This document defines and discusses morphology and morphemes. It begins by defining morphology as the study of word formation and the structure of words. Words are made up of morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units in a word. Morphemes can be either free or bound. Bound morphemes cannot stand alone as words on their own, such as prefixes and suffixes, while free morphemes can stand alone. The document then discusses types of morphemes such as derivational versus inflectional morphemes and lexical versus functional morphemes. It provides examples to illustrate these concepts and differences. In the end, it lists references used in preparing the material.
1. Morphology &
Morpheme
PRESENTED BY – KAMRUN NAHER NAFISA
MAIL: KNNAFISA@NDUB.EDU.BD
BATCH: 11
INSTITUTE – NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY BANGLADESH
2. What is Morphology
The arrangement and relationships of the smallest meaningful units in a language.
The study of word formation, of the structure of words.
Analyzes the internal structure of the word.
Words are made up of morphemes.
3. Morphemes
Smallest meaningful unit in a word.
A morpheme is not necessarily the same as a word. The main difference between
a morpheme and a word is that a morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but
a word, by definition, always stands alone.
4. Morphology vs Morpheme
Morphology
Morphology is the study of words.
A word that contains more than one
Morpheme is a Morphological word.
For example- Rewrite , Handbooks etc.
Morpheme
Morphemes are the minimal units of
words that have a meaning and cannot be
subdivided further.
For example -
Re+ write = Rewrite
Hand+book+s = Handbooks
6. Types of Morphemes
Free morphemes :
Morphemes that can stand alone as
word by themselves.
Those morphemes can be formed
independently .
For example- free, get, human, song,
love, happy, sad, may, much, but, and, or,
some, above, when, etc.
Bound morphemes :
A morpheme that doesn’t have any
independent meaning and can be formed
with the help of free morphemes is called a
Bound Morphemes.
For example; less, ness, pre, un, en, ceive,
ment.
Bound Morphemes are mainly Affixes , that
attached different types of words and used
to change the meaning or function of those
words. There are three types of Affixes –
Prefix , Infix and Suffix.
7. Types of Free Morphemes
Lexical Morphemes :
The lexical morphemes are those
morphemes that are large in number and
independently meaningful.
The lexical morphemes include nouns,
adjectives, and verbs.
For example: dog, good, honest, boy, girl,
woman, excellent, etc.
Functional Morphemes:
Functional morphemes are those
morphemes that consist of functional
words in a language
Such as prepositions, conjunctions
determiners, and pronouns.
For example: and, but, or, above, on, into,
after, that, the, etc.
8. Types of Bound Morpheme
Derivational Morphemes-
Derivational morphemes attach to
words, they create or derive new words
either to change the meaning of the
word or by changing its part of speech.
For example, un- in unhappy creates a
new word with the opposite meaning of
happy.
Inflectional Morphemes-
Inflectional morphemes are indicated
whether a word is singular or plural if it is
past tense or not, and if it is comparative or
possessive forms.
English has eight Inflectional morphemes all
of which are suffixes.
For example: Boy and Boys are both nouns
that have basically the same meaning, but
Boys, the plural morpheme –s, contains only
the additional information that more than
one of these things are being referred to.
9. References
Nida, Eugene A. "Morphology: The descriptive analysis of words." (1949). https://
eric.ed.gov/?id=ED071479
Neuvel, Sylvain, and Sean A. Fulop. "Unsupervised learning of morphology without
morphemes." arXiv preprint cs/0205072 (2002). https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0205072
Beard, Robert. "Morpheme order in a lexeme/morpheme-based morphology."
Lingua 72.1 (1987): 1-44. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/
pii/002438418790088X