Morphology Ch 3 PDF

Ch3: A word and its parts: roots, affixes and their shapes 3.1 Taking words apart  In this chapter, we will focus on the smaller parts of word, generally called morphemes.  The area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and with relationships between words involving the mo...

Ch3: A word and its parts: roots, affixes and their shapes 3.1 Taking words apart  In this chapter, we will focus on the smaller parts of word, generally called morphemes.  The area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and with relationships between words involving the morphemes that compose them is called morphology. 3.1 Taking words apart Morphology has come from the Greek word ‘morphe’ means ‘shape’ or ‘structure.’ Morphemes are considered as the minimal units of morphology. There are words which are lexical items and there are words which are not. Words that are not lexical items must be complex, which means that they are composed of two or more morphemes. But words that are lexical items can also be complex. In other words, words that are lexical items do not have to be mono- morphemic (consisting of just one morpheme). Besides, there are lexical items that are so complex ( i.e. they extend over more than one word), namely idioms. Two characteristics of morphemes: To allow the meanings of some complex words to be predictable, morphemes: 1. must be identified from one word to another. 2. contribute to the meaning of the whole word. The two characteristics of morpheme show that morphemes are not merely the smallest units of grammatical structure, but also the smallest meaningful units. e.g., words like helpfulness, which is divisible into the morphemes help, -ful (identifiable also in cheerful and doleful, for example) and -ness (identifiable also in happiness and sadness). The meaning of helpfulness, sadness, and cheerful is entirely determined by the meanings of the morphemes that they contain  In the face of such examples, it is important to remember that there is no necessary or logical connection between characteristics 1 and 2. Thus, it is risky to tie the identification of morphemes too closely to their meaning. Morphemes vary in length. Although morphemes are the parts out of which words are composed, they do not have to be of any particular length. For example, catamaran, knickerbocker consist of just one morpheme. On the other hand, a single-syllable word, such as tenths, may contain as many as three morphemes (ten, -th, -s). This shows that the morphological structure of words is largely independent of their phonological structure (their division into sounds, syllables and rhythmic units).  This reflects a striking difference between human speech and all animal communication systems: Only speech is analyzable in two parallel ways into: 1. units that contribute to meaning (morphemes, words, phrases etc.) and 2. and units that are individually meaningless (sounds, syllables etc.). This property of human language is so-called duality of patterning. 3.2 Kinds of morpheme: bound versus free Morphemes can be divided into 2 types: free morphemes and bound morphemes. Morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words are called Free Morphemes. Morphemes that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form are called Bound Morphemes. For example, in helpfulness, help is the core, or starting-point, for the formation of this word is; the morpheme -ful is then added to form helpful, which in turn is the basis for the formation of helpfulness. In this example, -ful and -ness cannot stand on their own. Hence they are bound morphemes. A. B. read-able leg-ible hear-ing audi-ence en-large magn-ify perform-ance rend-ition white-ness clar-ity dark-en obfusc-ate seek-er applic-ant The words in column A all contain a free morpheme, respectively read, hear, large, perform, white, and dark. By contrast, in the words in column B both the morphemes are bound. Most of the free morphemes in A belong to that part of the vocabulary of English that has been inherited directly through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family to which English belongs, whereas all the morphemes in B have been introduced, or borrowed, from Latin, either directly or via French.  In morphology, a cranberry morpheme is a bound morpheme that occurs in just one complex word.  Examples: leg in legible The morphemes cran- and huckle- in the compound words: cranberry and huckleberry whose second morpheme is free to occur in different words like strawberry, blackberry, and blueberry. However, cran- and huckle- occur only in these two compounds. 3.3 Kinds of morpheme: root, affix, combining form Root is the core of the word and the morpheme that makes the most precise and concrete contribution to the word’s meaning. It is the base to which a prefix or a suffix is added. Root can be bound or free. The words that we learned in column B contains roots that are bound. e.g., aud- in audienec, leg- in legible. And also cranberry morphemes have bound roots that occur only in just one complex word. There are words in which there are more than one root. They are called compound words. e.g., bookcase, motorbike, penknife… etc.  The non-root morphemes that precede the root (like en- in enlarge) are called prefixes. Those that follow it are called suffixes (like -ance in performance, - ness in whiteness, and -able in readable). There are more suffixes than prefixes in English. An umbrella term for prefixes and suffixes (broadly speaking, for all morphemes that are not roots) is affix. All affixes are bound morphemes.  A complex word can have: 1. two free roots. e.g. book-case, motorbike, penknife and truck-driver. 2. two bound roots. e.g. electrolysis, electroscopy, microscopy, microcosm, echinoderm. These are known as “combining forms” because of the Non-English elements that compose them. 3. one bound and one free root. e.g. cranberry, microfilm, electrometer These compound words are coined from Greek and Latin. 3.4 Morphemes and their allomorphs Many morphemes have two or more different pronunciations called “allomorphs,” the choice between them is determined by the context. e.g.: the plurals of most English nouns: cats, dogs, and horses. To form the plural, there is an addition of ‘-s’. This -s suffix has three allomorphs: [s] (as in cats or lamps), [z] (as in dogs or days), and [ɪz] or [əz] (as in horses or judges).  The three allomorphs can be distinguished, based on the sound immediately preceding the suffix, thus: 1. When the preceding sound is a sibilant (the kind of ‘hissing’ or ‘hushing’ sound heard at the end of horse, rose, bush, church and judge), the [ɪz] allomorph occurs. 2. When the preceding sound is voiceless, i.e. produced with no vibration of the vocal folds in the larynx (as in cat, rock, cup or cliff ), the [s] allomorph occurs. 3. After a vowel or a voiced consonant, as in ( dog or day), the [z] allomorph occurs. 3.5 Identifying morphemes independently of meaning The prefix re- can be added to any verb giving the meaning ‘again’ as in rewrite, retype, revisit, reread etc. In these words the prefix re- has the vowel like that of ‘see’ [ri]. But in words like revive, return, revise, restore, reverse, the prefix re- has a reduced vowel [rɪ] or [rə]. They also give same meaning ‘again’. e.g. return means ‘come back’, revive means “bring back to life”. Therefore, [ri] and [rə] are allomorphs of the same morpheme.  However, there are some roots with which both [ri] and [rə] can occur, yielding different meanings. e.g. restore and return are distinct from re-store ‘store again’ and re- turn ‘turn again’ The prefix [ri] can be added to any verb with the meaning ‘again’ where as [rə] is lexically more restricted. Hence we conclude that the two prefixes pronounced [ri] and [rə] belong to distinct morphemes in modern English and that they are not allomorphs. Their phonetic and semantic similarities are due to their having the same historical source in that part of English vocabulary that has been borrowed from Latin via French. 3.6 Conclusion: ways of classifying word- parts Chapter 3 has been concerned with classifying these parts, and dis- cussing further their relation to word-meanings. We have introduced the following distinctions: 1. morphemes and allomorphs, bound and free 2. roots, affixes and combining forms 3. prefixes and suffixes  Homework Exercises: 1, 3, 6, p. 27