stand alone, examples include bird, toast, cycle and happy.
• Bound morphemes need to attach to other morphemes, examples include -er, re-, -ness, and -s.
• Simple words are words containing only one morpheme.
• Complex words contain more than one morpheme.

Roots and Affixes

• Bound morphemes are also called affixes, like prefixes and suffixes.
• Affixes attach to roots in word-formation rules.
• In "birds," the root is "bird" while the affix is "-s".
• In "recycle," the affix is "re-" and the root is "cycle".
• Prefixes precede a root, while suffixes follow the root.

Infixes

• Infixes are affixes inserted within a word's root, not commonly found in English.
• Bontoc, a language in the Philippines, uses infixes.
• "Fikas" means "strong," while "fumikas" means "to be strong."

Allomorphy

• The choice between "a" or "an" depends on pronunciation rather than spelling.
• Allomorphs refer to the variant pronunciations of a morpheme.
• The plural morpheme "-s" varies in pronunciation, such as [s] in "cats", [z] in "dogs", and [ɪz] in "judges".

Derivation

• Derivation involves an affixational process that creates a word with a distinct meaning or category from its root.
• In "teacher", adding the affix -er, changes the verb "teach" to the noun "teacher".
• Attaching a derivational morpheme to a word can change its category and meaning.

Lexical Categories (Parts of Speech)

• Specific affixes are restricted to certain word types like nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs.
• Nouns represent people, places, and things, such as dog, cat, bike, person, planet, and ball.
• Verbs indicate actions, sensations, or states, like run, kick, scratch, scream, bite, walk, be, and have.
• Adjectives represent properties or qualities, such as happy, sad, angry, funny, clear, fuzzy, and ugly.
• Prepositions denote spatial relationships, including to, for, of, with, out, in, above, and below.
• Adverbs detail properties/qualities of verbs and adjectives, covering often, seldom, rarely, purely, and frequently.

Inflection

• A process using affixes to change a word's form to indicate grammatical details.
• "Wugs" signals plural from the base word "wug".
• "Smaller" suggests a comparative degree from "small".
• Only eight inflectional affixes are present in the English language, and they’re all suffixes.
• Plural -s indicates multiple items, ex: the books.
• Possessive -'s signifies ownership, ex: John's book.
• Third-person singular -s is for verbs in the present, ex: He reads well.
• Progressive -ing notes continuous action, ex: He is working.
• Past tense -ed marks verbs in the past, ex: He worked.
• Past participle -en/-ed is for perfect tenses, like He has eaten.
• Comparative -er makes adjectives comparative, ex: the smaller one.
• Superlative -est makes adjectives superlative, ex: the smallest one.

Inflection vs. Derivation

• Derivation changes word category and meaning, inflection does not.
• Derivation doesn't add grammatical information like tense or number.
• Both derivation and inflection can occur in the same word (kingdoms, replays).

Syntax

• Syntax is the linguistic study of sentence structure.
• It governs rules for sentence and phrase construction.
• Every language has a specific word order such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) in English and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) in Nepali.

Phrases

• Syntax combines words into phrases, units larger than individual words but smaller than full sentences like "more intelligent" and "green eggs and ham".

Generative Grammar

• Constituent Analysis is an early method, breaking down language into its smallest parts.
• It faces challenges in accurately dissecting complex sentences and word orders.

Rewrite Rules

• Rewrite Rules are the set of guidelines used to create sentences.
• "S -> NP VP" means a sentence includes a noun and verb phrase.
• "VP -> V NP" describes a verb phrase with a verb and noun phrase.
• "NP -> Art N" means a noun phrase includes an article/noun combination.

Transformational Rules

• Productive rules used to create different types of sentences.
• Transformational rules can change "The stream carries the boat" to "The stream carried the boat", "The stream is carrying the boat", or "Is the stream carrying the boat?".