PRELIMINARY MODULE III OF INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS.pdf

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COURSE TITLE: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS
SUBJECT TOPIC: MORPHOLOGY: The Words of Language
SUBJECT TEACHER: Karemina D. Lanzuela, LPT
BUENAVISTA COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Cangawa, Buenavista, Bohol
College of Teacher Education
Tel. No. (63) 061331582
I.TOPIC: MORPHOLOGY: The Words of Language
Week 3: September 7-11, 2020
II. LEARNER’S RESOURCES
These are the following references for the learner to more comprehensive and guided learning to enrich
modular educational platform:
1. Dictionary
2. Books
3. Internet sources
MODULE 3
III.LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this module, must have to attain the following learning outcomes:
1. Separate the words by placing a+ between their morphemes
2. Formulate possible reasons for the source of these “silly” definitions through referencing the
answers from the other source.
3. Prove that infixes that exist in other language by stating evidences.
IV.OVERVIEW
This module points out the definition and purpose of morphology in the language development
in which it highlights the importance of morphemes and its morphological rules in forming it into words.
This also deals with rules of word formation namely: inflectional and derivational morpheme, given the
summary of their differentiation for much understanding of word formation. This module helps the
learner to comprehend how morphemes function in formulating words with varies meaning.

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V.LEARNING CONTENT
Phoneme- (n.) smallest unit of speech in Linguistics
Phonemic-(adj.) having characteristics of phoneme
Euphonious-(adj.) pleasing to the air
Allophone- (n.) one or two variants with the same phoneme
Phonic – (adj.) relating to speech
Symphony- (n.) consonance of sounds
Every speaker of every language knows ten thousand words. Unabridged or complete
dictionaries of English contains nearly 500,000 entries, but most of the speakers don’t know all of these
words. It has been estimated that a child of six knows as many as 10,000 words and the average high
school graduate about 60, 000 words. A college graduate presumably knows many more than that, but
whatever our level of education, we learn new words throughout our lives.
TEACHER’S INPUT: Words are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a component
of our mental grammar but one can learn thousands of words in language and still not know the
language. Anyone has tried to communicate in a foreign country by merely using a dictionary knows
that it is true. On the other hand, without one word begins or ends in utterance like thecatisonthemat.
We separate to written words by spaces, but in the spoken language there are no pauses between
most words. Without knowledge of the language, one can’t tell how many word are in utterance.
Knowing a word means knowing that a particular sequence of sounds with a particular meaning. A
speaker of English has no difficulty in segmenting the stream of sounds into six individual words-the
cat, sat, on, mat- because each of these words is listed in his or her mental dictionary or LEXICON
(the Greek word for dictionary), that is a part of speaker’s linguistic competence.
When we know a word, you know its sound pronunciation and its meaning. Because the sound
meaning relation is arbitrary, it is possible to have words with the same sounds and different meanings
(bear, bare) and words with the same meaning and different sounds (sofa, couch) Because each word
is a sound meaning Unit, each stored in our mental lexicon must be listed with its unique phonological
INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY
LEARNER’S VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT

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representation, which determines its pronunciation, and with a meaning. For literature speakers, the
speakers, the spelling or OTHOGRAPHY, of the most words we know is included. Each word in your
mental lexicon includes other information as well, such as whether it is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an
adjective, an adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction which specifies as GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY.
TEACHER’S INPUT: You may not consciously know that a form like love is listed as both as verb and
a noun, but as a speaker you have such knowledge, as shown as phrases I love you and You are the
love of my life. If such information is not In mental lexicon, we would not know how to form grammatical
sentences, nor would be able to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentence.
The dictionaries that one buys in a bookstore contain some of the information found in our mental
dictionaries. However, the aim of most LEXICOGRAPHERS or dictionary makers was to prescribe
rather than describe the words of a language. They strove to be, as stated in Webster’s dictionaries,
the Supreme Authority of the correct pronunciation and meaning of the words.
All dictionaries, from the gargantuan twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary to more
commonly used dictionaries, provide the following information about each word.
TEACHER’S INPUT: Those are the following information that can be found in the dictionary. Other
information may include also the ETYMOLOGY or the history of the word.
Languages make the important distinction between two kinds of words: CONTENT WORDS
and FUNCTION WORDS.
which is sometimes called OPEN CLASS. It denotes such as objects,
actions, attributes, and ideas also. These are the following content words:
1. Nouns
DICTIONARIES
1.Spelling
2. Standard pronunciation
3. Definition of the words
4. .Part of speech
CONTENT WORDS AND FUNCTION
WORDS
CONTENT WORDS

