1. Lecture Three
Morphology

2. Open class and closed class, morphology
Open class: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs to which new words can be added. For example: beatnik (a person who rejects or avoids conventional behavior)
Closed class: conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns to which new word are not usually added
Morphology: Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

3. Anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism (国教废除论)
Morpheme: the minimal units of meaning
A single word may consist of one or more morphemes.
Example: a word over 5 morphemes
Anti+dis+establish+ment+ari+an+ism (国教废除论)
(Hu, Liu & Li, 1988, p. 87)

4. Affixes: prefixes and suffixes, disorder, wonderful
Bound morphemes and free morphemes: disorder, girl
Derivational morphemes: blacken, physician (may change class or words, a new word is derived or formed)
Inflectional morphemes: grammatical markers, signifying such concepts as tense, number, case and so on, they do not change the syntactic category of the original words, such as “–ed”, and “–ing”
Some morphemes don’t have any lexical meanings in sentences, such as “to” and “it”.

5. Morphological rules of word formation
The ways words are formed are called morphological rules.
Examples:
un + inhabit + able (un + adjective = not – adjective)
un + decided (un + adjectival form derived from a verb)
Some morphological rules can be productive but some are less.

6. Compounds
Compounds: stringing words together
Same category: landlady, blue-black, icy-cold
Category changed keeping the grammatical category of the final word: head-strong, pickpocket
compounds have different stress patterns from the noncompounded word sequence, `redcoat, `greenhouse; red `coat, green `house
The meaning of a compound is not always the sum of the meanings of its parts. For example, redcoat (在美国独立战争中服役的英国士兵), bigwig (有重大影响的人), highbrow, jack-in-a-box (a tropical tree), turncoat (a tractor)
Compounding is then a very common and frequent process for enlarging the vocabulary of the English language.

7. References
Dai, W. D & He, Z. X. (2002). A new concise course on linguistics for students of English. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Hu, Z. L., Liu, R. Q. & Li, Y. F. (1988). Linguistics: a course book. Beijing: Beijing University Press.

8. Task
Do the following in groups:
Divide the following words into their separate morphemes by placing a “+” between each morpheme and the next:
a. microfile e. telecommunication
b. bedraggled f. forefather
c. announcement g. psychophysics
d. predigestion h. mechanist

9. The italicized part in each of the following sentences is an inflectional morpheme. Study each inflectional morpheme carefully and point out its grammatical meaning.
Sue moves in high-society circles in London.
A traffic warden asked John to move his car.
The club has moved to Friday, February 22nd.
The branches of the trees are moving back and forth.