Chapter 6 : Morphology

 Morphology

 The process of investigating basic forms in language. What seem to be single forms in many languages actually have a lot of "word-like" elements in them. For example, in Swahili, the form nitakupenda is written as I will love you in  English.

 Morphemes

 The terms use to describe elements within a “word forms”, also known as “a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.”. For instance, English word forms such as talks, talker, talked and talking must consist of one element talk, and the other four elements -s, -er, -ed and -ing. This also include forms used to indicate past tense or plural.

-Free and Bound Morphemes

+Free morphemes: morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words, for example, new and tour. Can generally be identified as word forms such as basic nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

+Bound morphemes: forms that cannot normally stand alone and are typically attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist, -ed, -s. All affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in English can be refer as bound morphemes.

 When they are used with bound morphemes attached, the basic word forms are technically known as stems. For example:

-Free morphemes fall into two categories:

+Lexical morphemes: set of ordinary nouns (girl, house), verbs (break, sit), adjectives (long, sad) and adverbs (never, quickly) that serves as ways to carry the “content” of the messages conveyed. Treated as an “open” class of words because we can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily.

+Functional morphemes: treated as “closed” class of words because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language. Examples are articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me).

-Bound morphemes can also be divided into two types:

+Derivational Morphemes: these bound forms are use to make new words or to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, of the addition derivational morpheme -ment changes the verb encourage to the noun encouragement.

+Inflectional Morphemes: use to indicate the grammatical function of a word. Show if a word is plural or singular, past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.

 Morphological Description

 Derivational and inflectional morphemes differences is worth emphasizing. Inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word while derivational morpheme can do so. Like how both old and older are adjectives while the verb teach becomes the noun teacher.

 Whenever there is a derivational suffix and an inflectional suffix used together, they always appear in the stated order. For example, in the sentence The teacher’s wildness shocked the girls’ parents, we can identify thirteen morphemes.

 A useful way to remember all these different types of morphemes:

 

 Morphs, Allomorphs and Special Cases

 One way to describe more regular differences in inflectional morphemes is by proposing variation in morphological realization rules:

-Morphs: the actual forms used to realize morphemes. For example, the form cats consists of two parts,

/kæt/ + /-s/, with a lexical morpheme (“cat”) and an inflectional morpheme (“plural”).

-Allomorphs: as there were “allophones” of a phoneme, there are also allomorphs of a morpheme.

 Other languages

 When we look at the morphology of other languages, we can find other forms and patterns realizing the basic types of morphemes we have identified. Such as:

Kanuri

Ganda

Ilocano

Tagalog