Chapter 6 Morphology

1 Morphology 

Def: the analysis of the structure of words

2 Morphemes 

Def: Smallest meaningful unit in English and cannot be broken down into smaller meaningful bits

EXP:

• “Cats” contain 2 morphemes “cat” + “s” 

• “category” contains 1 morpheme although “cat” and “gory” have meaning, it not involved in the meaning of “category” 

Minimal units of meaning	Grammatical function
“cat” (an animal)	“s” (plural)

Free Morphemes ( Lexical Morphemes, Functional Morphemes) 

Def:

Free Morphemes: can stand alone as individual words (e.g cat, laugh, vital)

• Lexical Morphemes: Free Morphemes that carry the content of our utterances(lời nói) like nouns ( girl, house), verbs ( run, hit), adjs(beautiful, ugly), advs(quickly, never). They are “open” class because can easily add new lexical morphemes to the language  

• Functional Morphemes: Free Morphemes that serve a more grammatical role, connecting words together within and across sentences like articles (a, the), conjunctions (and, because), prepositions (on, near) and pronouns (it, me). They are “close” class because they cannot accept new members and are hard to define   

Bound Morphemes ( Derivational and Inflectional Morphemes) 

• Bound Morphemes: cannot stand alone as individual words {affixes include: prefixes(pre-,un-); suffixes(-er,-ful)} 

• Derivational Morphemes: Bound Morphemes that help to create new words and can change the lexical category of a word

EXP: 

• “pre”(prefix) + “determine” = predetermine ( a different word from determine) 

• “teach”(verb) + “er”(suffix) = teacher(noun) 

• Inflectional Morphemes: Bound Morphemes that serve a grammatical role in language (there are just 8 inflectional morphemes in English)

EXP: 

• “talk” + “-ing” = talking (talk at present)

• “long” + “est”= longest (superlative form of long)

3 Morphological Description 

It's important to note the difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes. Inflectional ones don't change a word's type (like noun, verb, adjective), while derivational ones can completely switch it up

 

4 Morphs, Allomorphs and Special Cases

Def: 

• Morph: an actual form used as part of a word, representing one version of a morpheme

• Allomorph: one of several phonetic realizations of a morpheme 

5 Other language 

• Kanuri 

From this set, we can propose that nəm- is a prefix, functioning as a derivational

morpheme that is used to derive nouns from adjectives

• Ganda

From this small sample, we can observe that there is an inflectional prefix omu- used

with singular nouns, and a different inflectional prefix aba- used with the plural of those

nouns

• ILocano

In these examples, there seems to be repetition of the first part of the singular form.

When the first part is bí- in the singular, the plural begins with this form repeated bibí-.

The process involved here is technically known as reduplication (= “repeating all or part of

a form”)

• Tagalog 

If we assume that the first form in each column can be treated as a stem, then it

appears that, in the second item in each column, an element -um- has been inserted after

the first consonant, or more precisely, after the syllable onset