Morphology: Words and Morphemes

• Morphology is the study of the structure of words
• It analyzes how words are formed and the relationship between words and their constituent morphemes

Morphemes

• Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language
• They can be free or bound
  • Free morphemes can stand alone as words (e.g., cat, run, blue)
  • Bound morphemes must be attached to other morphemes (e.g., -s, -ed, un-)
• Morphemes can be classified based on their function
  • Lexical morphemes carry the main meaning of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)
  • Grammatical morphemes specify relationships between words (prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, conjunctions)

Types of Morphology

• Inflectional morphology: Modifies a word to express grammatical categories such as tense, number, gender, and case without changing the word's core meaning or lexical category
  • Examples include adding -s to form plurals (cats) or -ed to form the past tense (walked)
• Derivational morphology: Creates new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to change the meaning or lexical category of the base word
  • Examples include adding -ness to create a noun (happiness) or un- to negate a word (unhappy)
• Compounding: Combines two or more free morphemes to create a new word
  • Examples include "sunflower," "blackboard," and "toothbrush"

Morphological Processes

• Affixation: Adding affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes) to a base word
  • Prefix: Added to the beginning of a word (e.g., un- in unhappy)
  • Suffix: Added to the end of a word (e.g., -ing in walking)
  • Infix: Inserted within a word (common in some languages but rare in English)
  • Circumfix: Added around a word (common in some languages but not in English)
• Reduplication: Repeating all or part of a word to indicate grammatical function
  • Total reduplication: Repeating the entire word (e.g., "bye-bye")
  • Partial reduplication: Repeating part of the word
• Alternation: Changing a sound within a word to indicate grammatical function
  • Examples include the change from "sing" to "sang" or "foot" to "feet"
• Suppletion: Using a completely different word form to indicate grammatical function
  • Examples include "go" becoming "went"

Morphological Analysis

• Involves breaking down words into their constituent morphemes to understand their structure and meaning
• Steps in morphological analysis:
  • Identify the base word
  • Identify any affixes
  • Determine the meaning and function of each morpheme
  • Understand how the morphemes combine to create the word's overall meaning
• Example: "unbreakable"
  • Base word: break
  • Prefix: un- (meaning "not")
  • Suffix: -able (meaning "capable of being")
  • Overall meaning: not capable of being broken

Morphophonology

• Studies the interaction between morphology and phonology
• Examines how the pronunciation of morphemes changes depending on the surrounding sounds
• Morphophonological rules describe these changes
  • Examples include the pluralization of nouns in English, where the pronunciation of the -s suffix changes depending on the preceding sound (e.g., cats vs. dogs)

Derivational vs. Inflectional Morphology

• Derivational morphology:
  • Creates new words with new meanings or lexical categories
  • Not always predictable in meaning
  • Can change the part of speech
  • Typically occurs closer to the root
• Inflectional morphology:
  • Modifies words to fit grammatical context
  • Does not change the core meaning or lexical category
  • Highly predictable and systematic
  • Occurs further from the root than derivational affixes

Allomorphs

• Allomorphs are variant forms of a morpheme
• The choice of allomorph often depends on the phonological environment
• Examples in English:
  • The plural suffix can be realized as /-s/, /-z/, or /-ɪz/ depending on the final sound of the noun
    • cats /kæts/
    • dogs /dɔɡz/
    • buses /bʌsɪz/
  • The indefinite article "a" vs. "an" depends on the following sound (a cat, an apple)

Word Formation Processes

• Besides affixation and compounding, other processes include:
  • Blending: Combining parts of two words (e.g., smog from smoke and fog)
  • Clipping: Shortening a word (e.g., exam from examination)
  • Acronymy: Forming a word from the initial letters of a phrase (e.g., NASA)
  • Back-formation: Creating a new word by removing a supposed affix (e.g., edit from editor)
  • Conversion: Changing a word's lexical category without adding affixes (e.g., "run" as a verb and a noun)

Theoretical Approaches to Morphology

• Morpheme-Based Morphology: Views words as being constructed from morphemes
  • Focuses on identifying and analyzing morphemes and their combinations
• Lexeme-Based Morphology: Focuses on the word as the basic unit
  • Treats different forms of a word as variations of a single lexeme
• Distributed Morphology: Asserts that morphology happens late in the derivation
  • Argues that morphemes are inserted into syntactic structures with phonological forms assigned later

Practical Applications of Morphology

• Language teaching: Understanding morphology helps learners decode and produce new words
• Natural language processing: Morphological analysis is crucial for machine translation, information retrieval, and text analysis
• Lexicography: Morphological information is essential for creating dictionaries and other language resources
• Linguistics research: Morphology provides insights into the structure and evolution of languages