This document provides an introduction to morphology, the study of word structure. It discusses the basic units of meaning in words called morphemes, including roots, stems, prefixes, suffixes, and other affixes. It explains the difference between inflectional and derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology involves changes that indicate grammatical information like number, tense, or case, while derivational morphology derives new words and can change a word's class. The document also covers topics like allomorphy, where a single morpheme can have variable phonetic forms depending on context.

1. T H E S T R U C T U R E O F W O R D S
5.1 Morphology

2. W O R D S , L E X E M E S , A N D M O R P H E M E S
Introduction

3. Breaking down words
 What is a morpheme?
 A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in the
structure of a language.
 Examples of morphemes?

4.  Japanese Find the morphemes that mean eat, give,
see, past tense, and non-pasttense.
 taberu eats
 tabeta ate
 ageru gives
 ageta gave
 miru see
 mita saw

5. Identifying morphemes
 What morphemes can you identify in the following
words?
 beautiful
 awful
 handful
 resourceful
 cardigan
 dutiful
 remorseful
 handy
 awfully
 cranberry
 awfulness
 hippopotamus
 remorsefulness
 resourcefulness
 uneventfulness

6. Words vs. lexemes
 What is a lexeme?
 A lexeme - word in all it’s different forms.
 cat and cats
 laugh, laughing, laughed…
 Lexemes are often written in small capital letters,
with the word in its simplest form: CAT, LAUGH.
 What appear in dictionaries are therefore lexemes.

7. Roots, stems and affixes

8. Roots
 Compare and contrast the terms root and stem.

9. Roots
 All the parts of words are known as morphemes, but
they come in different types.
 Roots and Affixes are the two basic types.
 A root is the foundation of a complex word.
 Try to list nine forms of the root “true”
 truer
 truest
 truly
 untrue
 truth
 truthful
 truthfully
 untruthfully
 untruthfulness

10. Stems
 In large words, roots are built up into more complex
forms in stages. The intermediate stages are called
stems.
 In words with two morphemes, the root and the stem
are identical.
 true
 root/stem of truer, truest, truth
 truth
 stem of truthful

11. Your turn
 Come up with 3 root words, add a prefix or suffix
for each one to make the new stem of another word.
 Example:
 Cycle (root)  recycle
 recycle (stem)  recycling

12. Affixes
 Languages vary in how many morphemes are
available for combining into a word.
 In some languages, entire sentences can be
constructed from one morpheme.
 Yupik language example, constructed from the root
morpheme angya (boat):
 angyaghllangyugtuq
angya- ghlla- ng- yug- -tuq
boat- big- acquire- want- -he
‘He wants to acquire a big boat’
 Any form that is attached to a stem is called an affix.

13. True or false
 Inuit have 80+ words for snow
 Kinda?
 Polysynthetic languages – languages in which words
are composed of many morphemes
 What does this mean with reference to snow?

14. Types of affixes
 The types of affixes are prefixes, suffixes,
circumfixes, and infixes.
 A prefix is a morpheme that comes before the stem
(e.g, re- in recycle)
 What prefixes can you identify in the following
Japanese words:
 massugu
 masshiro
 maikai
 mainichi
‘straight ahead’
‘pure white’
‘each time’
‘every day’

15. Explain suffixes, circumfixes, infixes
 A suffix is a morpheme that comes after the stem
(e.g., -s in recycles, -al in derivational, or –able in
believable)
 A circumfix affix with two segments, one before the
root and one after, that work together.
 the root ehr (to honour) in German becomes geehrt
(honoured) through the circumfix ge- +t.
 A infix occurs in the middle of a stem.
 Rarest - words like fan-bloody-tastic

16. Circumflexes in German
 play (verb)  spiel
 ge – t = circumflex past tense marker
 played?
 gespielt

17.  Identify four prefixes and suffixes in your LS. What
do they mean/refer to?

18. Free morphemes and bound morphemes
 Affixes are always bound, which means they cannot
be used on their own as free morphemes.
 Most roots are free in English,
 Exception – lingual  bi-lingual-ism or mono-lingual.
 Similarly, the root –ceive (get) in conceive, deceive,
misconceive, perceive, and receive is bound.
Although no longer recognizable, the words all share
the same root.

19.  What are clitics?

20. Clitics
 Clitics exist along the free-to-bound morphology
continuum. Clitics ‘lean on’ neighbouring words
rather than being pronounced as independent words.
 Looks like a word, but can’t be expressed as an
independent word
 English  not in can’t, is in she’s, or had in Sarah’d.
 Others?

