This document discusses the structure of words in morphology. It defines words, morphemes, and different types of morphemes. There are free and bound morphemes. Lexical morphemes convey meaning while grammatical morphemes provide grammatical information. Derivational affixes create new words while inflectional affixes create word forms. Allomorphs are variant forms of morphemes. The structure of words can be analyzed down to the morpheme level. There is no definite longest word in English because new complex words can always be created by combining morphemes.

1. Introduction to Linguistics Professor: Dr.Aida A. Dianela
Reporter:ALVINT.VARGAS Sat. 7:30-10:30
Structure of Words: MORPHOLOGY

2. A.Words
1. Notion of Words
a.Structure of Words
Simple words
Complex words
B. Morphemes, Allomorphs and Morph
1.Morphemes
2.Allomorphs
3.Morphs
C. Main Types of Morphemes
a. According to Occurrence
Free Morphemes
Bound Morphemes

3. b. According to Function
Lexical Morphemes
Bound Roots
- Derivational Affixes
Grammatical Morphemes
- Free Grammatical Morphemes
- Bound Grammatical Morphemes
- Inflectional Affixes
Clitics
- Enclitics
- Proclitics

4. D. Allomorphs and allomorph conditioning
Types of Allomorph
 Phonological allomorphs
 Suppletive allomorphs
Types of Conditioning factors
 Phonological conditioning
 Lexical conditioning
 Morphological conditioning

5.  The boundaries of words in spoken utterances
are not overtly marked, so we need criteria for
their identification.We introduce the widely
used notion of word as minimal free form.We
also examine the internal structure of words,
that is, how they can be divided into smaller
meaningful units.The scientific investigation of
this domain is called
MORPHOLOGY.

6.  Morphology is the study of word formation, of the structure of
words.
 Some observations about words and their structure:
1. Some words can be divided into parts which still have meaning.
2. Many words have meaning by themselves. But some words
have meaning only when used with other words.
3. Some of the parts into which words can be divided can stand
alone as words. But others cannot.
4. These word-parts that can occur only in combination must be
combined in the correct way.
5. Languages create new words systematically.

7.  Words
Notion ofWords
Speakers generally have some notion of words in their language, and all languages
probably have a word for ―word‖ – that is, a word that can translate word in some context.
Speakers of English generally have a good feel for how an utterance can be divided into
words.This may seem trivial: surely words are the things that are separated by largish
white spaces in writing. But this does not work smoothly.
Ex. Bookcase and Bookshelf
Church mouse and Churchman
In speech we find no corresponding pauses between words -
Ex.The farmer kills the duckling.
Nevertheless,no speaker of English would have any doubt that there are five words
in this sentence.No one would say that there is a word boundary between farm and
erkills or between kill and s.

8. The farmer…kills the duckling orThe um:farmer kills um the duckling.
Th…e farm…er kills the duckling.
Extension:
Ex.
 The hairy farmer always kills all the little ducklings.
 De farmer kills de duckling /The farmer kills the duckring.
 Words are thus minimal free forms: they have a degree of
independence from other words in the sentence in the sense
that they can be separated from them (free bit) and no smaller
part of them has such freedom(minimal bit)

9. Structure of Words
 Simple words - no internal structure
Ex. farm,kill,duck
 Complex words – do have internal structure
Ex. farmer,kills,duckling
The ―pieces‖ we have been talking about are minimal linguistic signs:
they have a form and meaning, and cannot be divided into smaller
linguistic signs. Such pieces are morphemes.
Morphemes are in a sense atomic signs: they can‘t be split up further.
Simple words consist of a single morpheme; complex words of more
than one morpheme.

10.  Language differ vastly in terms of the word-complexity they
permit.
 By comparison, words inYup‘ik (Eskimo,Aleut,Alaska) tend to
be more complex, and often correspond to full sentences in
English.
 Ex.―kaipiallrulliniuk‖ means ―the two of them were apparently
really hungry‖, and is made up of six morphemes.
Kai- -pia- -llru- -llini- -u- -k-
be; hungry- -really- -past- -apparently- -statement- -they:two

11. Morphemes, Allomorphs and Morph
 Morphemes sometimes come in different phonological
shapes. For instance, we identified a morpheme with the shape
/z/ in kills,which indicates that a single person is doing the
event now. For cat the corresponding form ends in /s/, and
for touches,it ends in / z/.These variant forms are called
allomorphs.
 Other allomorphs in English are /t/, /d/, and / d/ that are
variant forms of the morpheme that attach to verbs and indicate
―past time‖.