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2. Verbs
3. Adjectives
4. Adverbs
or sometimes called as CLOSED CLASS words do not have clear
lexical meaning or obvious concepts associated with them. These are the following closed class
words:
1. Article
2. Conjunctions
3. Prepositions
4. Pronouns
The difference between Content and Function Words is illustrated by the following test that
has circulated over the internet.
Count the number of F’s in the following text without reading further:
AT FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT
OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF TEARS.
Most of the people come up with three, which is wrong. If you come up fewer than six, count
again, and this time, pay attention to the function word of.
TEACHER’S INPUT: This little test illustrates that the B free win treats contents and Function Words
(like of) differently. Some brain damaged patients and people with specific language impairments have
greater difficulty in using, or reading function words like in or which, but can read the lexical content
words inn and witch. The two classes of words may function differently in SLIPS OF THE TONGUE
PHENOMENON produced by normal individuals. For example For example, a speaker may switch
words producing “chief- in- editor “ instead of editor-in-chief., bit the changing of function words has not
been observed.
The linguistic evidence suggests that content words and function words play different roles in
language. Content words bear the brunt meaning. Whereas function words context the content words
to the larger grammatical context.
FUNCTION WORDS
MORPHEMES: THE MINIMAL UNITS OF MEANING

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Phon- in the following words. (You may not know the meaning of them, but you will know
after this semester.)
Phone Phonology Phoneme
Phonetic Phonologists Phonemic
Phonetics Telephone Euphonious
Phoenician Phonological Allophone
Phonic Telephone Symphony
Phon- is a minimal form in that it can be decomposed. Ph doesn’t mean anything pho, though
it may be pronounces like foe, has no relation in meaning to it. For another example, the word on is can
not be break down into o-n. These words exist not to be decomposed but to add meaning when added
to words. The linguistic term for the most elemental word Unit of grammatical form is morpheme.
The study of the internal structure of words, and of the rules by which words are formed, is
MORPHOLOGY. This word itself consists of Theo morphemes, morph+ ology. The suffix ology means
‘science of’ or ‘the branch of the knowledge concerning’. Thus, the meaning of morphology is the
science of Word forms.
Morphology is part of our grammatical knowledge of a language. Like other knowledge, this
is generally unconscious knowledge. Morph by the way means to change in form.
One morpheme – boy
desire
Two morphemes – boy+ish
desire+able
Morph+ology
Three Morphemes – boy-ish- ness
desire-able+ity
Four morphemes –gentle-man-li-ness
un-desire-able-ity
Five morphemes - un-gen-tle+man-ness

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Anti-dis-establish-ment+ari-an-ism
TEACHER’S INPUT: A morpheme may be represented by single sound such as the words without,
amoral, asexual. A morpheme also consists of more than one syllable, such as child and -ish in childish.
A morpheme may also be more one syllable: by two and more syllable, as camel, Lady and water,
crocodile, hallucinate, etc.
A MORPHEME – the minimal linguistic unit – is thus an arbitrary union of the sound and a
meaning for grammatical function cannot be further analyzed. It’s is often called a LINGUISTIC SIGN.
Every word in every language is composed with one or more morphemes. If it consists of one
morpheme then it is called MONOMORPHEMIC WORD. The decomposition of words into morphemes
illustrates one of the fundamental properties of LANGUAGE DISCRETENESS. In all language, sound
units combine to form morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, and words combine to form
larger units-phrases and sentences.
TEACHER’S INPUT: Discreteness is an important part of linguistic creativity. We can combine more
morphemes in novel ways to create new words whose meaning will be apparent to other speakers of
the language.
Our morphological knowledge has two components knowledge of the individual morphemes and
knowledge of the rules that combine them. One of the things we know about particular morpheme is
whether they can stand alone or whether they must be attached to base morphemes.
Some morphemes like boy, desire, gentle, and man may constitute words by themselves.
These are FREE MORPHEMES. Other morphemes like – ish, -ness, -ly, -pre, -trans and -un are never
words by themselves but are always parts of words. These AFFIXES are FREE MORPHEMES
because they are freely attached to morphemes and create another meaning depending on where it
attached. Thus, -re in remediate and -bi in bipolar are PREFIXES. They occur before the morphemes.
Some affixes occurs at the end of the morpheme and it is called SUFFIXES such as -ing in sleeping, -
er in singer, etc.
Some languages also have INFIXES, morphemes that are inserted into other morphemes such
as spoonsful in spoonfuls, cupsfuls in cupful, passersby in passerby.
TYPES OF AFFIXES
Prefixes and Suffixes
Infixes
Circumfixes

