enjoy this slide for Morphology

1. What is morphology?
Morphology comes from a Greek word
meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and is used in
linguistics to denote the study of words, both
with regard to their internal structure and
their combination or formation to form new
or larger units.

2. words
 ‘Word’ is a term in common everyday use
but one which linguists cannot easily
define.
 Linguists therefore prefer other terms,
referring to morphs, morphemes and
lexemes when talking about ‘words’.

3. Types of morpheme
 The free morphemes are
generally also referred to as
lexemes, and the bound ones
as affixes.
 Affixes which come in front of
a free morpheme are prefixes,
and those which come after
are suffixes.

4. Inflection
 Bound morphemes which carry
grammatical (or functional) meaning are
called inflectional affixes and their
function is to create new forms of existing
lexemes.

5. Derivation
 Other affixes (which can be prefixes or
suffixes) have lexical meaning and are
used to create new lexemes.

6. Other more productive word-
formation processes
 Derivation is one of the three major (and
most productive) types of word-formation
processes visible in English. The other two
most important ones are compounding
and conversion.

7. Less productive word-
formation processes
Apart from these ‘big three’, there are
further ways of expanding the lexicon, but
none of
them are terribly productive in English. These
are: blending, clipping, back-formation,
acronyms and initializes and all involve
shortening the source lexeme in some way.

8. Word classes
 We tend to distinguish between open
word classes, which include nouns, full
verbs, adjectives and some adverbs, and
more closed word classes to which
pronouns, prepositions, determiners,
modal (verb)s, auxiliaries, primary verbs,
conjunctions, etc. belong.

9. Diagram of morpheme