12. Ex. kissed /kIst/, killed /kIld/ and batted
/bæt d/, respectively.
 Allomorphs
Maybe complementary distribution
Ex. / / and /æn/ = a and an or free variation
Ex. exit as /εgzIt/ and /εksIt/, and off as / :f/
and / f/.

13. Morphs
 Sometimes used on analogy with phone in phonetics to
refer to any meaningful form in a language. Some
morphs are grouped together as allomorphs of a
morpheme.
 Ex. /z/, one going on nouns and specifying plural
(more than one), as in dogs /d gz/, the other going on
verbs, and indicating‗he, she or it is doing something.

15. Main Types of Morphemes
 According to Occurrence
Free Morphemes – a simple word consists of a single
morpheme, and so is a free morpheme, a morpheme with the
potential for independent occurrence.
In “The farmer kills the duckling”,the free morphemes are
the,farm,kill and duck.
Bound Morphemes – by contrast, require the presence of
another morpheme to make up a word; they can‘t occur
independently.The morphs –er, -s and –ling in the given
example are bound morphemes.

16.  Other morphemes like –ish,-ness,-ly,pre-,trans-,
and un- are never words by themselves but are always
parts of words.These affixes are bound morphemes.
Prefixes occur before the morpheme, as in un-happy.
Suffixes occur after a morpheme, as in friend-ly.A
third type of bound morpheme is an infix, that goes
inside another morpheme, as in 'absofreakinglutely'
(some languages make more use of this than English).
Collectively, suffixes, prefixes and infixes are called
affixes.

17.  According to Function
 Lexical Morphemes – are those like farm,kill,happy that
convey the major‗content‘ of a message, specifying the things,
qualities and events spoken about.
Words that have meaning by themselves are called lexical
morphemes.
 Bound Roots - Most roots in English are free however there
exist a number which are always bound as they carry no
meaning apart from the word in which they are found. (Ex.
―cranberry‖) There are other roots which are bound in the in
certain contexts and free in others.(Ex.―blackboard‖)

18.  Derivational Affixes – these are affixes that attach to
a lexical root and result in a new word, a complex
lexeme called stem.The suffix – er / / in English is a
derivational suffix. Adding it to a lexical root gives a
stem with related meaning.
Ex. bake – baker, boil – boiler.
 These suffixes do not only change the meaning of the
morpheme they are attached to, they also change its
part-of-speech.

19.  Ex.
 Noun –Adjective Verb – Noun Adjective – Adverb
boy + ish sing + er exact + ly
 Noun –Verb Adjective – Noun Verb – Adjective
vapor + ize free + dom read + able
Some derivational suffixes do not cause change in grammatical class.
Ex.
 Noun – Noun Verb –Verb Adjective – Adjective
Friend + ship un + do pink + ish

20.  Grammatical Morphemes –Whereas lexical morphemes give the
major meaning content of an utterance, grammatical morpheme
mainly give information about the grammatical structure of the
utterance, about how to put the content together to form a coherent
whole.
 Those words that function to specify the relationship between one
lexical morpheme and another—words like at,in,on,-ed,-s—are
called grammatical morphemes.
 Free Grammatical Morphemes -Words that can stand alone which
(1) Signal grammatical & semantic roles & relationships; (2) Qualify or
modify meaning (e.g., gender for pronouns)Articles, prepositions,
conjunctions, disjunctions, pronouns
 Ex. the, a an, to, of, by, for, and, but, his, her

21.  Bound Grammatical Morphemes – Suffixes that (1)
indicate grammatical & semantic roles and relationships; and
(2) Qualify or modify meaning.
Complete list:
{-pl}: plural morpheme {-poss}: possessive
{-3rd person sg. present} {-present participle}
{-past participle} {-er comparative} ―higher‖
{-est superlative} ―highest