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Some languages have CIRCUMFIXES, morphemes that are attached to a base morpheme
both initially and finally. These are sometimes called DISCONTINUES MORPHEME such as enlighten
in light, embolden in bold, etc.
Morphological y complex words consists of morpheme ROOT and one more affixes. Some
examples of English roots are paint to painter, read to reader, ceive to conceive and ling in linguist A
root may or may not stand alone as a word (paint and read do; ceive and ling don’t).
TEACHER’S INPUT: Linguists sometimes use the word BASE to mean a root to which an affixed is
attached. Just like the base or root word system, it can be turned into systematic, unsystematic, and
unsystematically.
BOUND ROOTS do not occur in isolation and they acquire meaning only in combination with
other morphemes. For example, words of Latin origin such as receive, conceive, transmit and deceive
share common root; -ceive and the words remit, permit, commit, submit, transmit, and admit share the
root -mit.
TEACHER’S INPUT: Bound morphemes such as mit, ceive, etc. Cannot stand alone unless attached
to other morphemes.
Bound morphemes like – ify and – cation are called DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY. When
they are added to the base, a new word with a new meaning is derived.
Noun to Adjective Verb to Noun Adjective to Noun Adjective to Adverb
Boy +ish Sing+er Tall+ness Exact+ ly
Virtu+ous Conform + ist Free+dom
ROOTS AND STEMS
BOUND ROOTS
RULES OLD WORD FORMATION
RULES OLF WORD FORMATION
1. Derivational Morphology

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Ekizabeth-+an predict+ ion Specifi-ty
Healh+ful Clear + ance
Noun to Verb. Verb to Adjective Verb to Verb
Moral +ize read +able. un+do
Vaccin+ate create+ ive re+cover
Hast+en dis+believe
Noun to Noun. Adjective to Adjective
Friend+ship . Pink+ish
Human +ity Red+like
King+Dom Un+happy
Ez+wife In+accurate
TEACHER’S INPUT: Derivational morphemes have clear semantic content. In this sense they are like
content words, except that they are not words. When a derivations k morpheme is added to the word,
it adds meaning. The derived word is different from the original word.
Function word like to, it and be are free morpheme. Many languages also have bound
morphemes that have strictly grammatical function. They mark properties such as tense, number,
person, and so forth. Such bound morphemes are called INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES. Unlike
Derivational morphemes, they never change the grammatical category old. The stems to which they
are attached. Consider the forms of Verb in the following sentences:
1. I sail the ocean.
2. He sails the ocean blue.
3. John sailed the ocean blue.
4. John has sailed the ocean blue.
5. John is sailing the ocean blue.
TEACHER’S INPUT: In the sentence 2, the s in the end is an agreement marker; it signifies that the
subject of the verb third person and is singular, and that the verb is in the present tense. The suffix –
ed indicates the last tense in sentence 3. And perfect tense in sentence form with the verb has and
also a present continues form of Verb in the last sentence which uses ing.
2. Inflectional Morphology

