1. EDL 1201 Linguistics for ELT Mohd Marzuki Maulud
Morphology
EDL 1201
Linguistics for ELT
Mohd Marzuki Maulud

2. objectives Morphology: free and bound morpheme.
Morphological processes: inflection, derivation, compounding.

3. definition
Morphology is the study of words, their formation and their meanings.
Also the study of morphemes…
What is a morpheme?

4. a morpheme is…
Smallest identifiable grammatical unit. (R L Trask, 2004) Also ‘minimal units of meaning.
Trask gives the eg. of UNHAPPINESS
Unhappiness of Trask
Is built from 3 smaller pieces, i.e.
Un (prefix)
Happy (stem)
Ness (suffix)

5. C Poole defines morpheme as… smallest unit of words which have semantic or grammatical function, or
…minimal functional element of a word.
Some can stand on its own (roots – read, man, play) and some cannot (affixes – -er, -ly, re-).

6. Finegan (2004) says that ‘morphemes are word parts which carry meaning’.
Most words have >1 meaningful parts.
Untrue– how many parts? Untruthfulness? Truer?
Fromkin (pg 76) ‘most elemental unit of grammatical form.’
Morphemes cannot be confused with syllables. See Finegan pg 47, and Fromkin pg 76

7. What are morphemes?
Most morphemes have lexical meaning, like ‘dash’, ‘woman’ or ‘teach’.
Other morphemes represent grammatical category or semantic notion, such as ‘ed’ in ‘dashed’ or ‘played’ or ‘jumped’.
Some morphemes are just lexical – ‘er’ changes ‘teach’ to ‘teacher’, or ‘buyer’ which are both new words.

8. What are morphemes?
Circumfixes – morphemes which are attached to another morpheme, both initially and finally (see Fromkin, pg 80)
eg. Un-believe-able, dis- -able, see pg 81

9. Free morpheme Morphemes which can stand on its own, eg
Finegan gives the eg. TRUE, MOTHER, ORANGE.
Can you give other examples?

10. Bound morpheme Morphemes which cannot stand on its own. For eg.
‘un-’, ‘dis-’ ‘tele-’, ‘-ness’, ‘-er’, are just word parts and cannot stand on its own as a word.

11. Rules of morphology Derivational morphology
- bound morpheme added to a morpheme (root word) resulting in a new word. Eg.
The word ‘Pure’ + ‘ify’ = ‘purify’
‘purify’ + ‘ation’ = ‘purification’
Resulting in new words with different meanings, or class, which is derived from a root word.

12. Derived to form new word class
Noun changes to adjectives
Verb – noun
Adjective – adverb
Noun – verb
Adjective – noun
Verb – adjective
Refer to Fromkin pg 87

13. Inflectional morphemes
This is a type of bound morpheme, like cats, collected, sleeps, etc. changes the form of the word, but not the meaning of its central meaning/ lexical category.
Shows or functions to show number, gender, and tense.

14. COMPOUNDS
Morphological rules which allow the combining of two or more words to become new words. For e.g.:
Laptop
Hot dog
Deep-sea diver
Mile-high club
Lamb chops
Chicken chops

15. Acronyms
Words derived from the initials of several words which give a certain meaning, eg.
AWOL
ASAP CC

16. BLENDS It is similar to compounds.
The combining of shortened forms to two or more morpheme. For e.g.:
Breakfast and Lunch becomes ‘brunch’
Motor Hotel –
Broiled and roasted –
Information - entertainment

17. Reading assignment Please read - Fromkin Chapter 3, pgs 69-107
- Finegan Chapter 2, pgs 46-59
- do exercise 1 – 5, pgs