1. Morphology
Chapter 7
Prepared by Alaa Al Mohammadi

2. What is Morphology? What is a ‘word’?
Items marked in black separated by spaces?
What about the ‘thecatsatonthemat’?
In Swahili the form ‘nitakupenda’ stands for what we might say in English ‘I will love you’?
What about the word ‘replayed’ and ‘play’?
The concept ‘word’ turns out to be a complex fuzzy category.
Depend on ‘elements’ rather than ‘words’

3. Definitions
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the structure of words.
= the study of how words are built
 = set of morphemes + the rules of how they are combined
How words are put together out of smaller pieces  morphemes
e.g. replayed consists of re+play+ed

4. Morpheme A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function
Minimal= can’t be broken down any further.
Meaning?
Grammatical function?
renewable
Tourists
re + new + able
tour + ist + s

5. Morphemes
A word that contains more than one morpheme is a morphologically complex word
One morpheme is the basic one, the core of the form  root or stem
The add-ons bound morphemes are affixes
E.g. ‘rearranged’
‘teachers’

6. Free vs. Bound morphemes
Types of morphemes
Free vs. Bound morphemes
Free
Bound
Can stand alone as separate words
Cannot occur on their own as separate words
Single morphemes
e.g. hunt, kill, the, play, child, book.
Affixes
-s in dogs
-ness in happiness
-ed in walked

7. Free Morphemes
Divided into : Lexical morphemes vs. Functional Morphemes.
Lexical morphemes
Functional morphemes
a.k.a content words: carry the content of the message
a.k.a function words
Includes nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs such as, children, love, beauty, play, sing
Include pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions as, the, on, from, and, in, etc.
Open class word
Close class words

8. Bound Morphemes Affixation
Prefix: An affix that is attached to the front of a base, e.g. re-play.
Suffix: An affix that is attached to the end of a base, e.g. kind-ness.
Infix: An affix that occur within a base, e.g. (in Indonesian) s-in-ambung.

9. Bound Morphemes Divided into derivational vs. inflectional morphemes.
Derivational morphemes make new words in a language- different grammatical category from the stem
e.g. suffix –ness in happiness
Inflectional morphemes indicate aspects of grammatical function of a word.
e.g. suffix –ed in walked indicate past tense

10. Derivation vs. Inflection
It changes the category and/or the type of meaning of the word, so it is said to create a new word.
e.g. suffix –ment in government
It does not change either the grammatical category or the type of meaning found in the word.
e.g. suffix –s in books
Bound morphemes always appear in order, first derivational then inflectional. E.g. teachers

11. English Inflectional Morphemes
Nouns
–s plural
–’s possessive
Verbs
–s third person singular present
–ed past tense
–en past participle
–ing progressive
Adjectives
–er comparative
–est superlative

12. Some examples of English Derivational Morpheme
-ic : Noun  Adj ; alcohol  alcoholic
-ly : Adj  Adv ; exact  exactly
-ate : Noun  Verb ; vaccin  vaccinate
-ity : Adj  Noun ; active  activity
-ship : Noun  Noun ; friend  friendship
re : Verb  Verb ; cover  recover

13. Categories of Morphemes

14. The girl’s wildness shocked the teacher
Analyzing words
The girl’s wildness shocked the teacher
The  functional
girl  lexical
-s  inflectional
Wild  lexical
-ness  derivational
Shock  lexical
-ed  inflectional
The  functional
Teach  lexical
-er  derivational

15. Morphs and allomorphs Phoneme and allophone?
Morphs are the actual realization of morphemes.
Morphemes are abstract units- morphs are discrete.
Some morphemes are realized by one or more morphs according to their position in a word or a sentence  allomorph

16. Morphs and allomorphs Morpheme of plurality represented as -s
E.g Cats – digs – forces
Allomorphs are represented {-s}, {-z} and {-iz}
Phonetic influence of neighboring sound
Allomorphs for the morpheme of past tense –ed?

17. Describe the italic affixes:
impossible
terrorized
terrorize
desks
dislike
humanity
fastest
Derivational prefix
Inflectional suffix
Derivational suffix

18. Describe the italic affixes:
premature
untie
darken
fallen
oxen
faster
lecturer
Derivational prefix
Derivational suffix
Inflectional suffix

19. Analyze different types of morphemes
The young boy played with his friends.
The 
Young 
Boy 
Play 
-ed 
With 
His 
Friend 
-s 
Functional
Lexical
Inflection
inflectional