MORPHOLOGY The study of word forms

MORPHOLOGY Morphology is the study of the structure and forms of words and the ways in which words are related to other words of the same language. Morphology includes ways of describing the structure of words and the function of the parts of the words, morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in words. Some morphemes are used to build up the words and some are used to indicate grammatical contrast. Linguists study two fields of morphology: Lexical or derivation morphology studies how words are built up of new elements; Inflexional morphology studies the way words vary through form to express grammatical function

MORPHEMES Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning, the minimal linguistic signs; In English there are two main types of morphemes: free and bound; Free morphemes can stand on their own, they are words or stems: law, bar, ocean, that, of. Bound morphemes are attached to a free morpheme: -s, -ly, -ed: free+ly, sign+s

FREE MORPHEMES Free morphemes are divided into lexical and functional: Lexical morphemes are content words which carry specific meaning: text, seal, bail Functional morphemes have very abstract meanings and are best characterized as having a structural/grammatical role: the, and, she. They are a closed class, that is they do not accept a new member easily.

BOUND MORPHEMES Bound morphemes are divided into derivational and inflectional; Derivation – creating new words. Derivational morphemes are added to stems and create a different word: slow-slowly –slowness;

BOUND MORPHEMES Inflectional morpheme Inflection –creating various forms of the same word. Inflectional morphemes create a different (grammatical) form of the same word: crowd -crowded, form -forms, clear -clearing; Lexeme – a basic lexical unit of a language, consisting of one or several words, considered as an abstract unit and applied to a family of words related by form or meaning: find, finds, found, finding

MORPHS AND ALLOMORPHS Morphs – actual forms used to realize morphemes Allomorphs – group of different morphs Morphemes are realised in different context by allomorphs, i.e., a version of particular morpheme. Allopmorphs may vary in forms depending on the context: Courts, claims, witnesses - /s/, /z/, /iz/- allomorphs of the plural morpheme;

STRUCTURE OF WORDS The structure of words is hierarchical. To visualize it we can use ‘trees’, e.g. shipyard: N N N ship yard Not all words are straightforward as this one. When drawing trees for words – you have to consider whether or not a certain morpheme may combine with a certain word (politeness, but ?Lawness?)

MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES Concatenation – adding continuous affixes Reduplication – part of the word or the entire word is doubled: Africans: amper “nearly”- amper- amper ‘very early’ Templates – both root and affix are discontinuous Morpheme internal change (ablaut) – the word changes internally: sing- sang, Subtraction (deletion) – French, feminine adj. : grande-grand Suppletion – irregular relation between word: be-am, is. are

MORPHOLOGICAL TYPES OF LANGUAGES Analytic (isolating) languages – have only free morphemes, sentences are sequences of single- morpheme words (Vietnamese); Synthetic languages – both free and bound morphemes. Affixes are added to roots;

Synthetic languages Synthetic languages are subdivided into: Agglutinating – each morpheme has a single function, it is easy to separate them. Uralic languages (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian) Turkish, Basque, Dravidian languages, Esperanto. Turkish: ev (sg.)– evler (pl.)- house Fusional – like agglutinating, but affixes tend to ‘fuse together’ – one affix has more than one function. Slavic, Romance languages, Greek Polysynthetic – extremely complex. Many roots and affixes combine together, often one word corresponds to a whole sentence in other languages. (Eskimo, Australiaa langs)

Reading List: Bauer L. A glossary of morphology, Edinburg 2004. Bauer L. Introduction to linguistics morphology, Edinburg 2003.