22.  Inflectional Affixes – are bound morphemes that give grammatical
information relevant to the interpretation of a sentence.They do not give
rise to new lexical words, but to different forms of a single lexical
word, different forms that are appropriate for the use of the lexical word
in the sentence.
English has only eight inflectional affixes:
 {PLU} = plural Noun -s boys
 {POSS} = possessive Noun -‘s boy’s
 {COMP} = comparative Adj -er older
 {SUP} = superlative Adj -est oldest
 {PRES} = present Verb -s walks
 {PAST} past Verb -ed walked
 {PAST PART} = past participle Verb -en driven
 {PRES PART} = present participle Verb -ing driving

23.  Clitics - A word or part of a word that is structurally dependent
on a neighboring word (its host) and cannot stand on its own.
Not all bound grammatical morphemes are inflectional affixes.
The bound form of have,written „ve,as in “They‟ve broken
in again”is an example. Bound grammatical morphemes like
this, which behave grammatically as separate word, but are
phonologically part of the preceding word, are called enclitics.
If they are part of the following word, they are called
proclitics

24.  The negative word not and a relatively small number of
frequently occurring words (mostly verbs) can
be contracted and attached to other words. Usually they are
attached at the end as enclitics: she's (she is or she
has), don't (do not).
 Occasionally they are proclitics: d'you (do you), 'tis (it
is). The combination of both types of clitics appears
in 'tisn't.

25.  Allomorphs and Allomorph conditioning
Types of Allomorphs
Phonological allomorphs – morphemes that are
phonologically similar
Ex. /s/ - /z/ - / z/ ( plural and possessive allomorphs)
Suppletive allomorphs – morphemes that are quite
different phonologically.
Ex. good,better,best (The derived comparative and
superlative forms of good with the regular derivational
suffixes –er and –(e)st

26. Types of Conditioning factors
 Phonological conditioning – ex. / / and /æn/ = a
and an (conditioned by the following phoneme)
 Lexical conditioning – ex. –en, (in the past participle)
-ed, (the form of the verb used after have and had.
(the choice of allomorph depends on the particular word
the morpheme is attached to.)
 Morphological conditioning – (Grammatical
morphemes condition the presence of the allomorph.)

27. There is no longest word in English
 What is the longest word of the English language? Some have
mentioned the following:
(1) a. antidisestablishmentarianism (28 letters)
b. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (34 letters)
c. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis
(45 letters)
 As it turns out, there is no longest word in English.
To see this, consider simply the following two series, each of
which can be continued without limit to create a potentially
infinite number of new words:

28. antidisestablishmentarianism
 The word construction is as follows
 establish (9)to set up, put in place, or institute
 dis-establish (12)to end the established status of a body, in particular a church,
given such status by law, such as the Church of England
 disestablish-ment (16)the separation of church and state
 anti-disestablishment (20)opposition to disestablishment
 antidisestablishment-ary (23)of or pertaining to opposition to
disestablishment
 antidisestablishmentari-an (25)an opponent of disestablishment
 antidisestablishmentarian-ism (28)the movement or ideology
that opposes disestablishment

29. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
 The roots of the word have been defined as follows: super-
"above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone",
and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying
roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate
beauty."Although the word contains recognizable
English morphemes, it does not follow the rules of
English morphology as a whole.The morpheme -istic is a suffix in
English, whereas the morpheme ex- is typically a prefix; so
following normal English morphological rules, it would represent
two words:supercalifragilistic and expialidocious.

30. (2) a. great-grandmother
b. great-great-grandmother
c. great-great-great-grandmother
(3) a. sensation
b. sensational
c. sensationalize
d. sensationalization
e. sensationalizational
f. sensationalizationalize

31. MORPHEMES
BOUND FREE
FUNCTION OR
GRAMMATICAL WORDS
CONTENT OR
LEXICAL WORDS
ROOTAFFIX
DERIVATIONAL INFLECTIONAL
PREFIX SUFFIX SUFFIX
Conjunction (and)
Preposition (in)
Articles (the)
Pronouns (she)
Auxiliary verbs (is)
Nouns (girl)
Adjectives (pretty)
Verbs (give)
Adverbs (easily)
-ceive
-mit
-fer
pre -
un -
con-
-ly
-ist
-ment
-ing -er -s
-s -est -‘s
-en
-ed