Chapter 6 Morphology

•Swahili– nitakupenda– ‘I will love you’ I will you love In order to understand and analyze linguistic messages, Instead of ‘words’, let’s refer to them as ‘elements’ also known as “morphemes” Morphology: the study of forms / a type of investigation that analyzes all those basic ‘elements’ used in a language.

Morphemes •E.g talks, talker, talked, and talking consist of one element talk and a number of other elements such as s, -er,-ed,-ing– these are called ‘morphemes’ • Morpheme: A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function; Units of grammatical function include forms such as past tense or plural E.g., Reopened – has 3 morphemes; tourists contains 3 morphemes

Free and bound morphemes •Free morphemes – morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example open and tour. •Bound morphemes– they cannot stand alone and are typically attached to another form, re, -ist,-ed,-s (affixes; prefixes and suffixes) •Basic word forms are technically known as stems. E.g. dress and care in : undressed, carelessness • An exception; words like, receive, reduce and repeat; bound morpheme is re- at the beginning, but the elements –ceive,-duce and -peat are not separate word forms an hence cannot be free morphemes– called ‘bound stems’

Lexical and functional morphemes •Free morphemes fall into 2 categories: 1- Lexical morphemes : nouns, adjectives an verbs – “content” of the messages we convey e.g. girl, man, house, long, sincere, open, look, follow, break. Open class of words / we can always add new ones 2- Functional morphemes (e.g. and, but, when, because, on, near, above, in, the, that, it, them) Closed class of words (conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns) – new morphemes are never added

Derivational and Inflectional morphemes • The set of ‘affixes’ for bound morphemes are divided in two types: 1- derivational morphemes: we use these bound morphemes to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. •-ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness. •The noun care can become the adjectives careful or careless by the addition of the derivational morphemes –ful or –less • So they include both: Suffixes such as the –ish in foolish,-ly in quickly, -ment in payment and Prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-, un and many more

Cont… 2- Inflectional morphemes– not used to produce new words, but rather to indicate grammatical function of a word. inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form •English has only 8 inflectional morphemes E.g pg. 69 •In English all the inflectional morphemes are suffixes

Morphological description • Some suffixes have two functions, e.g. –er: It can be an inflectional morpheme/ never changes the grammatical category of a word. e.g, both old and older are adjectives. The –er inflection here simply creates a different version of the adjective. •it cam be a derivational morpheme/ can change the grammatical category of a word. The word teach becomes the noun teacher when –er is added.

Whenever there is both a derivational and an inflectional suffix attached to the same word, they are always attached in the same order, first the derivational and then the inflectional E.g., teach – teach(er)- teacher(s) We can now analyze the ‘elements’ in any sentence, e.g., ‘The child’s wildness shocked the teachers’— it has 11 morphemes (pg. 70)

Morphs and allomorphs •To treat differences in inflectional morphemes linguists have proposed some variation in the morphological descriptions of them. Morphs are the actual forms use to realize morphemes • e.g., cats (consists of two morphs cat + -s); also buses (bus + -es) • so the 2 different morphs indicating plural (-s and –es) can be referred to as allomorphs of the ‘plural’ morpheme. •Another allomorph of ‘plural’ in English seems to be zero-morph, the plural of sheep is sheep; also the vowel change in some irregular verbs is considered an allomorph of the plural morpheme, e.g., man/ men, so it is an irregular plural form •another example of allomorphs of a single morpheme are the allomorphs of the past morpheme E.g., Walk + past tense → walked, go + past tense →went, an irregular past form

When we look at the morphological processes in other languages we can find a regular pattern that is followed in every language E.g., English and Aztec (follow the same process when attaching a derivational and an inflectional form) Other languages •Aztec (72) •Kanuri (72-73) •Ganda (73) •Ilocano (73) •Tagalog (74)