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--s third -singular present She wait-s at home.
-ed past tense She wait-ed at home.
-ing progressive She is eat-ing the donut.
-en past participle Mary has eat-en the donuts.
-s plural She ate the donut-s
-s’ possessive Disa’s hair is short.
-er comparative Disa has short-er hair than Karim.
-est superlative. Disa has the short-set hair.
TEACHER’S INPUT: Inflectional morphemes in English follow the Derivational morphemes in a word.
Thus, to Derivational ly complex word commit +ment one can add a plural ending to form
commit+ment+s= commitments but the order of affixes may not be reversed to derive the impossible
commit+s+ment=commitment. Yet another distinction between inflectional and Derivational
morphemes is that the Inflectional morphemes are productive, they apply freely to nearly every
appropriate base excepting irregular Verbs such as the word feet, not foots.
The grammatical relation of a noun in a sentence is called the case of the noun. When case is
marked by inflectional morphemes, the process is referred to as CASE MORPHOLOGY Compared to
many languages to the world, English has relatively little Inflectional Morphology. Some languages
are highly inflected. In Swahili, which is widely spoken in eastern Africa, which can be inflected with
multiple morphemes.
DERIVATIONAL INFLECTIONAL
Lexical Function Grammatical Function
May cause word class change No word class change
Some meaning change Small or no meaning change
Never required by rules of grammar Often required by the rules of grammar
Precede Inflectional morphemes in a word Follow derivational morphemes in a word
Some productive, many non-productive Productive
English Inflectional Morphemes
COMPARISON OF DERIVATIONAL AND INFLECTIONAL MORPHEME
COMPARISONS OF DERIVATIONAL AND INFELCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY
COMPARISONS OF DERIVATIONAL AND INFELCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY
SUMMARY OF KNOWLEDGE OF HOW MORPHEMES ARE CLASSIIFIED

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1. Productive Form –It means that morphemes are apply freely to appropriate stem.
For example: -re applies freely to verbal stems to give words like redo, rewash, and
repaint.
2. Suppletive Form-One cannot use the regular rules of inflectional morphology to add
affixes to words that are exceptions like child/children because there is no such word as
childs, but must replace the uninflected form with another word.
3. Back-Formation- These are words created by misinterpreting an affix look-alike such
as er as an actual affix, so the verb burgle was under the mistaken assumption that
burglar was burgle-er.
VI. REFERENCES
http:///mirhuwembll.com
http:///morphsstudy.com
http:///linguistsmorphology.bueryi.com
http:///affixesderol389n.com
http:///inlederivbirl14o.com
MORPHOLOGICAL RULES

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http:///leixonorylh876o.com
The Study of Linguistics, Yule,George 4th
Edition pp.23-33
VII. SUGGESTED READINGS
https://www.britannica.com/science/semantics
https://www.thoughtco.com/derivational-morpheme-words-1690381
https://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk/branches-of-linguistics/semantics/what-
does-semantics-study/
https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/70663/Alshaikhi_colostate_0053N_
10803.pdf?sequence=1

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VIII. LEARNER’S GUIDE
NAME: _______________________________ YR. & SEC.___________________ SCORE:______
SUBJECT: _____________________________ DATE: _________________
EXERCISES:
1. Divide the following words by placing a+ between their morphemes. (Some of the words may be
monomorphemic and therefore indivisible.)
Example: replaces= re+ place+ s
a. Retroactive
b. Befriended
c. Televise
d. Endearment
e. Unpalatable
f. Holiday
g. Grandmother
h. Morphemic
i. Mistreatment
j. Deactivation
k. Saltpetre
l. Airsickness
2. Following are the listed some words followed by incorrect (humorous) definitions.
Word Definition
a. effusive “able to be emerged”
b. tenet “ a group of ten students”
c. ingenious “not very smart”

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d. deceptionist “secretary who covers up for his boss”
e. melancholy ”dog that guards the cantaloupe patch”
Give possible reasons for the source of these “silly” definitions. Illustrate your answers by reference to
the other words or morphemes. For example, staleman comes from stale meaning “having lost
freshness” and mate meaning “marriage partner.” When mates appear to have lost their freshness,
they are no longer as desire as they once were.
3. Consider what are called “interfixes”. Are there languages other than English that have infixes?
Prove your answers by stating evidences.

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