21. Clitics in Spanish
 lo / la – direct object pronouns
 tengo – I have
 lo tengo – I have it.
 “It” can be expressed alone in English?
 What do you have? - It.
 ¿Qué tienes? (what do you have?) - *lo

22. T H E F U N C T I O N S O F A F F I X E S
Inflection and derivation

24. Inflectional morphology
 Explain the terms inflectional morphology and
derivational morphology.

25. Inflectional morphology
 Grammatical information about the stem.
 number, tense, agreement, case
 For instance, for English verbs –s marks the 3rd
person singular present tense (dances), -ed marks
the past tense and past participle (danced), and -ing
marks the progressive tense (dancing).

26. singular/dual/plural

28. Paradigms
 In languages that use a large amount of inflectional
morphology, there are large sets of inflected forms
for each word. These are known as paradigms.
 For instance, the following are all paradigms of the
lexeme BOY in Russian. Ø indicates no ending.
 The different endings relate to case. Case refers to
the role of the noun in the sentence (sub/obj).
Case Singular Plural
Nominative mal’čik-Ø mal’čik-i
Genitive mal’čik-a mal’čik-ov
Accusative mal’čik-a mal’čik-ov

29. Gender
 While genitive and accusative are the same for BOY,
they change in Russian depending on the gender of
the word. Compare BOY with ORANGE.
Case Singular Plural
Nominative mal’čik-Ø mal’čik-i
Genitive mal’čik-a mal’čik-ov
Accusative mal’čik-a mal’čik-ov
Case Singular Plural
Nominative apel‘sin-Ø apel‘sin-y
Genitive apel‘sin-a apel‘sin-ov
Accusative apel‘sin-Ø apel‘sin-y

30. Gender (continued)
 gender - of type or class (e.g, genus, genre), not
“gender”.
 In German and Russian, the genders are called
masculine, feminine, and neutral, but languages
can have up to 20 genders.
 In English we still maintain what is called ‘natural
gender’ by using the pronouns he, she, and it, but this
doesn’t stop us assigning gender to inanimate objects.

31. Person, tense, and aspect
 Person, tense, and aspect are three more
inflectional paradigms.
 Person refers to changes based on person values
associated with the speaker. E.g., the selection of I,
you, he, she, we, they and it in English relate to
person.
 Tense places an event in time (e.g., past, present,
future), while aspect describes the way the event is
characterised by the speaker (e.g., one-off, recurring,
complete, incomplete).

32.  How is plurality expressed in your LS? What are the
morphemes that indicate plurality?
 How about gender?
 How do verbs work in your LS?
 Explain a verb paradigm using morphology.
 What are the morphemes that indicate
number/tense/aspect/mood?

33. Derivational morphology
 Refers to a morpheme changing the function or
meaning of the stem. That is, it derives a new
word/lexeme.
 In English, can change class of word:
 verb  noun (actor)
 verb  adjective
 verb  noun (activity)
dance + -er = dancer.
dance + -able = dancable
dance + -ing = dancing
 We’ll talk a lot more about this on Monday

34. Inflexional vs derivational morphology
 Which one indicates singular vs. plural?
 Which one can change the class of the word,
ex. verb  adjective
 Which is more predictable?
 Explain why with examples.
 Which is unpredictable?

35. P H Y S I C A L F O R M S O F M O R P H E M E S
Morphs and Allomorphs

36. Morphs and allomorphs
 The actual speech sounds that meanings are attached
to are called morphs.
 Remember signs? a morph is the form of a sign that
denotes a particular meaning.
 Allomorphs are simply variants or alternative
pronunciations (phonetic forms) of morphemes.

37. Allomorphs
 Cat is the only allomorph of ‘feline quadruped’ in
English, but the indefinite article has two
allomorphs: a and an.
 Allomorphs typically appear because of a
conditioning factor: something in their environment.
 Complementary distribution of allomorphs:
 When do we use a vs an?


38. Conditioned allomorphs
 Allomorphy is not always reflected in spelling
though. Consider cats, dogs, and cheeses. This type
of allomorphy is phonologically conditioned.
 When phonological information is not causing
alternation between word forms, the allomorphy is
instead lexically conditioned. Examples include
irregular plurals like:
 foot / feet
 tooth / teeth
 ox / oxen
 mouse / mice
 deer / deer
 man / men

39. Excercise
 For each of the following words, identify the affix(es) in
the word. For each affix, say whether it is derivational or
inflectional. For inflectional affixes, say what
grammatical information the affix indicates.
 purity
newest
misunderstand
Canadian
unlikely
weaken
nieces
expectantly

40. Exercise
 The regular English plural morpheme has several
allomorphs, including two different spellings (-s and
-es) and three different pronunciations [s, z, ɨz]. Say
the following words aloud to yourself and determine
which allomorph appears on each word. The form of
the allomorph depends on the final sound in the
base. What is the natural class of sounds that
predicts the appearance of each allomorph?
 books chips buses fans tomatoes wishes cuffs farms
cars judges shirts rainbows quizzes myths gloves flies
grapes caves peas toys clocks beaches dances