Morphology

MORPHOLOGY

Introduction

Words we know form part of our linguistic knowledge (competence). Since each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word is stored in our mental dictionary with its phonemic representation, the phonological rules which when applied to the phonemic representation, determine the pronunciation of the word and its meaning.

Each word must include other information as well. The dictionary representation of the word must include whether it is a noun, verb, adj....., it must specify what grammatical category or syntactic class it is.

OPEN/CLOSED classes of words:

In English, nouns, verbs, adverbs make up the largest part of its vocabulary. They are called “open” classes because they have more or less independent meaning and it is very common for new ones to be added to the lexical.

The other grammatical categories, prepositions, pronouns, articles, conjunctions and forms indicating tense, number, gender, case...et are “closed” classes. It is not easy to think of new prepositions or pronouns that have entered the language recently,

“Open” classes consist of lexical morphemes, whereas “closed” classes contain grammatical morphemes.

MORPHEMES: Minimal meaningful units:

A                                        B                             B =not A

1. desirable             undesirable               undesired +able
2. likely                     unlikely                      un + like+ly
3. happy                      unhappy                       un+happy
4. admired              unadmired                       un+ admired

 The meaning of the words in B consists of the meaning of the words in A the meaning NOT. They consist of at least two or three minimal meaningful units that cannot be further divided and they have a grammatical meaning.                 They are morphemes. Each single word may be composed of one or more morphemes:

One morpheme:        desire

Two morphemes؛        desire+able

Three morphemes؛        un+desire+able

Four morphemes:        un+desire+able+ity

Five morphemes:        un+gentle+man+li+ness

So the morpheme may be defined as a minimal grammatical unit in which there is an arbitrary union of sound and meaning, but they cannot be further divided or analyzed.

BOUND/FREE morphemes

un+like+ly                 un+desire+able                 gentle+ness

Some morphemes such as like, desire, gentle can constitute words by themselves. They are called free morphemes.  Other morphemes like the /un+/, /pre+/, /dis+/... and the suffixes /+able/, /less/, /+est/, /+er/ ...cannot occur unattached, i.e. they are not words, but always parts of words. They are called “bound” morphemes. The “bound” and “free” morphemes varies from one language to another.

ROOTS, AFFIXES

 Many words are formed by the addition of one or more grammatical morphemes to a lexical morpheme. The verb ELECT that constitutes the core (heart) of REELECTIONS is called a ROOT. Whereas the grammatical morphemes that are added to the root to form a larger unit are called AFFIXES.

MAJOR SUBFIELDS

Grammatical morphemes are two types:

DERIVATIONAL MORPHEMES: when these morphemes added to a lexical morpheme a new word is formed.

INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES: are morphemes that denote tense, number, gender, position, …et. They never change the grammatical category of the lexical morpheme to which they are attached. They simply express its relation to other words in the sentence.