Morphology is the study of words and how they are formed from smaller units called morphemes. There are two types of morphemes: free morphemes which can stand alone as words, and bound morphemes which must be attached to other morphemes. Free morphemes include lexical categories like nouns and verbs, and functional categories like prepositions. Bound morphemes are affixes that can be prefixes or suffixes, and can be either derivational, changing a word's meaning and part of speech, or inflectional, changing a word's grammatical features. Words can be formed through processes like compounding, affixation, conversion, abbreviation and coinage. Allomorphs are
2. What is Morphology?
• Morphology is the study of words. Morphology
is the study of word formation – how words are
built up from smaller pieces
3. Morpheme
• A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that cannot be broken into smaller parts. A word can be composed of one or
more morphemes.
Morpheme Example:
"Submarine" is a word made up of two morphemes: sub and marine.
There are two morphemes: sub and marine.
Unforgettable for instance is made up of three morphemes and twelve phonemes.
Un-forget-able (un is a prefix meaning "not" forget is the root morpheme and able is an adjective forming suffix)
4. Types of Morphemes
FREE
MORPHEME
BOUND
MORPHEME
A morpheme that can be a word by itself (can stand alone as a word)
A morpheme that must be attached to another element to become a meaningful word
For example:
Free Bound
Books
Book -s
Free Bound
Goes
Go -es
5. Free Morphemes
LEXICAL MORPHEMES
• Noun (man, house, tiger)
• Adjective (sad, long, yellow)
• Verb (open, look, follow)
FUNCTIONAL MORPHEMES
• Preposition: At, On, In, etc.
• Pronoun: I, You, They, We, He, She, It
• Conjunction: And, or, But, etc.
• Interjection: wow, huff, Ah, etc.
• Article: A, An, The
• Demonstrative: That, This, These, Those
6. Free Morphemes
Free morphemes are usually referred to in terms of Root, Base and Stem
• Root is the core of the word structure which carries the major meaning of a word component.
Example: believe is a root and it can emerge in a various words such as believe, believes, believed, believing, believer
• Stem is a word element that is in existence before any inflectional affixes.
Example: - Touch – Touched (stem) and –ed (inflectional affix)
- Cars – Car (stem) and –s (inflectional affix)
• Base is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added
Example: - Untouchables – Untouchable (base)
- Touched – Touch (base)
7. Bound Morphemes
Bound morphemes are Affixes (prefix or suffix)
DERIVATIONAL
AFFIXES
Derivational affixes are the affixes that change the meaning and part of speech of the words
For example:
Prefix –un in word ‘unfair’ changes the meaning of word fair (in accordance with rules) becomes negative
unfair (not in accordance with rules)
Or suffix –ness in word ‘kindness’ changes the lexical category of adjective word kind becomes a noun
kindness
8.
9. Bound Morphemes
INFLECTIONAL
AFFIXES
Inflectional affixes are the affixes that indicate the grammatical sign of the words.
For example:
Suffix –s in bags indicates the plural form of noun bag
Or Suffix –ed in connected indicates the past form of verb connect
11. Word Formation
• Compounding
• Affixation
• Conversion
• Abbreviation
• Proper Noun
• Coinage
• Reduplication
• Folse Etimology
CLIPPING WORDS
BLENDING WORDS
ACRONYMS
INITIALISM
12. Morph and Allomorph
• A morph is the phonetic expression of a morpheme - in other words, it is how a
morpheme sounds.
• An allomorph is each alternative form of a morpheme. This could be a variation in
sound (pronunciation), or spelling, but never in function or meaning.
PAST TENSE ALLOMORPHS PLURAL ALLOMORPHS
NEGATIVE ALLOMORPHS