1. Morphology 1 : the Morpheme

2. A WORD IS DEAD
WHEN IT IS SAID
SOME SAY
I SAY IT JUST
BEGINS TO LIVE
THAT DAY

3. What is a word?
It can be defined as a particular string of sounds that must be united with a meaning and a meaning must be united with specific sounds in order for the sounds to the meaning to be a word in our mental dictionaries.
A word is THE SMALLEST UNIT OF LINGUISTIC MEANING

4. Thecatsatonthemat.
A person who is unaware of the segments of linguistic units he/she would not know where to start or end .
A person who KNOWS the language will not have any difficulty in segmenting the stream of sounds.

5. The Internal Structure of Words
Words can have an internal structure, i.e.
• they are decomposable into smaller meaningful parts.
• Examples: cat + s/z?
• These smallest meaningful units we call morphemes.

6. Morphemes Come in different flavors. They can be: Bound or Free
Stems or Affixes
Content or Function morphemes
Inflectional or Derivational morphemes

7. Bound and Free Morphemes
Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand alone as a word,
e.g. cat, the, house, on, play
Bound morphemes are morphemes that cannot stand alone but that have to combine with other morphemes,
e.g.in-, un-, -ed, -ly

8. Stems and Affixes
Stems are the irreducible core of the word which contains the word’s principal meaning,
e.g. play, culture, cat
Affixes are bound morphemes which attach to stems. They fall into two large groups,
– prefixes which attach to the stem‘s beginning
(sub-culture)
– suffixes which attach to the stem’s end
(culture-s, cultur-al)

9. Content and function morphemes
#Content morphemes have an independent lexical
meaning,
e.g. play but also some affixes ; un- e.g. means
“the opposite of”. They are also called lexical
morphemes
#Function morphemes only provide grammatical
information, e.g. plural. They are also called grammatical morphemes.

10. Inflection vs. derivation
Derivational morphemes are used to build new lexemes.
Inflectional morphemes only contribute to the inflectional paradigm of the lexeme which lists all word forms of the lexeme.
What does this mean?What are lexemes? What are paradigms? What are word-forms?

11. The Lexeme
e.g. WALK
vocabulary items listed in the (mental) lexicon or in a dictionary

12. The Lexeme e.g. WALK • walk • walks • walked • walking
Different word-forms of the lexeme WALK: its inflectional variants or manifestations
... but not walker or walkie-talkie!(Derivation)

13. The Lexeme e.g. WALK I walk I walked you walk /you walked
she walks /she walked
we walk we walked
they walk/ they walked
The inflectional paradigm of the lexeme WALK

14. Inflection vs. Derivation
• Derivational morphemes change the meaning and/or word-class of the base
Inflectional morphemes have a regular meaning.
Inflectional morphemes are fully productive.
Inflectional morphemes are obligatory.
Derivational morphemes can be replaced by a monomorphemic form
Derivational morphemes are closer to the root.
Inflection uses a closed set of affixes.
Inflection is relevant to syntax (e.g. agreement (person,
number), syntactic function (subject, object) or inherent properties (e.g. gender))

15. Inflectional Suffixes
• 3rd sg. present {-s} e.g. wait-s
• past tense {-ed} e.g. wait-ed
• past participle {-ed} e.g. wait-ed
• progressive {-ing} e.g. wait-ing
• plural {-s} e.g. girl-s
• possessive {-'s} e.g. girl-'s
• comparative {-er} e.g. quick-er
• superlative {-est} e.g. quick-est
• adverb? {-ly} e.g. quick-ly

16. Derivational Suffixes
• e.g. {-ness}, {-ity} happiness, obesity
• e.g. {-y}, {-ly} flowery, manly
• e.g. {-en} sharpen
• e.g. {-able} gradable
• e.g. {-ment} judgement
• e.g. {en-} encircle
• no change e.g. {un-} unhappy, undo
e.g. {-ship} friendship
e.g. {-ish} greenish