Chapter 3 Lexeme Formation Morphology (Linguistics)

1. Chapter 3 Lexeme
Formation: The Familiar
Presenter Mehak Ali

2. Outline
• Common ways of creating new lexemes.
• Derivational affixation
• Distinction between affixes and bases,
• Between free and bound bases
• How to segment words into morphemes?
• How to formulate word formation rules?
• How to determine the structure of words?
• What morphemes mean?
• Processes of compounding, conversion, and
other ways of creating new words
• Use corpora to search for your own
morphological data

3. Kinds of Morphemes
• Morphemes: the minimal meaningful units that
are used to form words
• The morphemes that can stand alone as a word
are free morphemes e.g. Google, fiber etc.
• The morphemes that can not stand alone are
called bound morphemes e.g. –ical, -al, -un etc.
• The base is the semantic core of the word to
which the prefixes and suffixes attach such as
test and beauty etc.
• Prefix comes before the base and suffix comes
after the base, together they are called affixes
such as pretest, beautiful etc.
• New lexemes that are formed with prefixes and
suffixes on a base are often referred to as
derived words, and the process by which they
are formed as derivation

4. Bound bases
• Bound bases are morphemes that cannot stand alone as
words, but are not prefixes or suffixes
• Semantically, bound bases can form the core of a word, just
as free morphemes can
• All bases are bound in some languages
• Root and Stem

5. Affixation
• Word Formation Rules : words derived by
affixation
• Prefixes and suffixes usually have special
requirements for the sorts of bases they can
attach to:
• The phonology (sounds) of their bases
• The semantics (meaning) of their bases
• The most basic requirements are often the
syntactic part of speech or category of their
bases

6. Examples
• -un only attaches to adjectives and verbs not
to nouns
• Rule for negative un- (final version): un-
attaches to adjectives, preferably those with
neutral or positive connotations, and creates
negative adjectives. It has no phonological
restrictions. e.g. unhappy, *unsad, *unugly,
unintelligent etc.
• Rule for -ize (final version): -ize attaches to
adjectives or nouns of two or more syllables
where the final syllable does not bear primary
stress. For a base ‘X’ it produces verbs that
mean ‘make/put into X’. E.g. hospitalize,
finalize, idealize etc.

7. Word Structure
• Order of attachment of morphemes: Prefixes and
suffixes usually have special requirements for the
sorts of bases they can attach to;
• un- must first go on the base happy. Happy is an
adjective, and un- attaches to adjectives but does
not change their category. The suffix -ness
attaches only to adjectives and makes them into
nouns
• Purify: adjective pure must first be made into a
verb by suffixing -ify, and only then can re- attach
to it as –re only attaches to verb not nouns and

8. What Do Affixes Mean?
• Affixes like these are sometimes called
transpositional affixes, meaning that their
primary function is to change the category of
their base without adding any extra meaning.

9. • These affixes seem to have more semantic meat on their bones, so to
speak: -ee on a verb indicates a person who undergoes an action; -less
means something like ‘without’; and re- means something like ‘again’.
• Languages frequently have affixes (or other morphological processes, as
we’ll see in Chapter 5) that fall into common semantic categories. Among
those categories are:
• personal or participant affixes
• Locative affixes
• Abstract affixes
• Negative or private affixes
• Prepositional or relational affixes
• Quantitative affixes
• Evaluative affixes : consist of diminutives affixes that signal a smaller
version of the base (e.g., in English -let as in booklet or droplet), and
augmentatives, affixes that signal a bigger version of the base. The
closest we come to augmentative affixes in English are prefixes like mega-
• Note that some semantically contentful affixes change syntactic category
as well But semantically contentful affixes need not change syntactic
category and by and large prefixes in English do not change syntactic

10. • All of the forms derived with -er denote
concrete nouns, either persons or things,
related to their base verbs by participating in
the action denoted by the verb, although
sometimes in different ways. A cluster of
related meanings like that exhibited by -er is
called affixal polysemy

11. To Divide or Not to Divide? A Foray into
Extenders, Formatives, Crans, and Other
Messy Bits
a) Speakers of English have the intuition that these words are consist of
morphemes, If so, what problems do they present for our definition of
morpheme?
• First problem is that they are not native to English.
• if they are morphemes, what do the pieces mean?
• Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013: 16) call elements like these formatives,
which they define as
• “elements contributing to the construction of words whose semantic unity
or function is obscure or dubious.”

12. • The items in (18b) illustrate a different type of
formative that are sometimes called cran
morphs, from the first bit of the word
cranberry. The second part of the word
cranberry is clearly a free morpheme. But
when we break it off, what’s left is a piece that
doesn’t seem to occur in other words (except
in recent years, words like cranapple that are
part of product names), and doesn’t seem to
mean anything independently.

13. • The examples in (18c) also display a puzzling
characteristic. If we try to break these words
down into their component morphemes, what we
find is that each one consists of two obvious
morphemes plus an extra sound or two
• The question is what the extra bit is. Is it part of the
base of the word or part of the affix or part of neither?
It seems pretty clear that it doesn’t mean anything.
• And why do we get an /n/ in Platonic, but /od/ in
spasmodic, and nothing between the base and the
suffix in heroic, or an /n/ in tobacconist, but a /t/ in
egotist?
• Morphologists don’t have a clear answer to these
questions – but we can at least give these puzzling
bits a name. Following Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013),
we will call them extenders.

14. • (18d)These exhibit what is called sound
symbolism. All of the words begin with the
consonant cluster /sn/ and seem to have
something to do with the nose, but the
sequence of sounds /sn/ doesn’t mean
anything by itself.
• Here morphologists are relatively agreed that
sound symbolic words cannot be broken into
parts
• one thing, the sequence /sn/ doesn’t refer to
‘nose’ everywhere it occurs (consider words
like snail, snap, or snit),
• if we were to segment /sn/ in the words in
(18), what would be left over would neither
have meaning by itself nor recur elsewhere in
English.

15. • (18e) In these examples, the first part of each
word is clearly a free morpheme, but the
second part is not. Rather, it is what Bauer,
Lieber, and Plag (2013) call a splinter,
something which is split off from an original
word, but which is not really (yet!) a true
suffix.
• The difference between a splinter and a true
suffix is that speakers understand splinters in
relation to the original word from which the
ending splits off. If these bits survive and
continue to give rise to new forms, though,
they might someday be real suffixes!

16. How To: Dividing Words in
English
• There isn’t always a single correct way to divide up a word
20
a) Nonunionization
non-union-iz-ation
a) nonparticipation
non-particip-ation
non-participa-tion (here base is participate)
• and -ation and - tion. Those two different forms are often called allomorphs
– variants of morphemes.
21.
a. mania + (a)c + al
b. mania +( i)c + al
c. mania + (i)cal
a) maniac doesn’t usually mean ‘a person suffering from a mania’. Rather, it
typically has the special meaning ‘raving with madness’, which seems not to fit
with the overall meaning of the word monomaniacal.
• If we go with b) and c) we still have a problem of spliting –ic- al
• in a word like whimsical, there is no way of separating -ic from –al
• some evidence for splitting. For example, we have both electric and
electrical as common words in English
• we don’t seem to be able to split maniacal up in this way. So here, I’d
choose to go with the solution in (21c).

17. 22.
a) psycho + logy
b) psych + ology
c) psycho + ology
d) psych + o + logy
• First part of psychology, the originally bound base has spun off in
contemporary English into two free forms psych and psycho. The
latter meaning doesn’t seem to be a part of the meaning of
psychology, so we can probably rule out the segmentation in (22a)
or (22c).
• In b) and d) Do we continue to call both bits bound bases, or do we
call the first piece a free base and the latter a suffix? When does a
bound base become a free form or an affix? These are questions to
which I have no simple answer.
• The point is that there are questions that arise in trying to segment
many words in English and in labeling the parts of words.
Sometimes it’s easy, but sometimes it’s not. Many morphologists,
pointing to the sorts of issues that the writer has illustrated here,
even deny that it makes sense to try to segment words into
morphemes

18. Compounding
• Many languages also form words by a process
called compounding.
• Compounds are words that are composed of two
(or more) bases, roots, or stems. In English we
generally use free bases to compose compounds.
(23) English compounds
• compounds of two nouns: windmill, dog bed,
book store
• compounds of two adjectives: icy cold, blue-
green, red hot
• compounds of an adjective and a noun:
greenhouse, blackboard, hard hat
• compounds of a noun and an adjective: sky
blue, cherry red, rock hard

19. When Do We Have a
Compound?
• How do we know that a sequence of words is a
compound?
• In English, spelling is no help at all
• A better criterion is stress; compounds in English are
often stressed on their first or left-hand base, whereas
phrases typically receive stress on the right But it’s
not always the case that compounds are stressed
on the left.
• There is, however, one test for identifying compounds
that is fairly reliable: we can test for whether a
sequence of bases is a compound by seeing if a
modifying word can be inserted between the two
bases and still have the sequence make sense. If
a modifying word cannot sensibly be inserted, the
sequence of two words is a compound.

20. • This test confirms that both apple pie and apple
cake are compounds, in spite of their differing
stress.
• In neither case can we insert a modifier like
delicious between the two stems;
• *apple delicious pie
• *apple delicious cake

21. Compound Structure
• compounds as having internal structure in
precisely the same way that derived words
do, and we can represent that structure in the
form of word trees.
• Compounds, of course, need not be limited to
two bases.

22. • Compounding is what is called a recursive
process, in the sense that a compound of
two bases can be compounded with another
base, and this compounded with still another
base, so that we can eventually obtain very
complex compounds like paper towel
dispenser factory building committee
report.

23. • Some compounds can be ambiguous, and
therefore can be represented by more than
one structure. For example, the compound
paper cat container, might have this
structure:
• The way we’ve drawn this tree, the
compound paper cat has been compounded
with the noun container to make a complex
compound. The compound as a whole then
must mean ‘a container for paper cats’

24. • But if the compound paper cat container were
intended to mean ‘a paper container for cats’, the
structure of the tree would be like below, where
cat container is first compounded, and then paper
added in:
• Often, the more complex the compound is,
the greater the possibility of multiple
interpretations, and therefore multiple
structures.

25. • English has bound bases as well as free
bases, and when we put two of them
together, as in the examples in (29), we
might call these forms compounds as well.
• Some linguists call them neo-classical
compounds, as the bound bases usually
derive from Greek and Latin:
(29)
• English compounds on bound bases:
psychopath, pathology, endoderm, dermatitis

26. Types of Compounds